skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, I'll get a security cert + force ssl.
Many sockets have little bent-wire brackets that pop into those holes when the plug is fully inserted in order to help hold it in place.
Frankly, having used flot for http://burntbrunch.github.com/Silk-Rabbit-Hole/html/index.ht..., I wouldn't recommend it. It was a complete pain to do tooltips, since flot insists on drawing them with divs.

gRaphael looks a lot more customizable.
Android 4.0 - Fragmentation Continues For ICS
We have had an HN API for a while now: http://api.ihackernews.com/
After an hour-long detour through Wikipedia's various power plugs articles (shocking how many of them there are), I have to ask this: historical reasons aside, isn't there any kind of consensus on which is the "best" plug/socket system (in purely objective terms)? The comparison table in [2] would have us believe BS1363 has the most features, but surely, there must have been more improvements in plug design since that huge lump was designed in the 1940s?
Happy to help you test if you want. I'm in Adelaide.
I don't have a formal CS education, but most of the algorithms, i find that i can find analogies from whatever math i learnt back in school and college. I didn't major in math either. I just had a Mech. Engineering degree. One difference is that when i was in school, i ended up learning math in two different languages. My school used English, and in my free time i was bored enough to pick up and read my dad's classroom textbooks(in my mother tongue Tamil). Currently i work as a s/w Engineer and would agree that a full-time formal math training is not necessary in the current marketplace. OTOH, I also have moments, when i do wish i had seen a consequence a lot earlier, before expending so much effort. And think those would be reduced by a good math training.
While true that technology is either tech for tech's sake, or tech for something else's stake, I think the nchuhoai meant that technology is something much more than a means to an end, especially money.

It's applied mathematics that allows us to go deeper into analysis, gain deeper insights, and better control the variables and mechanisms invovled with it. See medicine, engineering, science, art, education, government, etc.

As a discipline though, I find it's associated with information, and can thus be 'in it' for itself in regards to practices, research, theory, and application. So I think it's both. Technology is an odd thing when you think about it.

I think that trying to classify it doesn't really matter though, as technology 'is', so we should focus on using it to make other things, and itself, better. I'm not against philosophical discussions though.
you could check the link immediately prior to accepting payment, and show a 'sorry, file is gone :-(' error page if not found.
So that thing that this very same site has insisted is in full development and is near ready to go... is going through a hiring round for devs to build the thing? Right.

I'm so sick of these articles. Ever since the Mac version came out this site and other Linux focused blogs have insisted Steam for Linux is minutes away. Every single time they've been proven wrong or miss their timeframe.

It probably is being built, but the last person who has legitimate up to date info on the project is Phoronix. They seem to just be making things up.
I also have a directory + file search. I haven't used Gumroad, so I'm not sure what it's control panel looks like.
Why hasn't it been eliminated or reformed by now?

Because the TSA has many other purposes that are beneficial to politicians:

- Now, there is someone to blame when the next terrorist attack happens (i.e. one poor TSA agent failed to detect something)

- TSA is a jobs program.

- Politicians can say show that something is being done to prevent airline attacks. It doesn't matter if it's effective.

The crimes against humanity perpetrated upon us with our own tax dollars should really be prosecuted with all vigor.

The problem with this is that may of the victims of these crimes are too stupid (EDIT: under-educated / let down by the schooling system) to vote for the right person (or at all) during elections.
I was born and raised in the US, so of course this seems upsetting and offensive to read.

BUT, as humiliating and degrading as the treatment of these girls may sound to western ears, you have to pull back and see that there is a larger picture and that these conditions were created in a context of constant threat of serious violence from all sides.

This is NOTHING like an employer asking you to log into your FB account. This is about a country preventing the murder of its citizens. Forcing you to expose all your potential secrets sends a pretty strong deterrent message to anyone who would try. Being extremely invasive at the airports and doing serious screening and interrogation is how Israel remains a relatively safe place to live for its citizens and guests.

As the woman from the embassy pointed out, there are a lot of things wrong with a lot of systems. At least this one was kind enough to allow a phone call and to quickly arrange safe passage home.
There is something odd about seeing the world's greatest software engineers show off their new string_to_int function.

Why are so many conversions needed? "they have many protocols that store ints as strings" why?
I read this through Instapaper four days after this was posted to HN, and your comment pinpoints exactly the thing I didn't like about the article.
I did top down starting at Lisp. I'm not unhappy with this choice, know assembly by now, and by the way, totally love C.
Perhaps this was a well-intentioned gesture, but it was carried out poorly. This reminded me of a great article on how to provide thoughtful and useful analysis. Perhaps read that instead:

"This is What Real Analysis Looks Like"

http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-...
The idea of instant scalability is somewhat flawed. James Golick does a pretty good job of explaining why here:

http://jamesgolick.com/2010/10/27/we-are-experiencing-too-mu...
Google Engineer Responds to ticket concerning ICS Translate3d performance
So what? The point of the TSA isn't to stop suspicious people from travelling. It's ostensibly to stop people blowing up or hijacking planes.
This API is extremely unreliable and has a great deal of functionality missing as well (commenting, voting). The original developer is also no longer maintaining it. I tried to build an Hacker News app using it some time ago and abandoned the idea very quickly.

Hacker News needs a real API.
Updated:

- Changed the graph to a log scale

- Added the ability to compare multiple stories from the list, you can also query them directly in the url like: http://hnrankings.info/4055256,4056649/

- Added timestamp to the tooltip

A search feature and some long term stats are next on my list
Alternate Futures and Promises for Clojure
Forgive me for being skeptical, but it seems to me that CoffeeScript is going the way of Lisp: a language by hackers for hackers, with way too many incompatible implementations because each implementer has their own pet features that must be included.
downvoting is just as much a problem with fools as well. A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed. Mention Microsoft on slashdot you'll get downvoted, period. Mention VisualBasic on any tech forum you'll get downvotes regardless of the point you're trying to make.

Eventually you learn to stop trying to present alternative points of view and just go with the flow or leave because the "fools" are now in charge of the downvoting.
Good idea, I'll look into it. Thanks!
I think Heroku is a great tradeoff for brand-new startups that are cash-strapped and also have no sysadmin capabilities.

Buying your own hardware - or using a blank VM provided by a VPS company - and setting them up immediately puts you in sysadmin mode from day one. New apache vulnerability? Your problem. Operating system upgrade? That's you, too.

What about security? Do you know all the ways that bad people can get into your system? How do you lock it down? Do you know how to properly configure the firewall?

What about a hardware failure? Now you're running back and forth from Fry's to your datacenter. Or in a VPS - you're going to have downtime while your provider moves your VM to another box. Depending on the scale of the outage, you could be down for a long time. Ugh.

Yes, Heroku is more expensive than your own hardware. So are tons of other VPS/VM hosting facilities out there.

Personally, I also really like RailsMachine. They built something called Moonshine (https://github.com/railsmachine/moonshine) that uses Puppet and Ubuntu to spin up properly configured, locked-down servers at the drop of a hat. I'd try something like that before managing my own infrastructure as an early-stage startup.

Some things are better outsourced; as a startup your most valuable currency is not a few hundred dollars per month - but your time. Wasting it playing sysadmin isn't worth the cost.
Phoronix seems to be playing a kind of Pascal's wager here. There is no way that it can be definitively proven that Steam will never arrive for the Linux desktop, but if it does then they can feel smug satisfaction that they knew all along and nobody believed them.
The tension between maintaining the original quality and growing the size of the community by several orders of magnitude is, in my opinion, an unsolvable problem.

No amount of arrow-clicking, ignore list or banning can solve this.

The easiest way to control the quality of the community is to control its growth. Pay-wall, invites, etc. will all be vastly more useful than after-the-fact approaches.

When the barbarians are in the walls, you've already lost.
Thanks, good catch. Something weird happened with memcached when I resized the server. Restarting the service fixed it
Take this for the anecdotal account and speculation that it is.

My father loves his Vista/Windows 7 gadgets - and that's what I see as the big idea behind Metro on Windows. Microsoft has been pushing this kind of approach for a long time (since 1999 with HTA's).

I suspect that they've got user data to show that adding a sandbox around these will make sense in the long run.

As for flopping, it depends on whether you mean in the press or in enterprise. I expect Metro Apps to be hugely successful in the workplace over the long term - Microsoft has a single toolchain which will work from cloud to desktop to mobile - there's going to be demand for those skills.

To put it another way, if Metro apps get 10% acceptance in the Windows community that's a bigger market than Linux and perhaps OSX.
The latest version of Chrome dev (21.0.1155.2 dev-m) does not require an app-specific password - it works with the OTP if you have it enabled, but at least for me the sync is broken at this point.
BlogPostTitle
The original intent of this app was not HN. It was smaller datasets like govt, public service and transit sites which generally don't have any APIs.
Reddit has some siloing as well, but they don't prohibit memes, which is why the content looks the way it does.

Reddit hardly prohibits anything. Individual subreddits do filter a lot of content, including memes.

This doesn't really fix everything, though. Problems still arise, and things still get out of hand from time to time. There was some community drama on the front page today...

And it goes the other direction, too. One of the most strictly moderated subreddits, AskScience[1], is about as dry as it gets. I don't know if I'd call that group a "community".

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience
You just made me realize how much my "web annoyance" factor has actually gone down since I installed ad blockers and don't have to see those "with one weird trick" ads anymore. They're really the worst of the worst IMO. (But I am glad that you were able to legitimately repurpose the phrase in this case.)

I'd love to see the article you mentioned, but I shudder to think of the search results were I to go looking for it. ;)
You said: Actually it does [mean he's wrong] because it is upon that logical fallacy that the counter argument is entirely built upon

Wrong is the wrong word :)

What you're looking for is "invalid". An argument is valid if and only if the conclusion follows from the premises. In other words, if the premises are true then it cannot be the case that the conclusion is false. Since a logical fallacy adds nothing to an argument, the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Since the conclusion can therefore be false, even if the logical fallacy is true, the argument is labeled invalid.

Just for completeness... A more strict standard is soundness. An argument is sound if and only if the argument is valid and the premises are true. If an argument is sound, then the conclusion is necessarily true. Obviously, the argument invoking a logical fallacy as its premise is unsound because it is invalid.

It is also perfectly possible for the conclusion to be true even though the argument itself is invalid and unsound.

If you still would like to apply the label "wrong" to it, then I'd say, "The argument is wrong, even though your conclusion happens to be true."

(Note: I can't see the post that started all of this off as it has been deleted, so I'm not making any comment on the truthiness of his/her conclusion)
You still need two slots, unless all of your appliances happen to rest on copper stakes hammered into the ground.
Death of RIM
This article would be better if it were properly titled: "The Cloud is Not For Me".

The anecdote provided here – about a specific app with a specific architecture and a specific load profile, deployed by specific employees with specific skills at a specific company with a specific budget, a specific revenue model, and a specific schedule – is fine as anecdotes go, but you can't draw a general conclusion from it. Change any of those specifics and the conclusion may be entirely different.
This has interesting implications to the recent discussions about A/B testing and Multi-armed bandit algorithms.

Assuming double blind tests are akin to A/B testing, at what point was the trial stopped? Was it stopped before there was statistical significance?

Or, are there differences in how double blind tests are done than how A/B testing is done in software and websites?
Right you are -- I misspoke there. Like you, I opted MAS for Coda 2 for iCloud -- especially since I imagine that'll come in handy for Diet Coda in the future.
The Earth prong is longer!!

> Most of the time the floor is a pretty terrible conductor, so most of the time the hazard is small.

The article doesn't mention the fact that a human standing on a wooden floor in rubber boots acts as a capacitor if s/he sticks a finger into a socket. The charge (or perhaps discharge?) can be fatal.
Hello Robert,

As an avid music fan and a self-taught web-developer/designer) I've been having thoughts of building something similar to SoundCloud/YouTube integration for a while now (since the end of 2010 already, to be honest). However, it was just recently I came to a conclusion that it could be worth building, since Spotify, Rdio nor any other music streaming service doesn't seem to moving in this direction. The service should probably have to include Dropbox integration and "collaborative listening" as well in order to gain some kind of competitive edge.

Anyhow: is it okay to email you the design ideas I have so far?

- Andrus
I was part of a team who have attempted to solve this problem before: http://anomos.info

It is a very, very hard challenge, and I wish them luck.
Apps Aiming for Sharing Within Boundaries
or have some capacitance of their own.
A ⊢ B is invalid (without any other premises) but proves nothing about the value of B.

Indeed even if we have

A → B, A ⊢ B and can show that the initial premise is false (which reduces then to the above) we still can't say that the assertion of B [being true] is incorrect only that the logic is unsound.

In traditional style:

All men are Greek, Aristotle is a man ∴ Aristotle is Greek

Despite the premise being provably false (under ordinary interpretation), thus the argument being unsound, the truth of the conclusion is nonetheless still possible and indeed in this case there has been an Aristotle that is/was Greek.

Bringing it back to the current question the ancestor comment claimed something along the lines of (hard to check because it's deleted and in any case I'm paraphrasing):

Terrorists are deterred by airport security checks, TSA provide such security checks ∴ terrorists were deterred

Despite the premise being unclear and thus the logic lacking in rigour nonetheless it is still possible that indeed terrorists were deterred by the TSA.
Jonathan Blow: The Depth Jam - four-day intensive design retreat
This is entirely that false belief I was trying to point out here. I'm not an operations guy, I'm an engineer. I spent a few hours a day for a few days and came up with replayable, fully-configured systems. If this were a full-time gig, I'd have had that done in the first 24 hours.

It's not hard to configure services in this day and age. The internet is a wonderful resource for every problem you can ever imagine, and with things like Chef and Puppet becoming so mainstream, you can piggyback off of the work of many other, much more versed players in the game.
But FAA security wouldn't exactly fix any of the problems in your scenario, except as far as they are consolidated and perhaps more accountable to their employers...
I tanked at maths at school. I have no formal education after school. I don't know how or when I learnt recursion, but learn it I did. There are a few other things I learnt since then, like breadth- and depth-first tree traversals, shortest paths and so on. A lot I learnt from examples I found online. A lot of it I figured out myself. I can't even articulate how I do a lot of the things I do, but I do them. And they work.

That said, a lot of the higher-level stuff I learnt the hard way, like the difference between tiers and layers. That's abstraction. And it's why I disagree with Keith's post in general, and this comment in particular:

"...mathematics was the only subject that gave them that experience..."

I don't need maths for 99% of what I write.

[Edit] I don't dispute that I'm doing it (mathematics). I do dispute that an expensive maths education is a requisite for good code.

Good of course is an interesting word - there's a difference between the best architecture, the right architecture, and a successful architecture. All can be termed as being "good" architectures, but no amount of maths is going to teach you the difference.
For that, you might want to visit the Perimeter Institute archive to see Bill Phillips' lecture Time and Einstein in the 20th Century: The Coolest Stuff in the Universe[1].

[1] http://pirsa.org/08060002/
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2010/12/16/debunking-google-group...
Addressing afhof's comments...

1 & 2. I don't see any reason to believe there will ever be a new machine with non-power-of-two word size, and I'm doubtful that there are even any historical post-standardization C implementations like that. Certainly Linux, which makes much bigger assumptions about word size and the relationship of types, will never support such hypothetical systems. Generality is good if it buys you anything practical, but my approach has been to avoid excess generality unless it has a practical benefit. This approach has been very beneficial in the dynamic linker, wherein assuming that things that are the same on real-world archs actually are the same, the amount of per-arch code to maintain is only some 30 lines (which might grow to 60-100 once TLS is supported), as opposed to many hundreds or even thousands in other implementations.

At this point, musl does not have official documentation/manual. When it does, these sorts of requirements as well as all the implementation documentation required by ISO C and POSIX will be documented.

3. The casts are all necessary (C does not define implicit conversions between pointer types) and correct. Casting to (void *) rather than an explicit type is my preference because it reduces duplication of the type in multiple places, but in any case this is purely a stylistic matter and has nothing to do with the generated code or correctness.

4. The ONES macro was leftover from other files on which this code was based (strchr and strcpy). Obviously it's not needed in memcpy which copies a fixed number of bytes without searching for any terminator character, so it could/should be removed. Thanks for catching this.
I agree that it's conceptually nice to support non-power of two word sizes, but how often do those come up these days in practice? If none of the architectures they're targeting actually have such a word size, it seems like it might be a useful simplifying assumption.
I friend of mine got his Gmail deactivated (as you know, without any explanation or means to dispute it). With it, hundreds of purchased Android apps got lost as well. As there isn't much you can do, after a week, he created a new account and had to repurchase most of the Android apps and switch all his accounts to it. Some services require access to your old email, so, he had to recreate some of those as well.
How much does Heroku actually cost? I have the impression that its a ripoff if you need a few databases. Like you could get a Linode or Rackspace for $20 or $10 a month or you could get Heroku set up with a few "addons" and get jacked.

Even for Linode or Rackspace though, I think that there is still room for much better prices for larger instances though for sure.

Also, if you don't want to set up the VPS, Linode has StackScripts, or (shameless plug), if you are into Node.js, I am only charging about $1.85 more per month than Rackspace for a VPS with my image that already has MongoDB, nginx and redis setup. http://cure.willsave.me
Great explanation! Just one small nitpick: IQ is not "normally distributed for the most part", it's fitted to the normal curve by definition.
I've disabled the page file on all my systems since I had more than 128 MB RAM. Increased performance every time. System has never crashed, individual programs rarely do since Windows is pretty good about warning you. A funny thing I noticed on my first XP box (256 mb): whenever I ran out of memory, Winamp got killed. Don't know why, but it was no coincidence - I've reproduced this a hundred times, showing it to friends, etc. there was no memory leak in Winamp - it's memory usage was constant. Maybe the system figured out it had no files open in write mode, so killing it would be harmless. Anyone heard of something like this or have another explanation? Windows killed user processes in reversed alphabetical order?! :)

tl;dr; determine peak usage, install twice the memory, DISABLE virtual memory, profit!
This brings great hope to all affected and I hope it gets approved and helps the people that have not gone through chemo yet, as stated in the article.
Changing game credits to airmiles
If you're too proud to be a part of an online community where memes are used then I'm afraid you're going to live quite a lonely existence.

Also, since you literally are new here (account less than 3 months old), please check the guidelines:

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
JQuery and CSS3 New Impressive Tutorials
Love your responsiveness - thank you.

Some feedback: the graph no longer fits on my screen vertically - the bottom gets lost. Granted, I don't have a huge screen here, but the previous version fitted nicely.

Added in edit: I see you've fixed that now - thanks.