skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I took the Rails Tutors class in February. I can say that Chris and Kevin have structured the course very well. I am also currently around 70% through this Pragmatic Programmers course... another great investment. I'm making a career switch from advertising sales and the education I am receiving from the vast resources online is amazing. I would say for any newbie, learn the Ruby basics from Pragmatic Programmers first.
Good point , I've had a few programs that I was happily using in Wine suddenly auto update themselves and start crashing all the time or cease working at all. For this reason I simply couldn't recommend using Wine to anyone who requires a particular program for their work (unless the developer specifically targets Wine as a supported platform , such as XMLSpy).

Also some games have DRM which does not work with Wine, so the only way to get it to work is to run a cracked version. Steam should fix that.
Parse URL Querystring Into Array In PHP
Ask HN: Will you re-brand existing product if it is completely redesigned?
We are reworking our flagship product. In fact rework is so huge that a little will remain of existing product. What do you think about re-branding option? Will it be easier to promote new product than v.3 of the existing product?
Amazon Is Going To Eat The World
Q: Why are corporations able to fund lobbyist?
A: Because it is legal

It would be more accurate to say that there are no laws limiting the practice. You are reasoning as if governments set up the lobbying mechanism and then invited people to form organizations to engage in the practice. Historically speaking, this is not the case. There's a constitutional right to petition the government in the first amendment, and people are simply exercising it.

If, as a result of this more people are getting hurt because the design isn't very sound, you don't turn around and blame the businesses using it. The design was at fault. Bad engineering. People will use what they are given to work with.

Like the employees of the businesses that bought the defective chainsaws in order to gain a commercial advantage? The companies in your example weren't given a defective chainsaw, they elected to purchase them because the devices promised a commercial advantage. If they're injuring the employees, then maybe the employers should be compensating them and recovering their losses from the product manufacturer...which is quite similar what happens with workman's comp, funnily enough.
Ian Gilman worked on the original and has a writeup about it here: http://iangilman.com/software/seizetheday.php

Hopefully he'll jump in and comment.
This was a big problem in my computer science. It's easy to run the experiment over and over until you get the desired result.
The NSA in Your Inbox? No Way. Call Now to Stop CISPA
No. They start from the beginning and go to the end. Conceptually it could work on any iterable, and not just a list container.

You can, however, use the 'reversed()' function, as in "for row in reversed(rows): for col in reversed(row): print col"

There is a special double-underscore method, which lists and other data structures support, to allow iteration in reverse with the normal performance of forward iteration.
It goes much too far to say that the climate is chaotic and therefore totally unpredictable in the long run. After all, if you buy that whole hog, you're also led to say that if you moved the Earth to Mercury's orbit it would be impossible to predict that the Earth would get hotter, in the long term. This results from the flaw of confusing weather (which is indeed chaotic) with statistics about weather (i.e. climate).

A butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane. But it can also prevent a hurricane. All those perturbations don't change the fact that, within an order of magnitude, we can predict how many hurricanes will occur in a given year. Alternatively, think about the classical three body problem: even though it's the preeminent example of a chaotic system, you can still make broad predictions about it. Center of mass, average speed of the bodies, average collision time. This isn't some obscure controversial field, either: in physics, these emergent statistical properties form the basis of statistical mechanics and therefore thermodynamics as a whole.

Chaos doesn't mean you have to throw your hands up and give up on making any long term predictions at all about a system.
Really? Maybe that's because you've never asked in the form of a URL: http://cssarrowplease.com/
Would they have refunded him if someone did this to him maliciously, as he points out is possible at the end of his post?
I totally agree with you. The traffic chart is also very exciting.
Thank you Github! I was just hoping that the graphs would get updated. This gives me better oversight into who/what/where/when. Although perhaps a bug - my punch card graph is empty.
What OS X and iOS SDK are you running with? You mind filing a bug if you have a GitHub account? https://github.com/mtigas/iOS-OnionBrowser/issues

I might have some dependencies that I’ve neglected to mention (since I use homebrew a ton) and I’m trying to nail down the build scripts to be a bit more portable.
This is awesome.

I turned it into an OS X screensaver using https://github.com/tlrobinson/WebSaver
Creation of something from nothing seems rather functionally equivalent to destruction of a something into nothing with time reversed. Is there any known process or way to take something and destroy it utterly into nothing? If not, then what would make such an utter destruction possible given a reversed direction of time?

Except as an abstraction, it seems to me that no one has any real experience of nothing. As an empiricist, that gives me quite a bit of pause when anyone starts making claims about nothing (myself being no exception).
Show HN: Mixtube, DJ your party from any browser (needs flash)
Android in early 2007 looked very different than it does today
I've learned something new today. Thanks!
Given that dosbox is an "emulator" (says so right there in the man page!), yes. You expected a different answer? Dosbox doesn't support "true" palette animation either (well, unless you give it access to the real VGA registers of real hardware, which can be done in some emulators).

The point was that the programming technique required to make this work is not the same as the one used on palette hardware, so calling it the "true" effect is going to be confusing to people who don't know exactly how this works.
If I wanted to launch an attack on something like Instagram all I would need to do is put a bunch of images (hosted on instagram) into a Google Spreadsheet? Then the google crawler will come through and download them all once an hour?
Ah, there's ways of dealing with that. Copper mines in Australia, for instance, often have trace uranium they have to deal with before they can sell it, and there are ways of dealing with this. It's easy to separate different elements, especially given the difference in density, and though it's usually harder to separate isotopes (U-238 and U-235 being the famous example) it really depends on the metal you're talking about. In addition, enriching uranium is a problem because nobody wants to help you do it, but with most other metals, everyone's cool, and would be happy to sell you that service.

Keep in mind not all radioactive sources are created equal--every atom is different, and every isotope is different. Iron and nickel, for instance, are extremely stable and can be irradiated without serious consequences--unlike cobalt or gold, which can be added to a bomb to make it dirty.

So, because the bulk of the asteroid is very stable, and the remainder of it very precious, I would expect dealing with the radiation not to be a problem. The precious metals may in fact be somewhat irradiated, but then this is not waste--radioactive isotopes of many different metals see a lot of use in industry and medicine.
Has Facebook ever shared that list?
Mod_spdy — Google Developers
I dove into programming in November as a complete newbie. I use every resource under the sun... railscasts, http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book, Treehouse, Codecademy, RailsTutors, This course, among dozens of others. This course is very well structured and offers a deep understanding into the Ruby language that none of the other resources compares to. For me, I take a bit from everything. I am confident that the route I am taking would blow away any formal education for building web applications. So a $199 price tag is extremely reasonable. There are other FREE ways to learn as well. To each their own.
Anyone have any idea what they are using to build these graphs. Looks kinda like D3 but I'm not really sure.
OK. It's sad if "that's that" and that a simple fault will be allowed to prevail and damage an otherwise great resource. If it really is the case that a couple of flags can rip the post of the home page, that's a really dumb system IMO—i.e. that many people like the post and upvote it but two people don't agree and overpower them. Doesn't make any sense to me and I'm still skeptical that this is how it works. Thanks again for helping.
Ask HN: help me lord, please help me
Although I'm not a technical person, I have managed to build a photo-gallery web site by myself which attracts several hundred thousand visitors per month.
My web visitors have been constantly asking for an iPhone app, so I gotta stop procrastinating and get it done.

I have a pretty good idea on how I want the app to look and function (it will basically be a photo gallery that is updated weekly with new photos). I plan to hire someone on oDesk to get this completed. Before I do so, I'd like to get your advice on some things.

1. What's the best way to host the images?. Should the app just serve the photos from my current web server? Or should I use Amazon web services? Is this what Heruko is used for? Sorry for my ignorance, I don't really know much about how iOS apps work and how the content is "pulled" into the app.

2. I've studied some current "pics" apps, and I noticed that some apps load images really quickly, while other ones seem to have a lag every time a new image is loaded. Are the ones that load it quickly pre-loading images? Or are they just using a fast server to load them?

3. Any other advice I should know about before I look for an iOS developer for this?
+1 For Amazon for kindly reimbursing the overage charge.

-1 For Google for creating what is the biggest threat to content providers by enabling easy-to-use DDOS attacks across the entire interwebs.

</hyperbole>

Seriously, is this what we have to look forward to when Google Spreadsheets, and God knows what else, become ever-more popular?

Think about all the additional onerus costs that would be incurred by content providers as more and more Google Spreadsheet users hotlink images, mp3s, videos...

This has to be a bad design decision by Google, there's no need to redownload assets by-the-hour, on-the-hour, regardless of whether the user's spreadsheet is open or not.

Is it time to go back to the days of putting your web assets behind $HTTP_REFERER?
Without patents, you would just get people signing even longer term exclusive contracts. The whole point of the patent system is that it's less bad than the previous situation, where either inventors were ripped off wholesale or they forced buyers into perpetually exclusive agreements.

Hospitals have no choice but to bend to BD's will.

Well, they could pay more in the short term and hope for innovation to undermine the monopoly over the long term, by buying cheaper and more effective products from disruptive competitors.
The point is that it's entirely predictable that unscrupulous business men would swoop in and exploit a weakness in the legislation/system.
No, but a jump from 1.5% to say 4% could be more significant than you think, especially if these are the right kinds of users.

Remember that a significant number of Windows users are either corporate users and corporate use numbers could take a significant fall if 3 or 4 big corporations decided to switch away from it. Many of the other windows users are people who bought they cheapest PC/Laptop they could get and spend as little as possible on software for it.

If Desktop Linux had 4% but that included a significant portion of developers , games enthusiasts and other people who spend serious money on software etc..
Obama has vetoed two (2) bills to date.

CISPA is certainly not going to be #3.

Grade sitting Presidents participating in a reelection campaign on their actions, not their words.
In the UK it's fairly typical to work a 37.5 hour working week in the software industry, with 20-25 days vacation. I work at $BIGCORP and work approximately those hours, as do the vast majority of my coworkers (apart from at intermittent crunch periods). My experience in previous businesses was roughly the same, as is that of my friends in other companies - apart from a couple who work longer because they want to.

This does not apply to the (much higher paid) work available in programming in the banking sector, where substantially longer work weeks are typical.
I still get a bad feeling from the fact that this e-mail talks about "cybersecurity" like it's not a made up word with no referent
How I startup all my project services in multiple terminal tabs in one command
Yeah, it's d3, the article says "The new GitHub graphs are built with the amazing d3 library by @mbostock".
Your iOS developer will be able to answer those questions.
Yep, D3.
Agreed. It's better idea to use mutex + 2 semaphores to implement queue with blocking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer-consumer_problem#Using...

(it's a classical computer science problem with classical solution)
http://developer.vodafone.com/partners/location/
If nothing else, the list itself is long and intimidating.
Victory for Open Government: The Data Act Passes the House
I know this guy, and I've seen this iteratively evolve at various parties based on what goes wrong. pretty happy to see it at this stage now. well done!
From the interview [1] - twelve of the images were originally used in a calendar application called "Seize the Day" [2][3] and later modified and used again in "Magic the Gathering: BattleMage". Other images were concepts for games that never made it to production.

[1] http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Q_A_w...
[2] http://www.iangilman.com/software/seizetheday.php
[3] Free and available for download here: http://everonward.webs.com/seizetheday.htm (OSX OS9 XP)
well, they should, but I'm asking for advice so I'm not totally blind when I go into this.
E.W.Dijkstra Archive: Home page
The punchcard might conceivably be useful for attempting to coordinate with the developers at the time when they're most active. Other than that, it does sort of feel like they just had a bunch of data lying around that they felt really needed to be shoved into a graph.
Just chiming in to say nice work Mike, and that it's nice to see another former Plus-One'r around these parts =)
I'd contend no one will encounter a force field when trying to enter TN, so "I can't ever go back" is perfectly meaningful for anyone who is unable to stomach this anti-intellectualism.
While the main point about the medical supply monopoly seems solid, I'm suspicious about this Shaw guy, his character, and his product. I'd like to see an objective counter-point.
I agree. I had written a post on my blog similar to your line of tought a while back. More along the lines of people are overestimating what their time is actually worth.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3376081
^ this

Hours worked must be one of the worst metrics for performance, productivity, efficiency or commitment. I don't know why people in some countries or cultures are so obsessed with how long they work, or how few days they take off. Or actually, maybe I do know why, but it has nothing to do with 'amount of work done' or 'quality of work'.

I think that more often than not, the people consistently putting in the most hours are those who take the longest to finish stuff, and care the least about the quality of their output. Anyone can sit behind a desk 10 hours a day to impress the boss.

IMO no metric used to assess performance or productivity should include the number of hours present in the office. Instead of 'hours worked this week' or 'number of days worked this year', the metric should be 'total number of hours to finish the job', preferably divided by a factor based on the 'amount of rework or support required afterwards' and/or multiplied by a factor based on the flexibility of the person doing the work, both in terms of availability as well as skill set. Of course some of these things are hard to track on a spreadsheet, so they are rarely used.

Long story short: just try to do the best job you can in the most efficient way possible, without turning into a bean counter, just because that's the best way to impress your superior.
I am curious: in what ways is an online course of this sort preferable to reading a book (plus doing exercises)? Is the "live" help really that much of a factor in learning the material?
Why was that downvoted? The guy has a track record. He was dead-set against telecom immunity, before he voted to support it (back when he was a senator). He was for repealing the Bush tax cuts until he wasn't. He caved on budget negotiations when he agreed that the deficit was the biggest budget problem. He was all for closing Gitmo until he wasn't. He was against signing statements until he got into office. His record on civil liberties (domestic spying, FOIA, strip searches -- he argued for the majority opinion, domestic use of drones) has been in stark contrast to the sort of things he was saying when he was a candidate.

I think he has proven that statements beginning with the words "I will" must be taken with a large grain of salt. In fact, with CSIPA you can already see it happening -- the weasel words to note are "in its current form".

How can you believe his progressive-leaning statements any longer without being completely naive?
That's because once the president says he is going to veto a bill, it almost never makes it to his desk.

Much like the threat of a filibuster is basically as powerful as a filibuster, the threat of a veto is almost as powerful as a veto.
Issuing a veto threat and then not following up on that veto is pretty much the biggest tactical mistake a President can make. The whole point of a veto threat is to make a credible threat to coerce Congress to change course.

If he didn't follow through, all his future veto threats would ring hollow and he'd have lost an important executive tool. Even if he didn't want to veto CISPA on principle, at this point he has too.
Well, it seems I should have said "not available in France", sorry for the mix up, I only checked French and US stores.
These new tools are fairly different from the client-server applications of the 90s (and 00s and even now). Those desktop applications did have a lot of chrome on the client side, but the "real work" was being done on the server. Normal AJAX apps are more like those 90s apps - the UI lives in the client, but they rely more heavily on the server than a CouchApp would.

That said, all these Meteor and Firebase apps could end up having quite a bit of middleware and end up not seeming all that radical, depending on how much stuff gets added on.
Reminds me of the email cannon we built on Gmail, not exactly on purpose. We needed a full Gmail account to do some testing on our company's email backup system. At the time that meant 8GB of email. And you couldn't just send a bunch of huge attachments, as it had to be like regular email. So we took a gmail account and signed it up for dozens of active linux related email lists (because they were easy to find).

The result was an email account that got an email message every second or so in a variety of languages.

We quickly realized that you could have some fun by forwarding that address to someone else's email account.

Fast forward a few months, and Gmail smartly requires a confirmation before allowing you to forward.
Perifoveal Display tracks head position, highlights changes on periphery
Higher frames rates people unconsciously connect with Soap Opera's and other straight video productions that were to lower quality.

On top of that much film making is trying to hide imperfections. We hit the uncanny valley of sets/make up where it just is too clear to suspend disbelief at some level.

It will have a lot of getting used to the look.
A vote by direct link is, I think, what happens if you post a link to the comments section of a article (i.e. this type of page) and ask for upvotes.
True. I watched an interview of one of the founders and he revealed that Instagram is just a offshoot feature of their original product. So the cost of mistakes are not taken into account.

It's like someone proving out that E=MC^2 AFTER Einstein already figured out the problem.

It's still a cool exercise to do! I wish he would do that for more sites and apps! I bet the Draw Something app isn't that expensive to reproduce.
What if your not building your business with the intention of (necessarily) selling it or getting IPO?

There needs to be some point at which you say "ok, I've done well so I'm going to reward myself by upgrading my lifestyle"
It was spaces in the path to where I was trying to build from. Breaking scripts for decades. It's building now.
i'm doing a thing at http://bloc.io too, similar to RailsTutors
It's interesting to look at major projects that have many commits to see when their active hours are. For instance, this is Linux's punch card: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/graphs/punch-card

Of course, interesting != useful
Kudos to Amazon for refunding the guy. I don't think any other hosting company would just take the bullet for the customer.
Why use a single CDN when you can use many?
I know the guy that knows this guy. I believe in the guy that knows this guy, so it must be awesome.
Bitcoin startup CoinLab + Tim Draper on Slashdot
Nice article, aside from the fact it should be proofread.
I work at Facebook, do not work very many hours (9:30-5:30 most days, including breakfast, lunch and sometimes an hour-long workout at the gym), and have never heard so much as a suggestion that I work more. This was also true during lockdown. The truth is, if you are capable of getting a lot of shit done, people are just happy that you're able to give them a lot, they don't squeeze every productive second out of you.

I attribute the 24/7 lockdown stuff to people who wear it as a badge of honor (that's exactly how Carnegie Mellon was, at least).
He was still for repealing the tax cuts, but he was unwilling to let the unemployment benefits lapse as would if he didn't.
Yes, that's kind of the point of Blend mode. AFAIK from looking at it, Blend mode makes the colors smoothly animate from one color to the next, which basically bumps the frame rate. Standard makes it change instantly, and since the frame rate is actually pretty low, it appears jerky.
> 4. Your conclusion: government rule making is bad.

Feel free to provide 3 examples where there's significant regulation AND little/no regulatory capture.