skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can think about the power of Python scripting + the rich world of Java libraries/frameworks.

My main use is for web scraping + javascript support, since I love Python and I like the HTMLUnit headless browser written in Java. I've written two articles using it:

i) http://blog.databigbang.com/web-scraping-ajax-and-javascript...

ii) http://blog.databigbang.com/automated-browserless-oauth-auth...
Baby Shower Gift Idea
We offer essential items for newborns, every day clothes for young children and gifts for new grandparents and relatives who are looking for inspiration.
It's a big help if everyone around you understands the rules and nuances. Things like "If my headphones are on, do NOT talk to me or even tap me on the shoulder"

It's when you try everything possible to shut out distractions (yes, including the Les Nessman tape on the floor, you older folk will know what I'm talking about) and it still doesn't work.
The (Sometimes Instant) Good Karma of Open Source Contribution
Yep, we have an exception from them. But still, we only ship an integration plugin and Aloha Editor has to be installed separately. This way the whole Create repo is MIT-only.
Yes. If you define my 'organization' as the component that builds the products we sell. As a company, customer interaction is very high, but that is very dependent on the quality of our product.

Almost overwhelmingly, our #1 customer request is new features closely followed by bug fixes. I enjoy talking to customers to help them with problems, but even when I had free reign to contact customers directly, I usually wrapped up conversation pretty quickly and cranked a new build for whatever the issue was.

I have spent plenty of time in customer calls with 4 or 5 other employees twiddling my thumbs, and I don't think the customer benefited much from my presence. Developer time with a customer really needs to be targeted to be valuable.

At least 80% of the time I spend is working on stuff that doesn't need a distraction.
Sounds like a good idea, lets stop all transactions going to any organization that might have political goals.
The demo is viewable at:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2690345/pagedown-bootstrap-demo/demo...
What I call "science" is the corpus of knowledge accumulated by the scientific method over the history of knowledge since Francis Bacon. There's nothing reflexive about believing Mann over Steve McIntyre - as with all such judgments we look at who's saying what, who they are, where they're coming from and why, and make a call. Within limitations, we also look at the evidence.

Why do we believe Hubble (expanding universe) over Hoyle (it's static)? Hoyle is a much more impressive figure than McIntyre, but his ideas have been tested over and over in many different ways, and found wanting. You could say that the expanding universe is just a theory, that it's unproven, because you could construct an elaborate static universe model that creates the red shift in some arbitrary manner, and causes distant stars to dim sufficiently that space is black and not white, and so on. You could create an elaborate theory that explains why things fall to earth but rejects both Newton and General Relativity. But it seems to me that the reason this doesn't happen is that it doesn't affect the bottom line of well-capitalized companies in the energy sector.

You are correct that we appeal to authority for most of what we know of science. But it's not Washington that's the authority, it's the corpus. And we trust it because it's constantly subjected to self-scrutiny. Voices like McIntyre's are heard, and either the whole of one single branch of science is engaged in a massive conspiracy to not listen, or he's probably wrong.

But we keep our minds open.
Shown HN: Email Obfuscation via JS-powered ROT13 Cipher and CSS fallback
Congrats on your brilliant execution.

I've noticed that from the beginning you've made it a point to share your growth numbers every few weeks (on HN and outside). How much has this helped you in generating buzz and getting more users? Would you recommend it to other startup founders?
I don't think the OP's boss is necessarily a dick. The OP may be putting the pressure on himself (he is a co-founder).

But my point is, no company needs you to be give 100%. Ever. Even if you are the only person who can do your job.
Most developers who I've known are easily-distracted from being in the "zone", and I include myself in that list. I'm always more productive when working remotely, where I can control my work environment. Second in order of preference is having a private office. It doesn't matter if it is little more than a closet with a door. I've been in nearly every scenario described by folks here on HN, and the most toxic was working in an open office space, and having an exit door behind me, to boot.
Did anyone else read Lord of the Flies in school? As far as I remember, that was way more gruesome than Ender's game.
BoxWave Nuovo Case for the new iPad 3rd Gen
Why you don't need to hire a designer
That actually makes a ton of sense and makes me feel much better about my inbox being empty. Thanks.
Social Gaming is About Business
Dell Unix Lives Again
Hmm. Thanks for pointing that out, we'll look into it!
> Why arent people using SVG for this sort of thing? Isnt that HTML5's vector graphics format?

1. SVG is slow, text layout engines (therefore fonts) are fast

2. SVG support is pretty terrible (not available on Android < 3, IE <= 8 and that's for support at all, inline-svg-in-HTML is even rarer and it's even easier to hit shitty implementation bugs), fonts are very well supported

3. I don't think you can use SVG in pure CSS, so you need markup, not so with fonts (theoretically you can use SVG as background, practically I'm sure it works half the time best)

4. You can't hint SVG, so it does not scale well from big to small resolutions

5. Mixing SVG and HTML text is absolutely awful, mixing text in an iconic font and actual text is much easier

6. Iconic fonts are trivially "sprited" (bundle all the icons in a single font file), this is more complex in SVG

7. Changing the color of an iconic font to match a new or alternative layout takes all of a single CSS property, likewise to change font (therefore the style of all the iconset) (this assumes the iconsets use the same characters as hooks for equivalent symbols).

> You would think the intended use of vector graphics would be designed to be just as good if not better than using a font to do the same thing.

You would, wouldn't you? But it turns out fonts are very, very good vector formats for (physical) rendering sizes.
Tim Cook’s latest promise to Apple’s employees
At Guidewire we've worked in an open-plan office for basically the whole life of the company (roughly 10 years), and it's worked really well for us (by whatever metric you like: successful products, financial success, employee retention). Yes, it can be distracting to people, so most people bring headphones, and it's important for people to be considerate and move discussions or phone calls into side offices and conference rooms.

At least with the type of software we build, though, communication is absolutely critical, and it's amazing how much a difference of even 10 feet makes in the frequency with which people talk. The optimum layout for us is roughly 1 or 2 clusters of 4-6 desks per "pod" (i.e. a cross-functional team consisting of developers, product managers, and qa that are all working on the same area of the product). At that level, when people are talking about something, what they're talking about is almost always relevant to you, so it's not necessarily a distraction: they're talking about your code and your project, so it's a good thing that you can overhear and participate in the conversation if you wish. If you didn't hear those conversations, you'd be out of the loop. It's often better to be a little more distracted and all on the same page than have a team of 5 engineers plowing ahead in different directions.

That's a common conflation when talking about software engineering in general: it's not just how much you get done, it's what you get done. If you get a ton of work done on the wrong thing, you might feel really productive, but you're not actually creating any value. At least with our software, a high level of communication is necessary for most projects to ensure that everyone is on the same page and rowing in the same direction. When that communication breaks down, projects start to fail.

Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on the size of your team and the nature of what you're building. (And it goes without saying that a giant warehouse with desks arranged like an 1890's cloth factory is a terrible idea; you have to consider lines of sight, and acoustics, and other environmental things. Not all open plan offices are the same.) But this assumption that open plan offices have been "proven" to be sub-optimal flies in the face of plenty of empirical evidence from companies like mine that have used them very successfully.
How to build a news aggregator with backbone.js - Part 1
I'm using the ace editor (highly recc'ed) and have been looking at HTML->(markdown|plaintext) issues. Thanks for this.
I'm also guessing that someone offended by the profanity would likely not be a happy customer. Which highlights an interesting potential limit of A/B testing for conversions. It may take some time after the point of sale to determine whether you've created a happy (and therefor loyal, returning) customer or not. So imagine in this case that profanity is likely to turn away 2 customers but presence of profanity will tilt 1 additional conversion -- so overall conversion rate of non-profane form could be better (2 vs 1 on some margin). But what if the non-profane converts are ultimately dissatisfied with the product whereas the the profane convert is likely to be happy? Perhaps the long term relationship with the latter customer is worth more than the two unhappy customers, even though a naive A/B test would push you to limit profanity for the short term conversion benefit.
Fab is just another testament to why design-centric companies like Square and Apple are so hugely successful.
Offices, real offices for each developer are best.
However, open-plan is still better than cubicles. Cubicles share all the problems of open-plans + you stare at the walls of your cubicle.

I'd love to have an office but I prefer open plans over cubicles.
users , revenue beats everything else. well done.
To add to this, Eric Lippert, a principal dev on the C# compiler team, mentions this in a StackOverflow response (http://stackoverflow.com/a/8899347/59111). He also blogged about the issue in general in a two part series, the first of which can be read here: Closing over the loop variable considered harmful (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/11/12/closi...).
In addition to the fact that lots of sites use RC4 TLS because it's faster, it's worth noting that DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA is a TLS 1.0 ciphersuite and was thus vulnerable to Thai and Juliano's blockwise-adaptive chosen plaintext attack. Several sites switched from AES to RC4 in advance of Thai and Juliano's publication.

Using AES256 instead of AES128 doesn't make much of a practical difference (using 2048 bit keys, though, probably does).

Also, more than one smart cryptographer has reservations with ECDSA (the one issue I'm aware of is that ECDSA/SHA-1 is especially vulnerable to collisions in SHA-1); there are replacement ECC signing algorithms in the literature now (EdDSA being one). ECDSA has also already had a couple major implementation errors (the one everyone thinks of is the nonce in Sony's implementation, but OpenSSL also coughed up private keys in a timing attack they've now fixed).

I agree with your general point though, which is that this advise seems pretty arbitrary and not grounded in reality.
*"I don't understand why there are so many blog posts describing how "X must die" or "Y is the only good approach to doing Z.""

Quite simply because this title:

"Open Plan Offices Must Die!"

is better link bait than

"Why I don't like Open Plan Offices".
> "I don't understand why there are so many blog posts describing how "X must die" or "Y is the only good approach to doing Z.""

Because they're click-bait. Authors of articles like that don't (primarily) care about making a sound argument. They care about attention.
Can I borrow someone's copy when you're finished with it?

Update: http://azizansari.com/tos says, All downloads are for use on one device only. You may keep one backup copy of the digital content downloaded from this site on any digital media of your choice.
Very handy little snippet, now I just have to relearn vim
I would say its more brutal. The violence depicted in hunger games is distant and somewhat clinical - almost as though it was written with the possibility of future film rights. In Enders game, other children are beaten to death in a quite personal manner. I recall being quite effected by the deaths in Enders game. I don't recall any similar explicit imagery in hunger games.
It's funny, these geocities sites were horrible but they provided a way for people to express themselves on the web.

MySpace tapped into this also , allowing people to change their page background, have autoplaying music etc.

The facebook/Twitter came along and spoiled it by prioritizing usability. Now basically everyone has an online presence that looks identical to the point of being sterile. Hell even 90% of wordpress sites look exactly the same.
You would need to fork it and edit Markdown.Editor.js to change the dialogue to include the upload logic. Somewhere around line 1023 (https://github.com/samwillis/pagedown-bootstrap/blob/master/...)

You really mustn't give me much credit for it, the guys here did the hard part: http://code.google.com/p/pagedown/
Great idea and it does look very slick and well executed, but from the little playing around I did it just didn't feel as fluid as a desktop app would. I'd definitely prefer a native desktop application to html and js, perhaps with an option to view and tweak my creations with the web interface when I'm off site.
[Official] A New Chapter for Pivotal Labs
I will agree that it (Orson Scott Card) may not be appropriate for 14 year olds.

My God. I was reading Stephen King and Peter Maas at that age.

What in the world is happening to us? This is not the way it should be going.
This trend of using Apple as a metonym for the world's outsourced manufacturing is getting tiresome. It's not as though Apple is the only one, or contracts to produce the majority of the output.

I'm not an Apple apologist and they AND everyone else, should be taken to task. But it's a little to easy to always say Apple (and not Samsung and Haier and HTC and Motorola, etc.)

Also, this may or may not change what someone knows about manufacturing practices in China. I guess that depends on what one knows or knew at the time of hearing mr. Daisey.
google trends for tmux vs screen

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=tmux,+screen+gnu,+shell+scre...
What?? My 10 year old loved it. The teacher should be fired for not making the kids read it themselves... Amazing book.
I get 9 months at 20 MBit/s [1] which is kind of low for a blu-ray[2] or a high-end consumer camera, today.

I find it kind of difficult discussing 60 TB since it will be soo faar in the future. By then we will at least have 4k and probably a bitrate in ~100 MBit/s (since the cap is at 50 MBit/s today that is aiming low but there will probably be a limit where you say that it is enough (then again, 3D imagery could potentially demand much more)), a small drive (same density but ~2") would hold about 2 weeks of footage which IMO sounds reasonable for a camera in an age where you don't have to compromise that much.

It will put some constraints on usage patterns, but I don't feel that 60 TB will be that much more data than 4 TB is today. Sure, for text and audio you basically will have an infinite amount of space (as a consumer) but that is the case even today. 60 TB is only 15 times more than we have to day in a single drive, and it will take many many years to get there. And I can barely fit my grandfathers VHS camera tapes on a 4 TB drive today, and since I want some redundancy 4 TB isn't enough for even that.

1. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=60+TB+at+20+Mb%2Fs

2. http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=3338
Two suggestions to reduce the imperviousness of Lisp code
* Where am I? where is the _exquisite_ systems architect? yes, I solve crazy problems (over 100M users), scalability and performance is my motto, but still struggling with a couple hours of free time per day, making my employer's dream come true*

How did you went from thinking that solving problems is nice and fun (ok), to thinking that the way to go about it is to work as a expandable human slave to your bosses benefit (not ok)?

Even the problems you get to solve are not that much impressive in the grand scheme of things. Scaling some service to 100M users != solving cancer. Yours and 1000 other companies already do it.

Don't get tricked into the whole company culture --except if you have a share of the company. And even then, your life is worth more.

Where would you be in 50 years? Exactly.
Most of the advice seems very sound.

I just wanted to add that, since you seem very commited to the company you work for, why not try to learn to delegate?

I'm sure there are some very bright and ambitious younger professionals in your company you could take under your wing (or ask for staffing) and delegate some non-critical work (or even critical if under your supervision).

It might be more work short term, but it'll be better long term. And it always pays to get backup - if you're indispensable, you can't make career choices, scale down on work as suggested or go on vacations.
Ask HN: Advice for the aspiring?
I'll make this as short as I can, I have a tenancy to go off on tandems.

A little background on myself that might be useful for context. Been a geek my whole life, high school was more about computer games but I built my first desktop then. Joined Navy out of high-school to work on gas turbines(ship engines, not planes), didn't as have much time to nerd as I had before obviously. Worked at a help desk the last two years I was in for a total of five years. I finished service last year February and hunkered down on studying.

It's been a little over a year since I started studying, there were a few times in the first few months that I had trouble deciding where to start and spent a lot of time reading advice columns etc... Eventually I stopped that nonsense, closed my eyes and spun the proverbial(first time using that word) globe of CS, my finger landed on Python. I don't know exactly what I want to do but reverse engineering seems like a lot of fun, it almost requires one to know computers from the bottom-up in many cases.

I read so damn much, I have some of the classic books of CS (Mythical Man-Month, C programming language(haven't touched C YET), and others by the wizards) I work on Project Euler problems, strengthen my math at Khan Academy, take courses at Udacity and now learning Ruby via Koans. I'm beginning to understanding the idea of computer architecture as a whole which has gotten me even more interested/excited.

I'm the only computer literate member of both sides of the family, don't make many friends what with my focus being elsewhere. Sometimes a family member asks me something about what I am studying, and they always regret it.

My question is, as someone with arguably less than a year experience, do you have any advice or criticisms to give?

Thank you for your time!!!
How do you expect them to serve you ads? They have to get to your phone _somehow_ so there will always be network overhead.

The amount of network overhead can vary wildly. If the app is polling the ad network API on startup and at a fixed interval, it can keep the radio awake for longer than it would otherwise, or wake it up and keep it in a high power state for the duration of the CELL_DCH timer.

It's not an impossible requirement to queue ads, reduce the frequency of polling, and coalesce the ad network API calls with other app network traffic.
It really is just a case of people's emotions largely being based around what they are used to. If a new industry came up that meant in 15 years we could all get great-quality cars for free, suddenly the idea of a normal car for £10k would seem hilariously insulting.
Great start. I believe the term you're looking for is data journalism, or data-driven journalism:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=data+journalism

Out of curiosity, what's your tech stack?
Grade 11 - most students are 16 or 17 by the time they are exposed to Lord of the Flies.
Nothing in his post indicates 'he', either, from what I can see?
It's hard to give advice here because you state what you're doing, but not why.

Why do you work so much? Do you need the money? Are you too timid to say no? Are you looking for a promotion? Do you love the game?

On top of all that work, why do you spend even more time on open source projects? Do you still have something to prove? Is this a source of entertainment or anxiety?

The fact is, you're extremely talented and could create almost any work arrangement you fancy. There's no need to quit IT and become a bus driver.

But again, what you should do now depends entirely on why you're currently working so much.

For what it's worth, I've been there before. I almost sold everything and moved to Costa Rica. Instead, I sold everything and made less radical changes.

One of the reasons I worked so much was because everything I owned had monthly payments. Selling everything solved that. Once you don't need to make a lot of money to pay your bills the world opens up for you.

Suddenly you can walk into your boss's office and say, "look, this is how it's going to be...". If she says no, then you walk. I really can't express enough the difference not needing money makes. Most people are desperate for money and it shows. The confidence you get from not needing a paycheck for the next year shows even louder because it's so unusual.

Now, I typically do consulting work 4 days per week and work on my start-up at nights and on Fridays. On the weekend I hang out with friends, surf, snow board, skate, and sometimes do more work (if nothing else is available). I also take a ridiculous amount of vacations, some just a few days and some for a week, but typically about every 3 months. That's what keeps me going.
No, the point of that piece was not that icon fonts are the way to go. It was that one vector icon can't just be rendered at different resolutions without changing the level of detail, and most icon designers use vectors to render their large sizes, but often resort to manual bitmap pixel pushing at smaller sizes to get the look they want.

The key point is that you need to design different vectors or bitmaps for different actual rendered sizes, with different levels of detail, and one design will never be suitable for all sizes.
OpenBSD bug in the random() function
Fab is testament to the fact that those annoying Launchrock type pages can help you launch a startup bigtime. I hate signing up to mysterious new apps with content-less landing pages as much as the next hacker on HN, but they can work sometimes.
For sure. However, lately, I've been seeing the storage growth rate increase faster than my personal use growth rate. Maybe it's just me.
I've actually got that book in my collection and you're right, it is a good read.

The idea of producing rocket fuel on Mars is not only a good one, but quite likely the only way such a mission would even be viable. The idea of hauling all that extra rocket fuel for the return trip to Mars and back simply doesn't work.
SimCity's upcoming GlassBox simulation engine