skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What constitutes 'users love'? It says (at this time) 4.5 stars across 891 Ratings, and prima facie 891 users seems pretty low ...
That's way too optimistic.
Apple to sell Nest Learning Thermostat
And... where and how did you draw such a conclusion?
MP3 and Video Converter | Free Online Converter for Your's Music and MP4 Files
I understand Jeff's motivation for writing his piece.

You mean that he's trying to revive his blog now that he's out of the stackexchange thing, building a readership that he can monetize in the future? Hence these sorts of confrontational, pablum entries that bizarrely make the front page of HN. I don't get it.

If these were usenet posts they would never, in a million years, see any attention.
You interpretation of his analogy is what he wants I think. If learning how to change your oil is like learning to install that new wifi dongle, then you should know how to do that. You certainly don't need code to do that. Similarly you don't need to be a mechanic to change oil.
That's a very sad post.

By that scale, Einstein's work was mostly lame, because hey, plenty of it is still theoretical. And he didn't cure polio did he?

And Steve Jobs wasn't accomplished, because the iPhone is just a toy, right? It doesn't cure cancer.

And the Wright Brothers. Well, I guess human flight could be subscribed to as being imperative to human survival. But really, humans were never meant to fly were they? They'd have wings otherwise, so how could flight be all that important? It's not like human flight cures AIDS or anything.
Come on, I'm just ignorant, not a fear monger, it really gave me the creeps in my ignorance.

I was not aware of any of the marvellous feats you mention. Thanks for the information.

I was merely wondering if a propelled launcher would be a harder safety problem than a non propelled one, but it seems that has already been solved also.

(This is in answer to nknight)
Show HN: Drapache - serve a dynamic website from your dropbox
The funny thing to me is how everyone swears that they only invest due to fundamentals, they absolutely aren't just gambling their money in the big slot machine and hoping to see three cherries come up instantly and coins pour into the tray.

And then when three cherries don't come up on the first spin, man, are they pissed off.
I too felt a lot of readers had the wrong reaction and mis-interpreted Jeff Attwood's original post.

I have a personal peeve for the desperate pivots of a piece to try to see what can stick. It's bad enough when an original author does it, but even worse when fans of the author did it.

His original piece was asinine. Perhaps intentionally, because its easy-to-refute nature saw it linked by the thousands, everyone lining up to take an easy hit. And now they'll link to this for followup points.
It's tough to know exactly what to point you to because you haven't suggested a specific use case you're looking to build for.
From the video, the `AreYouHuman' captcha strikes me as quite culture-specific. `Put the tools in toolbox', `make pancakes' -- some people will know what and how to, others will not.

Meanwhile, a simple bot, as demonstrated, achieves high success rate. Could also be improved with automated learning , using suitable AI library; such libraries are freely available for making games.

With both false negatives and false positives high, the captcha's either done for, or at least needs some serious tweaks.
You're right. I advocate that we take a page from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and replace all usage of "mother fucker" with "uncle fucker."
Here's how real people think about a hyped, flop of an IPO:

People don't like the feeling of being sold something for more than it's worth. We call that being "ripped off," and most folks don't take too kindly to it. I believe you described this as getting a "fair amount."

People also don't like the folks who rip off other people. It's kind of a dick move to rip someone off. Those folks tend to do quite well, yes. That's FB in this case, who as you note made out just swell.

People especially resent it when those guys get incredibly wealthy by ripping off millions of people.

> Facebook is obviously smart enough to think for the long term. I don't trust the financial machinery to do that.

I think we can all agree - there's nobody we can trust more than Facebook to rip us off properly.
900 ratings in two days isn't bad
I actually think the feature set seems really good. I saw it and immediately downloaded it. Unfortunately, I had to uninstall it not much later (from a desktop machine). It just seemed to screw up the browser.

If they can get the stability and performance up to snuff, I'd give it another shot.
CiviCRM (which appears to be Santorum's campaign tool) comes with a fundraising thermometer out of the box.
We are using Go at Torbit. We can write high level code and still get C-like performance. It gives us the rapid development of an interpreted language, with the stability and performance of a compiled language.
Oh, and we're hiring Go engineers too! http://torbit.com/jobs
btw why /usr? I get it that in unix legacy it started as the users folder, but won't this be confusing as hell for all people that have come to know it as unix system resources? Why not /users?
Yes, it is. On an absolute basis, the Facebook IPO resulted in the lowest 5-day return of any US IPO in the past century. The qualifier "largest" was used only because FB lost more capital in 5 days than the total market caps of the companies involved in the worst IPOs, so it is not the worst IPO on a relative basis. Even then, Facebook still ranks among the worst IPOs in the past decade.
Oh, so is the ARM support decent now? Last I read (probably too long ago) it wasn't very good.

I'm still using Lua in embedded projects. It's nice, nixio libs make is very nice and integrates with C ever so easily when needed.
I've got a five month old and I'm still learning how to do this. I also cook dinner most nights. I'm lucky if I get an hour on my side project a day.

Time when the spouse takes the child shopping with her is golden.

I agree with the other commenters that persistance is good (progress is going to be much slower than before kids) and that reducing the amount of time you spend on other things will help. Less TV, more carry out, etc.
Why does the captcha allow infinite retries?

And why it lets you keep trying once you solved it?

Not that any of that would really fix the captcha, you'd just need to improve the code accordingly.
Correction: Users love the Yahoo Axis iOS app
??? Who are the millions of people who got ripped off by Facebook?
I don't agree with that necessarily. As someone who used to scrape the web daily, I can tell you that most software doesn't have that level of sophistication...
I tend to agree with the need for "Meh". In order to make a good comparison, both sides need to be more similar. I mean, how can I compare a git diff to a line of css? Perhaps "Next" would sound nicer than "Meh", but the idea is the same. I'm not sold on the downvoting, however.
Where exactly have you lived that you've avoided knowledge of Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, the Space Shuttle, Skylab, Salyut, Mir, the International Space Station, and the thousands of observation, spy, communications, and scientific satellites that have been launched since Sputnik in 1957?
So a random gist from a lang on each side -- the real "my coding choice is better" metric

This is a lot of fun.
Though their method of distribution on desktop is not impressive/standard at all. I tried to install it, it downloaded me a .crx file. Now I know how to use it, but a normal user wouldn't. The extension is unavailable on Chrome Web Store and they do not use the right meta tags to allow for one click installation from their own site.
I don't understand many shareholder lawsuits. Especially when the lawsuits are robo-generated, eg once a stock's value crosses a threshold. It seems like unnecessary, unproductive overhead. Like anyone is guaranteed a profit.

As for Facebook, I'm ambivalent. Kinda like the housing bubble. Everyone with have a twit knew that prices were inflated. Most all the players were bad actors. And the people who choose to gamble, well, tough noogies.

But what I do get worked up about is fraud. If Facebook lied, like the mortgage brokers, lenders, foreclosure goons, etc, as in made false statements in their filings, equivalent to committing purjury, then throw that book at them. That's contract law. There's no way for an open market to function well if the players are allowed to lie about legal statements.

(Not that I think Facebook lied. Nor do I care; I'm not an investor. I'm just kinda amused that so many people were fleeced.)

(My snarky response about voters being stoopid is more about the undemocratic impulses of libertarian fruitcakes. People given high quality information make high quality decisions. The remedy for bad decisions is education and patience, not yanking people's rights.)
What's funny is FB still had a better week than DELL. Somehow that surprise just isn't worth talking about.
Rattlesnake bites kid near Lake Mary church
Google's fight against scam ads - by the numbers
No, actually I was poking fun at what is clearly a case of Big Co incompetence. They are throwing stones from a glass house.
Rethinking Harvard Business School For The Facebook Age
There was a story about a couple from Texas that loaded up with most of their personal wealth on Dell stock near its IPO point. Dell had IPO'd at a particularly low price point (so cheap, $0.05 / share, that you'd still have a 240 fold return today from that first year potentially), so it didn't take much to see huge wealth returned.

So as the stock kept going up, they kept leveraging up higher. They started from a few hundred thousand invested, ended up around $40+ million (Dell was a 1,000 bagger in ten years), but were carrying some insane leverage against it like $12 to $15 million at the peak. Never heard a follow up story, but they claimed they planned to just keep letting it ride and pushing the leverage up to boost returns - they had no concerns about a crash.
An Open Letter to ICANN on the TLD.js Movement
I just downloaded. It seems nice I guess. The search is neat, but not a killer feature for me.

I still prefer Atomic Browser, mainly for the full screen capability. That is not so important on the iPad, but it makes for a nicer experience on the iPhone.
What exactly are you writing and what do you see as the big improvements vs C in your day to day work?
I'm aware of many of the names you mention, but I haven't the slightest clue if they were reusable or had a reusable launcher.

And more to the point, I have no idea if the reusable capsule or launcher had an engine to drive it instead of using a parachute and letting it fall on the sea.

The only reusable launchers I'm aware of are the Space Shuttles, which look like to be driven similarly to a plane.

(answering nknight)
By "get traction on side projects" I'll go with the assumption that you mean "enough to quit your day job." (If that's not correct, then this advice may not apply).

Simple answer: save six to twelve months of living expenses from your day job so you can quit. Then you'll have plenty of time to make traction happen with a side project; and turn it into something real. Cut expenses as much as possible so you can build up your savings to the required level.

More complex answer. Compartmentalize your day job into the hours you put in there. Look at all other time as side project or freelance time. Get rid of all debt, if you have any. Getting out of debt is one of those liberating things that will make quitting your day job much easier. This second option is more time-consuming. You might find yourself taking on more responsibilities that you can't easily escape. Try to find a way to quit your day job sooner, rather than later; otherwise you may never quit.
As a father with 2 fairly young children, I can tell you from my experience that it will be extremely difficult. You will become very aware of your limited time availability, which allows you to be much more productive during the time that you do have.

In the end, there's only so many hours during the day. You have to limit what you can work on and carefully pick what the top priorities are. Focus on those intensely. Good luck!
I can say from experience that staying up late works for a while, but you'll eventually hit a wall and hate life. Now, if I have a side gig, I go to sleep almost as soon as my son is in bed (I say almost because you need to have some non-parent time). Then I wake up early, like 4am early. The benefit is you're fresh and hopefully have 2-3 hours before your oldest wakes up.

Of course when the baby arrives you can forget side gigs for about three months because it'll be madness. However it's only three months or so of crazyness, and they're only that small once so enjoy it! :)
"Now, I actually hope that telemarketers call me – it’s easy money."

Did he just opt-in on his own website?
Remove the cursing. It's really hard to get that sassy style of writing to work well and often, like in this case, it just looks unprofessional.

Plus, I don't get why you censor it. If you're going to say "fucking" then say "fucking". Don't get shy all of a sudden with a compromised version. If you feel you need to censor yourself, then don't say it at all.
If Google and Oracle made aeroplanes where would your sympathy lie then?
More detail for the politics side in my reply to lhnn, perhaps. My contention is that corporations are simply not designed to accomplish the same things as governments, and expecting them to do so is naive. But you said some other interesting stuff, so I'd rather ditch the politics and go back to space. So much ... quieter.

> I'll say that the fact that a private entity accomplished this feat is very significant exactly because it represents a step towards the democratization of space travel.

Buzzword alert! I catch your gist, though. SpaceX's accomplishments bring us closer to the idea of people being able to go to space "just cuz" - the ability to buy a ticket. Ok, agreed. But I'll still content that the enthusiasm displayed here and on reddit is far out of proportion. Even within the small arena of private, LEO spaceflight, this isn't the moment I would pick as the important one. SpaceX's first launch, maybe. Or the first commercial cargo in space. Or the first commercial human in space (yet to happen, I think?). But this? It doesn't make sense to me.
Again, I'm not disagreeing that exceptions tend to be more terse. Exceptions optimize for writability at the expense of readability. Reading linear code that uses if statements and loops is easier than code that uses try-catches. Especially trying to come up with all the ways control could jump from happy path code to error-handling code.

You tend not to be writing all 10 methods in a particular call chain at the same time. You will be writing a few methods that call each other inside a module. You paint this as a massive timesink, and I can assure you, it definitely is not.

Lazy programmers can also have catch-all exception handlers. I don't see how exceptions help make lazy programmers perform due diligence.

That being said, there is a place for exceptions. Truly exceptional conditions such as index out of bounds, or nil pointer dereference, or some internal precondition violated, should be treated in an exceptional manner. Go does this with panics, and panics are almost never caught as part of control-flow. They tend to be caught at the root of goroutines, logged, and the goroutine killed. The HTTP library, for instance, will catch panics in any goroutine it spawns, and write a 503.

I just find it odd that people treat commonplace things as exceptional. File open failed? Could not resolve hostname? Broken TCP connection? These aren't particularly exceptional things. They are probably not a result of a bug, and so should be handled by the programmer.
Maybe it is and the Bing team only uses Google to find the links. (lol) Actually didn't Microsoft force their employees to use only Microsoft products? Sometimes it's not fun to eat your own dogfood.
> many of the users only access the Internet via their mobile devices

Do you have a source for that? I'm finding it a little hard to believe, especially since getting a cheap computer + internet for two years is (much) less expensive than a phone + wireless. Granted, I'm in the US, which is probably very different from the demographics in Opera Mini's user base.
Let's create a JS Country - TLD.js
Exactly. He says only follow what you're passionate in. Most normal people I know aren't passionate about mathematics but they're forced to be competent.
If we taught mathematics like we taught computing, people would only ever use calculators and never see equations. They wouldn't know how to solve x = 5 + y and y = 2x + 1 or if solving it was even possible. Mathematics to them would be only what the calculator can do.

Think of all the problems you've had as a programmer.
Now think of how many of those could have been lessened if people had a better understanding of what's happening rather than trying to remember the incantation you just recited.

With this education they know when a task should be automated and they know when a task can't be (at least easily) accomplished by a computer.
The computer is no longer magic to them.

Advances in many fields have come by harnessing the power that computing provides.
Do we really want to see a future where people still think computers are magic?
I'm amazed the article didn't mention the lawsuits that are being filed against the lead underwriters Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc; according to the claims, some institutional investors got insider info that presumably leaked through the "Chinese wall" that FB was ill-positioned to take advantage of growing mobile ad views and thus would have to lower its earnings guidance for the next quarter.

Then again, the SEC and practically all government agencies are revolving doors with big business so I wouldn't be surprised that all they get is a slap on the wrist.
Recap of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012
with @imageThink images
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Seems like a nice fix for many cases, though it would parse emails like matt@xyz.com into m.t@xyz.com

Separately, it seems like putting your email into an image is the obfuscate it against spam scrapers who can use tactics like this
Drones over US to get weaponized – so far, non-lethally
The Tragedy of Facebook: How Wall Street Robbed Main Street America
I appreciated his sharing the email from the attorney/CPA. Now I know there are others out there like me that enjoy computing more than counting money. We should start a recovering CPA support group.
But these attacks are on the memory... I suppose there is a risk of the machine being stolen while it's turned on?
The whole point of faking interest was to figure out who they were, so he could sue them for the first violation and any other violation that occurred after placement on the DNC list.
"I'm kind of sick of .ly domains" - Everyone ever
As a former kid who grew up with a dad whose first and greatest love was antique cars, I would first recommend against taking up a time-consuming hobby while having a full time job and raising kids. You have the opportunity to be a tremendous influence on a young person's life; Richard Feynman described this very eloquently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=695Flhmjmg4. Feynman would not have become Feynman without all the time he and his father spent together.

If you try to give up sleep, it will make you less alert around your kids. Aside from potentially exacerbating a dangerous situation should one occur, it will also make you less responsive to them, less playful, and less patient. They will eventually learn to just leave you alone -- even if that's not what you intend -- and that will weaken your bond with them and make them less communicative and more rebellious later on.

I hope this isn't coming across as a lecture or a moral crusade. I'm not implying anything about how you are as a father. Just that, if you have a full time job and two kids, then you really don't have the time left to spend on personal projects or freelancing without sacrificing some of your relationship with your kids. The time you spend on freelancing or personal projects could instead be spent reading to them, playing with them, doing cool science-y things with them, and those things are all really important.

If someone had discussed this with my father while I was still young, I might still have something to say to the man.
just email fb, tell them this guy is infringing your copyright, point them to its real home on the web and ask them to take it down. i runinto this w/ ebay and youtube and that approach always works for me. they may even have an official form or email for these complaints.
It's still incredibly error prone and just bad practice. It's a telltale sign of a bad developer because a good dev would instinctively just use var without thinking about it. Good devs may make a mistake here or there but this is clearly well beyond a forgotten var keyword.
How did this get any votes on Hacker News? Terribly written article with ridiculous link bait for a headline. I used to play Call of Duty quite a bit, and haven't gone on any mass murdering sprees recently. Oh wait, that guy is CRAZY. His video game playing habits have nothing to do with it.
Don't worry, I am sure they'll find a way to separate content slide-by-slide on a number of ad-ridden pages.
From my brief time playing around with the demo on the AreYouHuman page, it seems like the game is loaded onto the client side, and the javascript then initiates a callback to the php form indicating the results. Since the client has complete control over the javascript, it seems like it would be possible to simply send the server fake acknowledgement that the user has completed the game successfully. This seems fundamentally flawed and differs from regular captcha, where the client side has no awareness of right and wrong answers, and can't give immediate feedback. It simply acts an input to the server, which then judges the correctness, and if it isn't correct, returns a different problem, so a bot would have to start all over again.

So I think beating this captcha wouldn't require computer vision and stuff, simply sniffing the traffic on a successful run of the game and then replicating it appropriately later.

Also, how will this captcha system scale? They'll have to keep coming up with new sets of objects where some of them belong on a target and some don't.
Please verify your facts before bashing TeX.

Firstly, tab completion does not need those binaries. Zsh does similar tab completion for git (which uses 150 binaries) and hg (which uses one binary).

Now for TeX, pdfTeX has been around since, well, since the mid 90s. It has been part of the standard TeX distribution for more than 10 years. So for the last 10-15 years, TeX can directly produce PDF.

Similarly, xetex has been around since 2003-04 and luatex since 2007-08. With both of them, using OTF and TTF fonts is as simple as just saying `\setmainfont[Dejavu]` (using the simplefont module in ConTeXt or fontspec package in LaTeX). No need for converting to TFM files or anything.

The reason TeX is built like TeX is because when it started, postscript/pdf did not exist, Type1/TrueType/OpenType fonts did not exist, so TeX had to create its own formats. Over the years TeX has adapted to the new technology: you can easily use UTF-8 input (for text and math), ttf/otf fonts, opentype math fonts, use Lua to write macros, and get PDF output. You are objecting to the fact that TeX works hard to be backward compatible and carries around all the legacy programs so that documents written in 90s still compile easily today. If you don't want them, just don't install them (again this is more of a packing issue than anything else).