skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Practice? To scratch an itch?

One could argue that Twitter is a 'useless' app that realistically could have been prototyped over a weekend. I'm not arguing whether it is or isn't, but it's certainly popular.

My favorite 'weekend' app of the moment is Word Wars[1], which happened to be built during a hackathon.

I'm putting the finishing touches on "By A Bus", which is a source code escrow service activated by a dead man's switch that I started tinkering with yesterday, after reading this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761

Why am I doing it? I thought it would be a fairly easy thing that could be knocked out pretty quickly that would solve the problem of what happens to source code when their developers die. Source code escrow services are complicated and expensive, but with "By A Bus", you can just choose to escrow your Github-hosted source code so that if you die, all (or some of) your private repositories can be open sourced, or 'willed' to other open source contributors to take care of.

It is useless? Well, now it certainly is, and even after it launches, it might still be except to a small percentage of developers. I'll have learned a little more about the dotcloud infrastructure when it's done, and learned the GitHub v3 REST API, which I'd never touched before.

This kind of experience isn't exactly groundbreaking, but the more little things I can touch, the better off overall I am to be able to handle new things that I haven't seen before, or figure out how 'thing a' will interact with 'thing b'.

Most importantly though, small things can grow to be bigger things. Twitter wasn't exactly the hyper-mega trending analytics engine it is today when it first launched, but it grew into that as its creators realized how people were using it. Google started out as a search engine, and is now one of the biggest companies in the world. The best ideas start from small beginnings, and I'd much rather have a small project that a few hundred people like than a Facebook-sized project that nobody does, and I'll have wasted a lot less time in getting there.

[1] - http://wordwars.clay.io
It might have to do with the fact that most Web technologies do something useful while this just sends an extra header that pretty much every site they visit will ignore. I wouldn't prioritize it either at this point in time. This is a movement that needs support from site maintainers, not browser implementors.
It's probably worth noting that "gaol" hasn't been common in British English for some time. A search of the BBC news site reveals "jail" being used almost daily while "gaol" is only used to refer to historical buildings which are now closed.
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 13 Notes Essay
It reminds me a lot of RFC 3514's evil bit[1].

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
Quite a long time since I saw Aliens, but isn't the divide between the military and the civilians rather than the men and women?
tl;dr

On the heels of his decision to accept the public's money, Mark Zuckerberg ensures for himself a future tax break.
Chicken, egg. Someone has to start.
Google's Schmidt challenges: no screen time for 1 hour a day
I don't know that I would call that subtle.
Love the app, congrats! I will start using it this week and see how it goes.

My only gripe with it is related with responsiveness to touch: if I tap on '+' or on 'View all habits', the button doesn't highlight. This can feel frustrating if the next screen takes a while to load and you don't know if your touch was valid or not. This problem happens with almost every button in the app.
On the other hand Google provides browser extensions that lets you opt-out from advertising cookies and Google Analytics tracking. These are not vastly popular though, each at around 100k installs for the Chrome version.

https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html

https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
Solar eclipse can be viewed safely via an iPhone and a shoe box here is how
I was just about to make that point myself: Even the military women talk trash about Ripley at first.

Have an upvote.
Diesels are not cleaner, but it's a complicated story because you have to factor in the process to make a car (and batteries in the case of hybrids and electrics), the fuel efficiency, the emissions given off and the longevity.

Diesels are, however, very fuel efficient and can last a long time. But they give off small particulate matter that gets lodged into people's lungs, shaving days, months and years off people's lives. I don't know how clean clean diesel cars are, but every time I see black soot coming out of a truck, I want to punch someone. That's going straight into our lungs.
The technology doesn't attract people - people attract people. Microsoft have yet again missed the basic concept of social networking. Is it really that difficult to figure out?

As so.cl has no users, it can hardly be considered a social network. So far it's just a shell of a website with nothing to attract anyone into it.

If you wanna break into the social networking industry, stop creating useless technology and start creating communities.
Great primer on web caching.
Heh, The overall sentiment in irc freenode #python is a general dislike of ipython and a recommendation of bypthon as a good alternative to the REPL. It's a pretty light alternative but I still generally use ipython these days.
Ending your list with etc. undermines your point. With this header set, can my site track what pages a user views to recommend pages to him later? Can compliant sites keep stats for engineering purposes? Grandparent is dead-on - it's bad enough that this does not affect the behavior of bad actors, but if it isn't even clear what effect it will have on good ones, the false sense of security may be worse than nothing.
Ipad Video Lessons – Big Seller
This looks great! How does it work? Is it open source?
Really? I feel bad now, I had no idea. My opinion of him has changed :-)

Edit: wait, how do you know this? I've googled a bit but found nothing to suggest it. Whilst it definitely seems like it could be satirical, I wouldn't put it past the fashion industry.
As far as I can tell, this official extension for Chrome has been available since January of last year and supports the header: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.ca/2011/01/keep-your-opt-...
Twitter, for one: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/18/twitter_signs_do_not...
I do not think anyone in the forum but me read it that way (because it was a subtle powerplay). It grew out of good natured kidding around. It is hard to convey the exact context. Let's just say I was doped to the gills, in constant excruciating pain and I have a ribald sense of humor. So I went quite a long ways towards setting myself up for the challenge.
Does that somehow make it not sexist? You gave the history of it but the parent comment was not arguing history. I'm not sure what your comment has to do with the parent.
Ah, I see in carbocation's link now. It just seems odd to say they moved from d3/svg to canvas, because d3 is just a layer on top of canvas (or the dom), and if you look at their source (not chart.js, the minimized source on the website) it's full of calls to d3 still. Maybe more useful to OP to say that it was originally written in d3, then optimized.
I patched up the ones that were apparent, but I'm sure there's still some open.
There's no mention of FTP - is it possible to deploy to a server other than Heroku?
The iPad IDEs I've tried are all lacking an integrated FTP client which provides a decent workflow for web dev, if you provided this in worqshop I'd adopt it in a heartbeat!
People are comfortable when others in their class assume the chronology of traditional employment. In the office, nine to five Monday through Friday, drinks after work on Thirsty Thursday, see you on Monday again. That's called career stagnation and threatens no one, hence it's widely accepted.

The way out of stagnation is to develop methodologies and processes that take advantage of the inherent weaknesses of the stagnated. Rooming a bunch of guys together or maxing out on Red Bull isn't the answer. Finding smart, dedicated and talented people to work with and avoiding the bozos is.
Nope, our system is a write-heavy transactional one, and SQL Server can show you which query started your lock chains too so it's easy to resolve lock contention issues.
cuz there's good TV on during the week?
HN Policy Amendment: All Facebook announced weddings can be posted on HN using links to Facebook.

Disclosure: HN users who login to Facebook will be tracked according to Facebook's policies. This HN Policy Amendment does not imply that HN staff themselves will be logging in to Facebook.
If you work from home, I strongly suggest getting a DD-WRT router and block sites at that level. Then password protect the router and give the password to someone you trust.
Thanks! I really hate spammers :\
"First though, I do think in Aliens, that part of the mens' and the audience's enjoyment and celebration with Ripley that she ran that loader so well is because she is a woman, so in that respect, it is sexist (woman shows disbelieving men and audience)."

While I broadly agree with that analysis, I would point out that's a metanarrative analysis. In the context of the narrative itself I believe Mz's analysis is accurate. And you gotta start there. The metanarrative unavoidably has elements of the real world in it and the way it changes is with people choosing and accepting other narratives over time.

I say this because I think in general sometimes people can overanalyze things like this, and the danger there is that sufficient "analysis" can turn anything into anything else. (Which is the core fallacy of postmodernism in an information theory nutshell.) It is unavoidably a product of its time and culture, but irreducibly, it is merely what it is, as well. Too many people get so caught up in the former they forget the latter.
This will only be useful if governments enforce it. The US has included it for consideration in the US Privacy Bill of Rights[1] and the EU may enforce it as well[2]. But until there is some form of punishment for not complying with DNT it is essentially window dressing.

[1]http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/privacy-final....

[2]http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/article-29/docum...
Good call on week start dates. I'd agree with you there
Very happy for Sri Lanka!
did something similar, with some twists http://270rule.appspot.com no (!) usernames, is a bookmarklet to use on top of existing sites, and has a feed for those sites and activities
Chemical companies, Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home
well-meaning nice guys often deprive women of the chance to struggle, to prove themselves and so on. It is often heartbreaking to watch well meaning men make such mistakes.

I can usually tell, so this is confusing me.. is this post satirical? (Update: Seems not!) I'm a "well-meaning nice guy" to anyone, male, female or otherwise, who's not antagonizing me; I haven't appreciated that this may cause people problems, but different strokes, etc :-)
Lots of gold in this thread. The Chain app I use is not worth mentioning, but for habits I use this:

http://www.homeroutines.com/

I actually prefer its cheerful design and it has an iPad version. But the integrated Chain counting might convince me.
What sort of agreement did you have with him? Did you pay him or are you guys sharing profits?
Fair. I don't like the term either, but it was the OP's and I decided to use it. :)
Liking it a lot so far - but one suggestion: frequency options are good, but there is nothing available for >daily. Workaround is multiple items, I guess.
It is not intended as satire.

Not all well-meaning nice guys make such mistakes. But I have seen it. Maybe you are both well meaning and reasonably socially savvy?

Thanks.
Is Global Facebook Helping the World or Itself? | Web Technology Breaking News
So you'd rather spend 10 hours a week commuting inside SF?
"The average plumber makes as much as the average doctor" , really?

I assume somebody is using a very creative definition of one of those.
Only paranoid geeks refuse to enable Javascript when prompted. ;)

For awhile there I'd surf with JS off, but enable them when I get to a site I want to see.

Now though, every site seems to have JS as a requirement so I don't even bother. It was becoming a hassle.
When I saw ipython for the first time I was really excited but now I realize I never actually use it. Any thoughts about why it isn't appreciated?
If you schedule the first jubilee 50 years in the future, you neatly sidestep most of the sarcastic rejoinders.

And then people with money to loan out can factor the coming jubilee into their credit decisions.
No panic - it's still not something you would miss indoor.
On the other hand I wonder how useful would something like that be for monitoring big events (or just keeping an eye on police by some more paranoid civilians) - is there any information on how long can those work?
Yes, and I'd contend that there are far more "new" tech companies in the peninsula now than there ever were semiconductor and defense companies. There are certainly far more people here now than there were fifty years ago, and the big names in the peninsula are probably a bigger employer than the "old" tech.
Rules don't exist to for their own sake, they are an imperfect way of formalizing what would otherwise have to left to common sense. But sometimes, common sense obviously trumps the rules.

Incidentally, I suspect most bureaucracies emerge from a cargo-cultist/priest of a lost religion mentality where rules are enforced for their own sake without any insight or thought into what the rules were trying to achieve in the first place.
"His wife" or "his partner" may not imply ownership, but "his woman" most certainly does. Aside from all the cultural connotations, using the common noun "woman" instead of associating a relationship between them depersonalizes her.
When a joint enterprise accidentally injures a third party, generally all possible outcomes are fundamentally unjust. That's what makes tort law interesting.
You're just as likely to be murdered in San Francisco, and statistics really don't mean shit except scaring people like you. The number of people being murdered in drug violence and other crimes has a very negligible impact on the probability of a mid-twenties software developer getting murdered.

It's extremely amusing how much people worry about being killed by thugs in places they've never been, when they're far more likely to be killed by a dumbass texting on 580.
I cannot say enough about the express module. It brings a simple, yet powerful framework for Web and API development. If you are doing any serious API or Web delivery using Node, you will, at the least, be evaluating express.
My friend and I were debating this topic today. We both agree that ideally, a well rounded education in the arts and sciences is optimal. However, is it necessary for the skilled completion of many trades? I don't think so.

I think high school has started to fail as an educational mechanism.

Let's face it: There are many, many stupid people in the world who will never be that bright. Be it from biological or parental reasons, there are many who will not grasp intricate logic, higher math and philosophy, etc.

Also, many students are capable of beginning higher education in high school. Programming, engineering, even medical studies could be started in the teen years of the brightest students. But we're not fulfilling that potential at the moment.

tl;dr high school should be more challenging, and we should accept that not everyone should go to college.
Why don't we ask plumbers what they think of a college education? And how it feels to go through life without one.
Do wealthy plumbers want their kids to skip college to become wealthy plumbers?
Isn't pushing perks like 4-day work week,etc you do at your company the same thing you are talking about regarding trying to cash in on someones youth and optimism?
Similar to me.

In fact my hn activity is sporadic because I occasionally entirely block the site at the host file level.

I've now got myself a little app that blocks a blacklist site for a specified amount of time. I set this for 2-3 hour blocks, turn off email and get on with things. It's a bit crummy but it works OK.

I've never had push notifications on my phone.

I use RescueTime but I find it a bit after-the-event. As in, it tells me how bad I was in the prior week.

Ultimately, though, it takes self discipline, the same as any other worthwhile task like eating well, getting fit, or maintaining relationships and friendships.

If you find yourself mindlessly looking for distraction, I find it helps to stop and question yourself on what task it is you're trying to avoid, and then just get on and do that task.
Plumbers make a LOT of money. Source: just knowing plumbers.
Has he actually paid anyone with his deal yet? Just curious.
What if you try 1 post per 30 seconds ?
ipython provides more features but requires significantly more magic to do so which can have unintended side-effects e.g. by triggering stuff through introspection that the user didn't intend to trigger.
http://ipad.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ipad-keyboard-doc...
Check it again. It recently added a "Notebook" mode that you might find useful.
I'd like to see a reference for that statistic.

I don't discredit the statistic, but I think it's bit misleading, because we're not able to dig into the data - even just a bit.
BIN LADEN APPREHENDED ON THAMES IN LONDON.flv
Does the average plumber make as much as the average doctor? Some quick googling gives the average plumber salary as about 40K. [1] The same site will give you a bunch of doctor's salaries by specialty the lowest one of which seems to be about 170K for a general practitioner.

[1] http://www1.salary.com/Plumber-I-Salary.html
Simply put, the argument is that the the 'price' of price manipulation is one the market (read: the purveyors of the exchange who get to make the rules) are willing to allow in exchange for an orderly, stable market. IPOs are hectic times, and they want some stability while the dust settles.
I power through as quickly as possible using keyboard shortcuts, making quick decisions about whether each item is important enough to devote some small fraction of my life to. Will it help me work faster, understand something I've been wrestling with, solve a difficult problem?

This kind of approach reminds me of Richard Hamming's "You and your research" talk: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dahlin/bookshelf/hamming.html

"Under these circumstances it seems better to live a life in which you do important things (important in your eyes, of course) than to merely live out your life. No sense frittering away your life on things that will not even appear in the footnotes."
I've lived in 3 hacker houses (still living in one now), and it's been a nice place to live with like-minded individuals. It's equal parts fun and hard work.
In the UK the average for a plumber is about £26,000. But this includes London plumbers, and also includes plumbers with extra skills and certification for gas.

Pay for doctors is complex, because you're including FY1 and FY2 and registrars (a bunch of junior doctors) and also consultants and experienced consultants.

Here's a PDF, which appears to be undated.

(http://www.wwl.nhs.uk/library/foi/classes_of_info/whatwespen...)
SpaceX: Live... Launch of First Commercial Spacecraft to the ISS
Pardon my shallowness, but the bright green on white on the home page screenshots screams all over the rest of the page for me (in a bad voice). The pills below the screenshots are also hard to click with a trackpad.
The best example you can come up with is something which happened in an online forum? A fabricated, but relevant "real life" story would have been much more appropriate. Heck, a less-relevant, but real "real life" story would have been more appropriate. My issue is that, if this is the best example you can think of, it makes me think you have not encountered these situations in "real life"
what the FUCK is he talking about?

120k for a GP vs 40k for a plumber.

Sources:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/People_with_Jobs_as_Phys...

http://www1.salary.com/Plumber-I-salary.html

I really expect more intelligent comments from a man as accomplished as Thiel.
Read about it and spread the word: http://www.google-melange.com/ :)
Is there any evidence to support your worry?

Because there is ample evidence that good content was available through the internet and later the web, before it was permitted to be used as a commercial vehicle and long before the web became laden with cheap advertising.
In the context of the narrative itself ... And you gotta start there.

See, I disagree that it has to start there.

I love the movie, but I analyze it that Dan O'Bannon wrote a script in the 80s for an 80s crowd, and he knew that the audience and the purchasers of his script would love seeing a shapely Ellen Ripley in her feminine white panties one moment and in a masculine yellow loader the next showing all the military men she was their equal or better. It was a rah rah feminism moment, one of many you go grrl moments in cinema. (And O'Bannon also knew about Chekhov's gun and knew it would be good for the audience to introduce her talents with the loader early in the movie.)

So I see the internal narrative as a function of what scripts could be expected to sold and be successful in the 80s.

Similarly, Aliens can also be analyzed outside the narrative of the movie as a Vietnam War movie, and in the early 80s when it came out, that was a pretty big deal, especially since the movie was a science fiction movie, set in the future, about the Vietnam War.
Two Books in the Making
Pycon lightning talk about bpython:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
That's high, many internships are min wage or even unpaid.
the icon looks a lot like visual studio's if fact I thought it was a link to the windows phone marketplace or something :-p
You know in our case, we see node as something that is a little lower level and bare bones. That actually sped us up a bit. You get this, and if you want that - npm this.

You can extend to your heart's content with node on functionality - but you start with the bare minimum and build accordingly to your requirements. You aren't overwhelmed - you are presented with a basic set of building blocks, and when you cannot accomplish what you need to with the current set of blocks, you research the modules that meet those specific needs.

Think of it like building your own PHP stack from scratch from the source. Except with more of a dynamic perspective.

For example, standard crypto functions are not available in the base node, but installing the "crypto" module makes them available. Same for mysql, server pooling functions, clustering, and even a decent web/api "framework" (Express). You add as appropriate. you leave out what isn't needed.

Our team runs a huge PHP stack for all our apps, so it is a breath of fresh air to be faced with the notion that we are truly architecting our entire code platform, bottom up, vs just calling a bunch of pre-loaded functions. This also gives you greater visibility of the overall stack that your code is running under.