skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been in the Orfield labs anechoic chamber. I didn't feel too disturbed, but then I never got the chance to be in there alone -- some friends and I went together.

Steve's a great guy. He'll give you a little tour of everything going on at Orfield labs, but the price of admission is a $20 check to a local food-bank.

He told my friends and I a lot of interesting things. Like how corporate offices use subtle noise from the air-ducts to drown out coworkers' conversations; or how casinos use echoing plates to project the sound of a jackpot across the entire gaming floor.

I definitely recommend paying it a visit if you ever find yourself in Minneapolis.
That, as well as the story linked (which I read carefully), are really bad analogies, for what I think of obvious reasons.

I do think intent can matter at times. Perhaps what I'm more zeroing in on is that idea that I don't find saying you didn't mean to, when you repeatedly kill civilians in very large numbers, such that certain countries have a long history of being on the receiving end of American collateral damage, as an acceptable rational/excuse. (This last part is why I think you're examples are not particularly apt)

Your intent just stops mattering as much when the body count gets to a certain number and you show no signs of changing the behavior.
Say you are sorry for the name calling and then for the lying. I am willing to forgive you. I knew you would be back. More proof: http://www.guardian-silver.com/research/article/keith-moelle...
Apple should provide the ability to import "legacy users" (Cydia offers this feature, for the record, and it has come in very handy and made the decision to support it much easier for both developers and customers, so I'm not just talking out of my ass without knowing the ramifications of having such).
It used to bother me as well, now it is clear, i am not going to invest any more on Mac, seeing the system is going down the road after iOS.
Fedora 17 Installation guide
When Facebook goes down, the Internet barely blinks
I couldn't have phrased this better. Thanks ken!
I pasted in weakurl.com. Response: weakurl.com/2. Wouldn't it be shorter to just return the url? :D
Responsive design coming soon!
Forthcoming Book _Claims_ US Created Stuxnet ... Nothing confirmed here...
That is not the case. I have a couple of spaces I'm interested in, and will start prototyping in the next few weeks. But I don't have a concrete and fixed idea.

This blog post in not a CYA tactic but was triggered by the comment I read on Hacker News, and my belief that leaving to do one specific idea is in most cases the wrong way to do it.
Seems like the executive mandate is an "80% now" solution instead of waiting for perfection. At least they're thinking about the dissemination of information.
What can other communities learn from R's great plotting packages?
That "ideas are a dime a dozen" mantra upset a fair amount of people, especially combined with my assertion that I could easily brainstorm up good ideas in no time. I changed it (accurately asterisked) to "ideas are easy", which more accurately reflects what I think.
InstantWatcher.com shows you xref with other review sites.
Oh yes, I did mean the negative - thanks for the correction. Responded to your email too.
It's spreading like wildfire: http://startupjunkies.org/blog/2012/06/01/lightbank-whoshere...
Actually, no, they're not. They're tied at the waist. Governments antiquated technology acquisition schedules mean that govt cannot tie itself to Moore's law. Because currently government buys from an exclusive system rather than an inclusive one, it means the tech they do end up getting, often 18 months late, isn't very good, and is very hard to upgrade.

Thus a mandate that "all agencies should do x" with tech, before reforms in the acquisition arena create severe problems down the road, and only really benefit the contractors who make them.

By the time these Apis really see the light of day, we will be complaining about them.
Flights is a bit thin on, hotelfinder is better but on my iPad here it's got that typical clunky google UI feel - and to be fair they aren't a design or GUI strong company - but it's clear they are making steps to address it.

Good point - Angry birds is an excellent counter example and fair use case for GWT. It's not what I'd call a GUI app - I was more thinking Forms, Document interaction (word, excel, illustrator, photoshop).

I see a strong use case for Java on GWT, emscripten et al for apps like games that are a universe to themselves, using a very narrow surface area (canvas, ogl) of the browser application interface.

Where these abstractions fall down for me is the friction at every interface interchange. In java case that's callback friction (brievity matters to me), the heavy burden of types on variables versus values, a verbose and inarticulate typing system, and like C/C++ and many Algol derivatives a complete paucity of expressive Literals for expressing all data types that can be modelled by the type system.
How about just linking to the movies themselves if they are available on Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Lovefilm, iTunes or VUDU instead then?
I should have been more clear. That's the general logic for mazes where both the entrance and exit are on the outer edge.
Lessons Learnt from failing to launch a startup
As far as I can see, the two concepts have no bearing on each other whatsoever, but in any case, I can't help you to understand how something doesn't imply something else. You're going to have to justify how it does imply that. You can start by defining "situational" and "relative".
"Nom" is the Latin root for "name" in pretty much every European language (Nom in French, Nome in Italian, Nombre in Spanish, etc.) and a villa is an upper class country house, so together, it's "Naming House".
That version will run into walls, turn left when it shouldn't, etc.
- Custom wrapper around MySQLi, which doesn't support parametrized queries
- No separation of Model, View and Controller (in 10 lines, there's SQL, HTML, JS, PHP and if you get lucky, PHP generating JS or piecing together HTML)
- Their idea of IRC integration is to write a bot in PHP, where different pages send it raw IRC commands to execute
- is_numeric used for most SQL injection checks
- User information stored in two tables (users_main, users_info), for no apparent reason
- About 1/3 of the code is in a file named script_start.php, which defines a mess of global variables and functions
- They store PHP-serialized data in MySQL TEXT fields
- They store pipe-separated data in MySQL TEXT fields

I could go on, but you get the idea.
Amazon Patents 'Electronic Gifting
"Fortunately Apple now only accepts sandboxed Mac apps, clarifying the situation: customers should buy Mac apps directly unless there’s a good reason not to."

This article seems heavily biased towards the app developer's interests. Is it really better/safer for everyday customers to use non-sandboxed apps?
Hm, interesting thought. One thing we have thought a lot about is a reminder function based off of tags — i.e., you set anything tagged #todo to be sent to you every day, but anything tagged as #ideas sent every month. What do you think?
Of course, the more popular language, the higher the value. $200k for a clojure IDE is certainly overvalued for the number of people using it, but $300k is way undervalued for python. Not sure about javascript; obviously it's popular, but it's unclear whether this ide supports anything but niche (non-browser) use.
Show HN: Front page redesign to make room for ask, show, jobs and new posts
It is strange to try to notice the subtle changes of an algorithm that tries to minimise visual change as much as possible.
From your comment history, you sound very sour and jaded. I do not envy you.

If reading HN (and commenting on this kind of submission) makes you unhappy, why don't you just stop and focus on the things that make you happy?
This is an excellent idea, you should definately work on this some more. It has a lot of appeal because it is social and creative too. It also brings back memories for me, I loved to play with level editors for games in my younger years.

I think though that you should allow people to play a level without signing in.

The gameplay does feel a little slow and generic though, you should work on making that more fun and a little more polished. For a well polished 2d game have a look at Cavy Story.
D'oh, you're right; I started punching calculator buttons with 1100 f/s and turned it into meters somehow.

Point stands, though.
As mappu mentioned, I was inadvertently paraphrasing Alexander Stepanov, who said it better than I can:

“I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting—saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all.”

Most of my work has been in game dev and languages, so I may be biased, but the problems I encounter tend to be about 90% dataflow, constraint satisfaction, events, and logic programming, and 10% sequential/imperative code to string it all together. OOP (again, in the Java sense) can model the non-sequential parts, but it’s just sort of awkward and unpleasant.

“I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need multisorted algebras—families of interfaces that span multiple types.”

“I find OOP methodologically wrong. It starts with classes. It is as if mathematicians would start with axioms. You do not start with axioms—you start with proofs. Only when you have found a bunch of related proofs, can you come up with axioms. You end with axioms. The same thing is true in programming: you have to start with interesting algorithms. Only when you understand them well, can you come up with an interface that will let them work.”

You can’t come up with an interface until you know that it actually corresponds to anything. The defining feature of OOP is also its greatest weakness: that it bakes interfaces into datatypes. Modularity is crippled and change is prohibitively difficult, resulting in extensive workarounds (and a proliferation of design patterns).

But ultimately, programming is about what you create with it. We can argue about languages and paradigms all day, or we can just make cool stuff however works best for us.
In a way it did, since the OP mentions that Dell turns over its inventory every 10 days.
Good point, but taken to the extreme, if you listen to people too much they'll tell you they want a faster horse.

You have to combine the aspirational thinking of "let's build a self-driving car" with the day-to-day grind of actually building it. Without the first, you end up in the local maximum you describe, without the latter you land in the "talk is cheap" box.

My post is about the fact that you can in fact leave your job and go through a phase of prototyping one product after another, and deliberately testing each idea for not just how great it sounds but how buildable it is.
Gerard 't Hooft, the author of this page, is surely one of the smartest people alive, with a Nobel Prize in physics. I'm excited to see that he's set forth a course of study; I only got to study a little bit of physics while getting my CS degree, and it's great to have guidance on how to pick up where I left off.
Was just testing out this bookmarklet on the same page as the bookmarklet, but was surprised that this gem hasn't been submitted yet to HN. So here you go.
It's planned.
Siri? Doesn't Siri essentially aggregate Google's results directly? Also I'm not sure what user statistics on the service are but I don't know anyone who regularly uses Siri for anything other than to show people when asked about it.
Semi-related: One of my NAS disks had, for the past few months, made a horrible high-pitched noise every so often that kept rising in intensity and ended in a screeching halt, as from nails on a blackboard.

Today, I saw a RAID warning that a drive had died. I replaced it in a hurry, as an SSD died yesterday on my main computer and I didn't want to wait around for disaster to strike a third time, and booted the NAS up and waited for the array to resync.

Relieved, I thought "well, at least I'll never hear that horrible screeching sound again, now that the drive finally failed."

Half way through the thought, I hear a familiar "nnnnnnnnnggggggg"...

I still have no idea which disk is doing that, or how long it will last.
You must have skipped the "actively campaigning against my interests" bit. Why should I care about the rights of someone who tries to make sure I shouldn't have any? At that point, my view on their rights is something along the lines of "Fuck 'em".
Did you use an existing game engine to build this , or was it something custom?
OK. Maybe it should be another discussion but to me FP is a step backwards. Anyway I am glad to see you defending your position a bit.
There are different projects in the works by different trackers. Check back in a few months.
I would say if he really wanted just to help, he could of stopped after the first comment he left. That was him helping, the rest I'm not so sure about.
No, but that's next on my list! I'm familiar with at least one approach—identify borders shared by multiple features, simplify those independently, then stitch everything back together. I'm curious as to whether you can identify shared points and then use the average area of the associated triangles to prioritize removal.
Actually, we're planning on doing that for US visitors.

The rest of the world is way too much trouble to serve legally so far (it's not even consistent across providers, it's content-dependant..)
Chrome OSX. Nope.
spoiler!! 3 1 4 1
This seems quite relevant now: http://xkcd.com/927/

What will this bring? Well, the US govt has X agencies. The result of this decree will be that, within 12 months, all of the public will get to enjoy the thrills of having X incompatible web API's, one unique one per agency.
These are cultural vectors, and so the sovereign territory includes the Great Lakes. Though, come to think of it, I should have picked the physical vectors if I wanted to stick to the coastline paradox theme!
On the other hand, they say a story can't be considered true until it's received an official denial.
Just a small note here, but Coda 2 is for sale on Panic's website just like previous versions. After some consideration I went with the MAS-option because of iCloud-integration. Being able to easily sync your sites from your computer to your iPad sounded like a nice thing.

We'll see if I'll come to regret it in the future, but it would be nice if Apple allows app-developers who get crippled by future restrictions to offer their users a licensecode for the non-MAS-version as a replacement.
The line from the original paper is in section 3.3: "If its calculated area is less than that of the last point to be eliminated, use the latter's area instead. (This ensures that the current point cannot be eliminated without eliminating previously eliminated points.)"
Interestingly, movies.ioi is a relatively clean rails app.

Sure, we still have to refactor our TMDb client into a separate lib, stuff like that. But otherwise good clean MVC.
I can no longer edit my comment, but instead of:
"For your first startup, make something awesome but try to fly people to Mars."

I meant:
"For your first startup, make something awesome but don't try to fly people to Mars."
Samsung open sourced Galaxy S3's Android Ice Cream Sandwich
the client-side javascript is written from scratch -- so if there's any wonkiness with the physics (especially with the moving crates), it's my own fault. it probably would have been faster to use an existing engine (i'm sure there's many), but i wanted to take on the challenge myself.
So, a user setting would work then?
A/B testing is linear regression against a single binary variable. There are many better techniques. Multi-armed bandit is just one of them. A more direct comparison would be simply using a continuous independent variable, or at least one with more than two values. You can have more variables pretty easily, too.

Of course you get statistical significance with fewer observations if you have fewer variables to model. Although you'd get even significance with even fewer observations if you had a continuous independent variable. But more variables produces a higher r-squared. As in, you can explain more of the variation in your conversion rate.

The prevalence of A/B testing demonstrates a sad lack of statistics training. It's a problem in many science fields as well, especially biology.
I think it's more terrifying today. Who would have thought a small place like North Korea kill lots and lots of Americans? It may happen indirectly, via sharing nuke technology with Iran, who is buddy-buddy with Latin American countries, which may, by proxy, end up within striking distance of millions of Americans.
I wrote an implementation of this for this project:
http://vimeo.com/uuorld

It's MUCH harder if you want adjacent borders to line up w/o gaps. You have to find all shared verts, run the smoothing algo on them, do the same for the coastlines / islands and then put all the pieces back together. I think 10% of my code was cleaning dirty data (removing duplicate points, detecting and fixing self intersection) 80% of my code was breaking everything up and putting it back together and 10% was the Visvalingam / Whyatt algo.

The biggest time sink was dealing w/ messy data. Between countries, states, counties, zip codes, neighborhoods etc, we hit A LOT of crappy corner cases. If anyone else is endeavoring to do the same, contact me and I can probably save you a week of work.
thanks! the toolset is extremely bare-bones right now, somewhat in the spirit of "launch and iterate". we're trying to gauge what percentage of the population is interested in stage design (vs. just playing). as for the player logins, i want to keep an identity because the main value-add of our game is the player stats tracking and replay footage.
cave story is a huge inspiration, and i hope someday we can enable folks to build their own cave story-like experience.
Yes! Thanks a lot for the comment amirmansour. It certainly was the source of much controversy on here :-)

One interesting change from last time I started a company (in the nuclear winter of 08/09) is that angel and seed funding is much easier to come by. That leads to a situation where there are lots of companies in almost every interesting space. Thus being able to out-execute them becomes even more relevant.
Actually, that's just project management 101. The fact that it's government work doesn't make the steps to delivery any different than anywhere else, just the subject matter. Or, it shouldn't be any different -- though I know some claim otherwise.
> A better solution would be to have a way to indicate "this parameter needs to be this type".

If only there were some kind of concept of typing, perhaps enforced by the language and statically applied, which would eliminate this class of error entirely...boy, that would be helpful in larger systems.
That Stephen Few book is pretty much all you need, but you can also check out Edward Tufte's books, and Juice Analytics' white papers (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/).
>As is obvious to most on HN, requiring an API (as opposed to a CSV file release schedule, etc.) is fairly meaningless, and most definitely not a presidential-caliber dictate. Some agencies' data might be far better suited to publication in a CSV and posted on a web page, for example.

And for those cases, the agency can still justify why the CSV is better. There are always ways to get around the rules, see Section 508 rules for handicapped users.

>If a president could have a meaningful impact on this sort of thing, it would be in setting a high bar for the quality of information released by agencies. Any sort of requirement of this kind is completely absent from the announcement.

This is a step in the right direction, once the data is more accessible, the "users" (developers) can request for better data. The /DigitalStrategy page requirement is really good in my opinion and will make things simpler instead of the mishmash of sites buried in menus and behind authentication walls.

>So rather than being about transparency as it's being touted, the announcement is a celebration of high tech obfuscation. Soon the same sort of insulting, opaque, useless information spouted by officials in press conferences will be available via HTTP. This is at best a neutral day for democracy.

Whoever said this was about transparency in government? It's not about transparency per se.This is more about making information easier to access and find. In many cases agencies already have APIs, Webservices, data dumps, but they're really buried. How is making them more visible neutral?
It was useful when you were expecting a data call and you hear your aunt on the other end saying HELLO? WHAT IS THIS BEEPING? HELLO?
Did you bother reading the article? There's a slew of improvements listed that are mainly useful to users, like better integration with finder etc.
I don't disagree, but how do you define and identify "legacy users"? Most importantly from Apple's perspective, how do they properly identify "legacy users" who purchased apps from a vendor's site before the App Store launched, vs. users who purchased apps from a vendor's site after the App Store launched.

If Apple allowed vendors to import any user as a "legacy user", then that's a clear and supported way for vendors to get around Apple's 30% cut.
Framework Fight: Zurb Foundation vs. Twitter Bootstrap
SEEKING FREELANCER local / Los Angeles CA.

For a project in CodeIgniter, must be local
Aprox 20 hrs a week. Duration 2 months.
(pabajo@hotmail.com)
I would love to tell you what is wrOng with you but I am kind of busy
I'm with you on the 'I'm glad someone is moving in this direction' vein, but to me the "Enemies of software development today" are much broader than you suggest. I am pretty strongly of the view that the fundamental line between 'developer' and 'user' (aka. 'programming' and 'program') needs to be broken down.
And notably absent is the idea that there could ever be an advantage to sandboxing for the user. A glaring oversight that renders the one sided conclusion invalid.
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But... "better" than the other choices, which are only getting 1/10th the traffic. The amount of traffic sent to a choice should be a function of how good you currently think it is, and how much more data you need to be sufficiently certain about that choice. So choices that have insufficient data should get more traffic, and choices that already have sufficient data to be sure they're worse than some other choice should get very little traffic. How much traffic they should get depends on how certain you are of stationarity (is that a word?).
You need to do 1, 2, 3, and 4 regardless of where you are, yes, but my point was that each of those is larger (in scope or import) in the context of a large, long running government agency than in the context of a startup or small company.

Remember that this has to accommodate the agency in the worst situation. The alternative would be to give separate deadlines for each agency in the memo, but that may be hard to determine from the outside (after all, "what are you going to do, how, and when?" is the first thing he's asking for) and you still have to wait for the last one to have your "Hey, everyone, there's data! Have at!" press conference.
Seems like, if the President were interested in "now", they would have been working on this for going on 3.5 years, and would be actually publishing some APIs.