skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a fairly obvious way to see that the Apple one is higher quality than the Samsung one, if you happen to own both, like I do. Plug them both in and be quiet. You can hear the Samsung one making a high pitched ring, while the Apple one is silent. This is probably due to the superior diode bridge snubbers in the Apple design (if, indeed, they exist at all.) Having a high-speed diode connected directly to a transformer is an almost guaranteed way to setup an oscillation, which can lead to audible sound, and always leads to electromagnetic interference.

And the sound is really annoying.
African child mortality: The best story in development
"sites constantly popping up reminders that they have apps. If I wanted the app I would have installed it."

Exactly. I have the same pet peeve. It is such a nuisance.
The Beatles – Let it be + Lyrics
For me, the realization that it is actually SAFER to claim the lane rather than be meek and risk getting doored or risk being in a position where cars assume they should pass you. Better to piss people off than risk your life. Plus, in most of those heavily trafficked roads the cars that are getting pissed off are delusional and don't realize that you're basically moving at the same speed as traffic anyway.
My least favorite, but the one that has probably influenced me the most:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128
ماذا قال محمد مرسى على التلفزيون المصرى
For a variety of reasons (technical, social, logistical), Wikipedia isn't suited for really hyperlocal knowledge sharing. The same factors that make Wikipedia work well actually work against collecting really specific, uncitable, non-noteworthy local knowledge.

If you're into this sort of thing you should definitely check out the LocalWiki effort: http://localwiki.org We're a non-profit, decentralized project to collect and share the world's local knowledge.
Gotta dump those shares before the tax code changes next year.
You're right about that. The traveling salesman is slightly different than Hamiltonian path because it's looking to find the lowest possible distance, but I thought it worked nicely as a metaphor. I should have said that instead of referring to it as the traveling salesman problem.
That seems like decidedly unexpected behaviour and makes default params far less useful.
They are to the underwriters that defended them at $38. : )
I've also run into O(n) and even O(n*m) # queries situations. They're entirely avoidable by simply sticking closer to the relational model than the object model. Sadly, this is almost always impossible with just Django's ORM. You very quickly end up writing unmanaged models and raw SQL.

SQLAlchemy is so much better when it comes to this, since things like joins are always explicit. However, it's rather hard to use it together with the Django ORM bits, especially the admin. One method I want to explore is replacing only the raw SQL bits with SQLAlchemy, and use its reflection to map to the Django ORM models.
Well, yes, but I'd also like to think that code should raise the level of the programmers reading it. You shouldn't avoid language features just because some people don't know about them. That's as ridiculous as the folks who say "Don't use the ?: operator because folks who haven't taken Intro CS 101 may not be familiar with it."

So you spent a couple seconds Googling defaultdict. Great, you now know what a defaultdict is and can use it in your own code. It's useful in a lot of places besides this toy example.

You should avoid gratuitous complexity, where you force the reader to learn something that will never, ever be useful to them again. A great example might be writing your own encryption algorithm, which will be complicated, wrong, under-performant, and totally useless on any other project. If you just use bcrypt (or whatever the recommended best practice is now), then your code works well, and all readers of your code now know about bcrypt and can use it themselves.
The MSF course is something I would strongly recommend for anyone able to take it, rider or not. All of the people I'd consider good drivers have taken one (or are 20k+ mile motorcyclists), even when driving cars.
A regional note for San Francisco: the bikers here aren't helping things. We seem to have a disproportionate number of asshole bikers who seem to think they are entitled to fly through stop-signs as 10/15 mph. As a person who both bikes and drives a lot in the city I see both sides of this coin. I understand that coming to a full stop is an expensive operation for cyclists... but approaching a 4 way stop with cars already at the intersection and then suddenly deciding that you're a magical cyclist that doesn't need to obey traffic laws is both dangerous and pisses of motorists which only increase tension for all people involved.
This Cicero guy seems like a very good writer. That is a nice presentation of stoic(?) philosophy.
In Jobs' case, he had a lot of charisma on his side. The investors could watch the song-and-dance that he put on at the keynotes and get excited about Apple's products (or not).
There are different laws for bikes, it isn't just bike == vehicle.

Example: http://bicycling.com/blogs/roadrights/2009/07/28/a-stop-sign...
That's really unnecessary. In fact, cyclists here rarely if ever stop at stop signs. It's a very dangerous situation.
Chrome overtakes all IE versions combined
Yeah, when you are taught to draw, they always tell you to hold the picture up to a mirror. Any errors become blatant when you do that. Its also why you have to be careful when you draw at an angle when sitting down. As soon as you sit the picture up right once again errors show up where you didn't see them before.
I used a proportional-width typeface on one of my recent projects in Java. It felt quite natural, actually, and took some of the pointless formatting distractions away from the coding process. Didn't constantly think about trying to keep lines of code within 80 characters, for example -- if it was readable on my screen it was fine.

The drawbacks were things like confusing lowercase L with 1 (one) in the sans-serif font I preferred, or the sort of editing where I was trying to change stuff at, say, character position 67 in a series of lines. It seems better for writing code than for editing it. Definitely give it a try if you haven't yet.
the D language supports that kind of syntax

nums.filter!(i => i%2 == 0).map!(i => i/2);
Corporations don't have to worry about a clean conscience, but some of them do.

Certainly, some of their employees care a lot. And in Silicon Valley, the people building this stuff have a lot of options. Apple has managed to attract a bunch of people who like making great stuff. Some of those people would find jobs they liked more if Apple tried to make things that were too junky.
My rule for finding internships so far has been simple: I target variety. This way, by the time I graduate, I have a very good idea of what I like and what I don't. Being able to try a different sort of company for a short time with no adverse effects is great for exploring! Doing just small startups would be just as bad as only doing bigger enterprise companies.

I started with a larger company and later found that I'm more interested in smaller companies; now I'm looking for different technologies (functional programming!), different industries (no more web stuff) and, in the far future, different locations (I'm bored of the Bay Area now).

Coincidentally, I haven't seen anybody mention the last one, but I think spending the summer abroad or in New York would be really awesome. (That said, I'm not willing to sacrifice technically interesting work just to live elsewhere.) Of course, I say this as somebody who went through middle school, high school and now two years of college all in the Bay Area, so it's no doubt different for students from other universities.
You're comparing two solutions that solve completely different problems, and complaining that Comcast (and other ISPs) chose the one that solves their problem rather than yours. I don't know why this surprises you. Comcast's goal is not to provide you or I with as much bandwidth as we want, it's to make a profit off of providing a service.

High-usage users are a drain on their profits, and they only provide service to us because we'd be a PR disaster if they tossed us and we ended up telling all our friends and family to switch to some other provider. On the other hand, we would obviously prefer much higher or non-existent caps. Comcast is understandably not amenable to that, as it'd require substantial investment in infrastructure improvements for minimal increased revenue. Whatever happens is going to be some kind of compromise, and the one they're proposing makes them additional money while also giving us "power users" an option besides "run into the cap and die".

I don't think that that's a terrible idea. Like you, I'd prefer higher caps for the same price, but the reality of it is just more complex. ISPs are strongly opposed to doing anything that would increase costs or decrease revenues, and customers are strongly opposed to doing anything that would increase prices or decrease quality of service. Something has to give, and in the short term that's going to mean pain for both sides. In the long term, technological progress and the limited (but present) competition between providers will mean that we'll probably end up paying about the same amount for a slowly-increasing amount of service. That means faster connections, higher caps and more options, just not as soon as you or I want them.

Disclaimer: I don't have Comcast cable, but I do have cable service from one of their smaller competitors.
I came here looking for an explanation for this, so thanks.

To the curious - SO has an explanation of why Python was designed like this, which I found interesting: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1132941/least-astonishmen...
Did you use a PHP framework to write the AJAXy stuff? Something like backbone.js?
Actually, if you understand the way Python is evaluated (dig in, the core is pretty transparent), it's the only behavior that makes sense in this case. It's also documented as such[1], so it's quite expected. Default parameters are still just as useful for constants, such as:

def f(x=0, y="foo", z=3.14159):

This, however, is a perfectly Pythonic idiom:

def f(L=None):
if L is None:
L = []

[1]: http://docs.python.org/reference/compound_stmts.html#functio...
One of the reasons Python stopped being my favorite programming language was the appearance of what seemed to me to be Perl envy. I hadn't seen conditional assignments before, but they don't exactly make me regret that choice.
I was taught to always open the driver's-side door (left-hand drive) with my RIGHT hand, which forces you to turn your body (and head) to look for potential dooring victims.
Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but cyclists ride bikes, whereas car drivers drive cars. Car drivers should be prepared to take a bit more responsibility for their actions, given the amount of damage they can cause.

Anyway, is it seriously that big a deal? Avoid them, like you'd avoid a dog, or a toddler, or a man in a BMW, or some other agent that doesn't seem to comprehend the rules of the road, and then ignore the matter.
His blog is nomoreharvarddebt.com, and includes a detailed breakdown of his spending habits. I always see posts about bootstrapping on here, and as intrigued as I am, they often lack specifics, so this was incredibly helpful to an aspiring 18 year old entrepreneur entering college.

P.S. If anyone knows of a series of blog posts or even a book that breaks down the expenses (business and personal) of bootstrapping I startup, I'd definitely be interested!
As both employee and employer, it's my view that all employees should what they see as the right thing by default.

Personally, I think the poster should make the change and then announce it. I'm not saying he should be cowardly. If anything, I think the cowardly choice is to futz around trying to get consensus an elusive around doing the responsible thing.
I feel horrible for saying this, but in many areas of science and engineering, RSA under sanctions was more interesting to outsiders, in that it was a relatively rich, industrialized country which produced technology (due to being isolated) which most other countries wouldn't have (since they didn't need it, with global supply sources). Synthetic fuels, some amazing defense tech (G5 howitzer, funding Gerald Bull, etc.), a credible nuclear program, space, ... I guess the isolation wasn't as complete as North Korea, and had a much better industrial base to begin with, because aside from superbills, a huge abandoned hotel, novel money laundering techniques, and some industrial scale meth production, North Korea hasn't done anything interesting.

(It was of course immoral, a horrible human tragedy and was objectively worse for 90% of the population, etc.)

Is it an accurate perception that RSA is less of an interesting science/engineering power now than it was in the 1980s? Will this reverse itself?
LinkedIn advertising might be good for you. Submit the site to any group devoted to engineering HR. Create a list of 100 target businesses and start cold calling them. Start an affiliate program.
*choose three of those things and you should be on your way to a solid revenue stream.
You do realize that kickstart project failed horribly and it was actually useless. Look at reviews.
I like the "hostility" towards business guys in an early stage startup where delivering a product is key.

If they can't build it, they have nothing to do there, not early on anyway. A single developer who can design > business guy.

Keep it up!

"2) sales and marketing are usually vital for growing businesses?" sounds more like hostility against developers, as in marketing is some obscure dark magic?
In the same thread, one of the best comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35139).
> “Bicycle riders on public roads have the same rights and responsibilities as motorists, and are subject to the same rules and regulations.”

Not wholly true. Cyclists aren't required by law to have insurance, a riding license or a license plate to even be on the road. Cyclists might get fined or punished for disobeying the law, but in most places, they can't be banned from getting on the road again like a car driver would.
Python offers filtering expressions in its generator syntax. I find Python's "lambda" hurts readability for most uses, which pains me as a Lisp geek. Your example, as a generator:

halve_evens_only = (i / 2) for i in nums if (i%2 == 0)

The parens aren't necessary, but they help readability for people who aren't used to the generator order of operations. (Again, Lisp geek, more parens means more readable in my fractured mind.)
Google will keep Android free and open for at least five years
There seems to be quite a lot of interest right now in companies trying to build platforms for cloud-based 'genetic-analysis-as-a-service', such as DNAnexus. The data management/storage and scaling problems in genomics are very real, but to a large extent these issues are not really specific to bioinformatics. There are also companies working on software for NGS, such as Real Time Genomics and Novocraft.

Historically, pure-play bioinformatics startups have had a pretty tough time, perhaps because the primary users have been academics who are loathe to pay for software. I think many of the successful ones also involve proprietary databases (eg. Ingenuity) or have deep scientific experience and expertise (eg. OpenEye).

The real opportunities at the moment are more likely in companies that are tightly integrating genomics technologies with diagnostics and services. There are many, but for example, look at Foundation Medicine in cancer, or Counsyl or Natera in prenatal diagnostics.
In Japan, where many people cycle, they ride on the footpath. It seems to work out fine.
I'm a fan of Monte Carlo (http://www.bok.net/MonteCarlo/). ProFont is also really nice, but doesn't have a proper bold version.
"If there is no bike lane, something like 90% of the cars simply do not give a single shit about bikes."

You have to respect the culture in which you are immersed. It seems insane to me that cyclists would even consider riding on a road that has no bike lane.

Right or wrong, the existence of bike lanes sets up a dichotomy in people's minds. Either there is a bike lane and bikes belong there (and I have to be aware of them), or there is no bike lane and bikes do not belong (I won't be expecting them - I may even resent their presence).

Pedestrians have their place, and cars have their place. Bikes have their place, but unfortunately only on a few select roadways.
Beat me to my equivalent answer: "java programmers."
Or just say:

from collections import Counter
freqs = Counter("abracadabra")

I was surprised to see that missing, given that Counter was mentioned in the next section.
I guess now we'll see what chrome's security model is really made of.
Or just embrace the tao of the tuple:

def f(L=()):
...
Literal edit wars, perhaps!
That's a valid point. I updated the wording a bit.
Where I live, a pedestrian was killed by a cyclist.

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1048256--cyclists-defend...
By the way, I love the site, don't know how well it works or not, but assuming it provides a great value to companies hiring, I'd love to be a business partner in the venture.
I can see the cost, although I imagine it would be more than made up for by the savings in fuel consumption and vehicle maintenance. As for the size, though, I seem to recall seeing a lot of very small roundabouts in Europe. Do they really need more space?

IMO the major problem with roundabouts in the US is simply that American drivers find them frightening and confusing and simply won't put up with them.
It's ironic that you're linking to one of Joel's articles in your response, given that he's actually the "Windows programmers' hero" that the comment was referring to: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html.
Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
I agree with the spirit of your argument.

In fact, I almost came here to write a parallel comment: I'm really not sure that reversing the list 'a' with 'a[::-1]' is better than 'reversed(a)', which usually effectively does the same thing, but whose meaning is much more obvious.

But, while I agree with your general point, in the specific case of 'defaultdict', I differ.

I use 'defaultdict' all the time and I'm glad its there. It feels cleaner than 'freqs.get(c,0)'.
I define the default value in one place, and then the interface to my datastructure is simpler; hence as I continue writing, I can spend more of my brainpower in the problem domain.

Its a small detail, but its one less thing to think about when writing a complex algorithm.
Can we shortcut through the usual discussions?

As a cyclist, I'm hyper aware of the fact that I'm not a 4 ton steel SUV. If you see me do something dangerous, comfort your rage with the simple fact that it will likely kill or severely injure me if it comes to that.

If you see me break the law, know that per law I'll be fined like a normal vehicle, even though these are based off the danger radiating from a SUV going 40mph.
I will agree with that the idea that the cult of Lisp started because Viaweb proved that super programming capabilities are better than mere mortals is both wrong and flawed.
Airline pilots have strict protections on how the cockpit voice recorder information can be used; it's only a 30-minute loop, etc. Hardly the same as having every working day recorded permanently...
See screenshots: http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment1.png and http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment2.png from Diego "sickness" Righi's notes: http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment.txt
There's a bit of a feedback mechanism, since the only price that really matters is the one you can get. If you had an auction (the stock market is already an auction that's always ongoing, btw) as soon as its revealed that Warren Buffet bid X, you'll see people bid X+1, even if 30 seconds earlier they had scoffed that X was totally unrealistic. You could have a silent auction, but the facts come out eventually, and then you'll see the same eruption of trading. That's almost what the bankers are doing behind the scenes, holding a private silent auction.
I run one of these companies, Seven Bridges Genomics. I'd encourage you to learn more about genomics, biology and the problems these fields are trying to solve. Technology is useful only insofar it solves a problem in a big market -- so instead of starting with a technology / picking an area; I'd start with a problem.
> They are so common, they work so poorly even when everybody knows what they're doing, and nobody ever knows what they're doing with them.

4 way stops are just evil. Where I live, nobody comes to a full stop (even though think they think they do), and because the danger is a little less than a full intersection with a traffic light, people will go out of turn because they think their time is worth more than everyone else's.
While it seems logical when you understand what's going on, from a practical point of view I can't see how this would ever be useful. The tradeoff appears to be that the functions are first class objects. I'm not sure what the benefit here is though. Does having them as first class objects allow some useful idioms? (I'm a ruby dev but I'm genuinely curious to know what this allows you to do)
Because the regularly-named ones got better.
It appears to me that there is actually no such operator in Python; cf. http://docs.python.org/reference/simple_stmts.html#augmented...

Superficially it looks like an operator, but I suspect that's merely because of whitespace freedom; i.e., a, = [0] is equivalent to a,=[0] and a ,= [0].
Wow - really impressive. Thanks for sharing. Good luck with the future development.

How did you code the PHP and MySQL? Was this straight into notepad or did you use a template/tool?

Like others, really interested how you picked up the skills so quickly.
Not a mature answer.
Yes, Oregon's U-turn law is a constant source of annoyance in the pacific northwest. Meanwhile, if U-turns were made illegal in California, navigating the bay area would have a twilight zone quality to it.
I define the default value in one place, and then the interface to my datastructure is simpler; hence as I continue writing, I can spend more of my brainpower in the problem domain.

Actually, this speaks to point: optimization should be for reading, not for writing.
Note that this is a study on a high-fructose diet, not a high-fructose corn syrup diet. A major source of fructose is sucrose, which when cooked with is often already broken down into glucose and fructose before consumption.

Note also that this was a study on rats, not humans.

If we cut through the press release (which was already amended to be less sensationalist), this was actually a study showing that omega-3 fatty acids improved the rats' memories of a maze after six weeks. That a high-fructose diet would "sabotage learning, memory" is merely supposition on the part of the researcher (and he says so, explicitly). There is no evidence from this study that that is the case. Why they wouldn't have a control group not receiving the high-fructose diet is not apparent.
In one particularly embarrassing example, I once spent dozens of hours on a project for a drawing class, only to find I’d included perspective distortion on the entire image from the angle at which I’d been viewing the canvas.

Luckily it turned out to be a good-looking effect, and I got a good grade by passing it off as intentional.
Except that, as is mentioned in the OP, in the US cyclists are legally allowed use most all roadways and are treated legally like an automobile in cases where a bike lane does not exist.
> If you see me do something dangerous, comfort your rage with the simple fact that it will likely kill or severely injure me if it comes to that.

Why would that comfort anyone? It's distressing to watch someone do something dangerous specifically because of the fear that they may injur or kill themselves.