skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have downmodded and flagged you. Derogatory slurs are not part of civil discussion.

In response to the inevitable response of it just being a joke or a reference, I submit three things: 1) jokes do not come across well on internet forums, as tone is lost and we lack the familiarity that friends have where we can easier infer intention; 2) even given that, it makes the level of discourse likely to decrease; and 3) the attitude of "can't you take a joke?" is one of privilege, that is, it is most frequently adopted by people who haven't been on receiving end of the kind of discrimination that sometimes comes packaged in with such words.
BLDGBLOG is a gold-mine for these kind of things.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/
Alright. Let's say a song is $1, a movie is $10 and a book is $10, and a song takes 3 minutes, a movie 200 minutes, and a book is 700 minutes (350 pages at 2 minutes a page). So the per minute cost is $.30, $.50, $.15. The average is (30+50+15/3) $.31. Not really sure how to factor games in there. $60 for 20 hours - that's $.05 a minute, which pulls the average way down.

I think a person will max out at 40 hours per week. That's 2400 minutes, which at $.30 is $80. The average is probably going to be closer to 10-20 hours - $20-40 per week.

So we're talking $80-240 a month by this calculation.
See, I still disagree with you here. Forget 'graduate-level' anything - you're still thinking in terms of formal education and degrees. Compete on hustle, moxie, other initiative - create your own life/job/work/etc - people will find you. Make a name for yourself doing something.

I know, this all sounds airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky, but it's largely true. Many employers are still going to be impressed more with hustle than with degrees on paper. The ones that aren't - perhaps you don't want to work there anyway.

The world is very much who-you-know vs what-you-know, and getting out there networking with people is going to get you a better chance of work than fighting with 9 other degree-holding applicants filling out forms on monster.com.
HTML/JS is a native platform for Windows 8 isn't it? This is akin to porting to IE10.
This is exactly my point, though; being efficient at Vim is unlike using any other editor, and you've invested so much into gaining that muscle memory it's very, very hard to convince yourself that other tools are better. In some way, I am addicted to the efficiency and succinctness of Vim.
Eh, I'd really rather fund a non-abusive twitter clone than a "trying to be all things to all people" emailinotificatallistifederated whatnot.

There's an awful lot to be said for the focus of doing just one thing, well. I've never once thought to myself that the thing that Twitter really needed was complex ACL settings.
Here I feel that it's a lot more common to pay $20,000+ a year to have a professor read off a slide. Most professors I've had can't steer for shit. (Although I've had 2 philosophy professors who were very good at it! They are in the minority, unfortunately.)

You also have to keep in mind that colleges here will accept just about anyone (no matter how stupid) if they have the money to pay--from what I've heard, Europe's system is free for those who are smart enough to get in, and the entrance standards filter out a lot of the dumbasses who would otherwise just destroy the intellectual level of the class discussion.
"You should care because nobody else does"

Sure. It's a decent enough reason. But it seems born from an overly cynical thesis.

How about a better reason? Care because you want to. Make a conscious effort to give every stranger you encounter the benefit of the doubt. Some will prove you wrong, naturally. But until they do, they're presumed innocent.

It's actually pretty remarkable how much of a difference this approach can make in your daily life. People on HN like to talk about "expanding their luck surface area," and other terms of that nature. Well, being genuinely interested in other people is one of the better ways to do it.

Our lives are stressful. Our patience is thin. Our guard is up. All of that seems to come with the territory of modern life. But resolving to push that crap down, and treat other people respectfully, takes an enormous amount of strength. And it's a mark of good character.

Have something you stand for in life. Have a code. Make being a good, friendly person part of that code. This isn't corny. This is strong. This is badass. James Bond lives by a code. Batman lives by a code. See if you can rise to the challenge, and do the same.
Paved with Good Intentions
Show HN: Eligible API for 700+ Health Insurance Companies
You could listen to someone tell you what books are worth reading, or you could learn critical thinking by trying to work it out for yourself. In the real world, you often have to parse data from a variety of sources without much guidance from a higher authority as to what you should consider legitimate.

I'm not saying that college isn't helpful for some people--but it's certainly not the only way.
I strongly agree: the article comes across as an attempt to solidify an emotional division between different kinds of software developers, and that never brings out the best in humanity.

Most people with any programming talent can learn to write software idiomatically in different styles if they try; making out there are different teams you have to support just makes that more difficult, and for no good reason.
thanks for clarifying this. Being new to the US, I initially found it slightly strange when people would say that; but I've come to love the warmth and politeness that comes with it. Also, saying "Have a great weekend" usually makes the other person's face light up with happiness :)
It all depends on the person, and there's no way to tell without asking. If someone doesn't want to talk, it's quite easy to tell from their response to the question. If that's the case, you end the conversation there, and nobody cares.

Anecdotally, I have started many conversations with service people this way, and I'm not much of a talker. In fact, it's usually them telling me about how horribly things are going, and I just listen. It's interesting how often a perfect stranger will open up to you if you just show a little empathy.
You don't have to pontificate on semantics, you can just see the list of sites that receive the most takedown links:

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...

that list does correlate rather well with spammy content (stuffed links and lots of flash ads and popups), it just also happens to correlate well with sites you're looking for when you want a torrent. As long as they're still indexing these sites, they're probably still going to come up if you add "torrent" to your query, so I don't really see the problem.

The reality is, when most people are looking for a video, they are looking to find it on an official site, and not a streaming video site from china or a torrent site with 18 "download" buttons, none of which links to the actual torrent file download (it's in the plain text link). As long as they can still find the other content, you're still meeting everyone's needs and you've probably upped average searcher satisfaction.

Now, geographic restrictions on video playback would be a great search signal to incorporate (would googlebot start trying to play videostreams, though?). That shit is really annoying.
Coded messages in the control room as Mars Curiosity lands
Where was the argument that "I Can Haz Cheezeburger" is harmful? The argument is that they don't benefit from new copyright legislation, and any new legislation is likely to be a burden to them because they'd likely have to police their users more intensively. The list of signatures is from companies like these.

On the other hand, industries that rely on shipping an easily duplicable product with high up-front costs for development are likely to benefit from strong copyright enforcement. They are not on this list, in spite of being arguably more innovative.

Neither result is surprising, but saying "Entrepreneurs" and "innovators" are generally in support of less copyright legislation is disingenuous.
Same file in multiple views is actually possible but difficult to find: Under file you have to say 'duplicate in other view' (or something like that, I use Vim now).
I think he meant that everyone should care, not just that everyone should say the words.
I guess its really up to you whether you want to do it or not, but it is a pleasant attribute
Go read the first comments from a sixteen year old social outcast who just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time. It's that, but with Yegge as the pimply protagonist and American politics playing the role of Objectivism.
I tried, but to no avail. Even if you move Control, you're still chording and that can twist your hands into funny shapes. Not to mention that I never found a good solution for where to remap Meta to; it got to the point where just hitting M-x was really painful.
Yes, sorry, wrote it in a hurry.
That's some deep stuff. Let's go further...

If one gave sugar pills to 100 dreadfully depressed patients at their lowest point and claimed it would make their heart stop beating within a few hours. Would any of the patients actually die from believing it? And if an autopsy confirmed the dead patients died from heart failure would the death be ruled a murder, assisted suicide, or suicide?
Ridiculous emotionally-driven opinionated politicized tribalism is already all over the place in software development. Compared to the other engineering disciplines, programming doesn't even fit this title most of the time.

What he describes doesn't introduces anything new to current behaviours, American Politics are already everywhere. While it's a gross overestimation to place whole languages in buckets just like that, it doesn't mean things have to fall in one bucket only.

For the Mars Rover, you want mission critical batshit conservative programming practices. The JPL coding standards do the job perfectly for that. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got Joe's webpage.

I completely agree with you about the bad image of american politics and the incomplete one dimensional line view. However, I do believe software development practices can be classified, it just needs to be in a tree or a graph instead.

In order to stop the current meaningless fights over using/doing something or not, lines have to be drawn somewhere. People don't know what these lines are and the industry is plagued with projects having to live with the wrong decisions.

He clearly mentions it's not like american politics and I agree on that. It can be useful to actually educate the industry on what exists so they use the right tool for the right job, which currently only rarely happens.

It doesn't encourage "good enough" practices, it promotes knowing when to use what. He got the idea right, he only omitted to mention that these line can split multiple dimensions.
Meshworm Robot - recreating worm locomotion with muscle wire
Liked the video of them smashing the robots with a hammer at the end there. Seems to be a pretty durable mechanism.
Intellisense depends on the language. For C, C++ clang_complete is fantastic. For Javascript, Python, Ruby, there's also static analyzer based completion. IMHO Vim is pretty advanced there.
There really isn't enough information in that anecdotal retelling to make heads or tails of it, but from that limited information, I'd say that person probably just had a panic attack. Panic attacks cause a spike in blood pressure for most people, but for some people the opposite will sometimes happen. I used to have them from needles, and in high school I went to the ER for suspected meningitis. They had me hooked up to monitor my vitals, and when a nurse stuck me with an IV, the room suddenly filled up with panicking medical personnel because my blood pressure hit the floor.

So my guess would be the subject in question took a bunch of pills, freaked out and went to the ER, and then had a panic attack because they thought they were going to die.

But to answer your question, I think that if you can, by panicking, alter your blood pressure (up or down) enough to kill yourself, that just means you had some pretty messed up cardiovascular issues. You wouldn't call that "killing yourself by thought alone"; you'd call it "dying of cardiovascular disease".
Here's the protocol stacks http://public.ccsds.org/publications/default.aspx , here's source code for some higher layers https://ion.ocp.ohiou.edu/
App.net is Dreaming Small
They told me all of these things too, most of which I was already doing. Hover your wrists over your keyboard, elbows tucked in at your side, forearms should be parallel with the floor, eye level at the center of your screen, feet flat on the floor, lower legs perpendicular to the floor. But even after maintaining good typing posture for a while (and rearranging my workspace to be more ergo-friendly) the wrist pain didn't go away. It was gone in a week after I stopped using Emacs.
I know how to achieve it, (File > New view into file), it's just not as natural as jedit (You just open different views and the current open file defaults to opening in the new view too).

If there's a way to set this up in ST2, please feel free to comment!
Free mobile themes. Download free themes for mobile phones.
Sorry, but no. America's level of effective corporate taxation is at a historical low. Corporations used to shoulder more of the tax burden than individuals, now it's the other way around.

We need to keep the rate the same, but close a whole bunch of loopholes. Your expenses are already counted out before you pay the corporate tax.
>> it's anger about the fact that Twitter became a big company on the backs of these developers,

No, I disagree on this. This is not true. Remember, the developers wouldn't even care about developing for this platform if it wasn't big in the first place. Developers didn't make it big. Twitter became big, and developers came flocking in.
Dear Flask, Please Fix Your “Secure” Cookies
Ah I see.

I hate to sound like a sour grape, but if a Japanese engineer sees those phrases/words, they're likely to cringe a bit (granted, they're a really small part of your audience). Think about those T-shirts in Asia with the nonsensical English phrases and how native English speakers react to them -- that's the kind of reaction I personally had when seeing the phrases (but to a lesser degree than said shirts).
I hope this does not succeed. Elitism for social web sites is not the way to go.
It varies a bit by culture and establishment. I've run into plenty of coffee shop employees from non-chain stores who'll be happy to complain about their day if you inquire. Also got an unexpectedly long answer at a Trader Joe's checkout counter once, a whole story about a messed-up delivery resulting in a bunch of broken bottles, when I asked how he was doing.
What existing applications besides RSS readers? Who uses PubSub and Webfinger, and why would I want to use Atom/RSS for this type of service?

I don't see the point in this trying to be everything to everyone sort of deal.
In this case I think the snark would be accurate. I was surprised at how the snark , "What are you? Republican?" was tossed about at my former search company. Thematically there is power in labels, and Yegge goes out of his way to attach the 'bad' label to things he doesn't like. Not much different than 14 year old boys calling each other gay on game chat boards. Take a label that is offensive, associate it with something you don't like, paint people who like what you don't like with a label that they don't like. Class warfare at its most middle school.

There is a reasonable point, which is you can't argue with someone who doesn't share your definition of 'good' and 'bad'. But the labeling thing is unfortunate.
Upcoming announcement from Suitable Technologies (remote presence device)
And I still disagree with you here. It's not about me and my personal employment situation; specifically, because my situation can always be improved via a purely relative advancement that would have no net benefit if everyone did it (see: "Darwin the Market Whiz"). Also, generally, because I personally am doing decently right now: I damn well wanted to go back to academia and get a research degree, and I've lucked out to get into a damn fine research institution. I've had to turn down 1 offer to convert a a good contract gig to full-time and turn away four recruiters pursue that (not to mention previous interviews where I was told I was turned down because they saw that I truly fit in grad-school more than I fit in their team right this month). I'm also continuing my open-source/research project and working on a side-business idea in the meanwhile. But just because I'm ok doesn't mean everyone else is ok, once we dispose of the false assumption that I'm average.

The real problem here is that you have half a generation 18-22 year-olds coming of age, trying to leave their parents' care, and finding that there's basically no demand for their labor.

Millions of people can't all have more hustle, moxie, initiative, mojo, or whatever other nigh-meaningless abstract term we've chosen to convey "the capitalistic equivalent of sex-appeal", than each other. There has to be actual demand for labor to hire these people.

Conversely, even though I'm not average, an overall bad labor market affects me. The tech sector is "recession-proof", but nothing is Great Depression proof. An ultra-capitalist economy geared towards maximizing debts and rents for bankers, lobbyists and lawyers does, in fact, ripple out to the tech sector and affect hiring. For instance, it means that there are very few R&D labs in computing right now (though a friend of mine has been interviewing with R&D teams at Oracle and I'll be happy to have the connection!), lots of VC-funded start-ups, and much of the world's top technical and scientific talent ends up writing financial algorithms. Someone who wants to actually do hard-core technology like me finds himself really curiously starved for places to work, given how well the tech-sector is supposedly doing. Oh, and everyone is wondering when this latest start-up bubble will pop, especially after GroupOn, Facebook, and Zynga IPOs.
I notice the welcome message and action buttons on the home page are all jpeg images rather than text, which makes it harder for search engines to make a judgement about the content. (The text appears fuzzy as well.) As a developer of a crawler, is there a reason you found this to be beneficial?
Well, vim cannot syntax highlight markdown. Period.

There are multiple markdown syntax highlighting plugins, but none of them work most non-trivial markdown features (a paragraph indented by four spaces after a list item is a regular paragraph not a code block; extend the same analogy to multiple nested lists...).
If I understand it correctly, this is an EDI to JSON API? At 5c/call, it seems like one of the most expensive APIs out there but I'm guessing it does something that is very difficult to setup on your own. Reading the front-page, did not make it clear what is it that it really simplifies. And how can I as a developer (who might want to make a mobile app for the medical industry) make use of this service?
The best details are in the audio story - under 'listen to the story' at the top. I'm fascinated they had a series of announcements that indicated specific points in the landing sequence that were not publicly known, before they actually announced the landing, which had happened 10 seconds earlier.
Thats how I counted them too. Start off with cell in top left corner and count 4x4 (16). Then make a 2sq cell and see that you can fit 3 of these across by shifting one cell at a time to make 3x3 (9). Same with 3sq cells (4) and 4sq cells (1) as the total size. Adding the inner ones is straightforward from there.
Time Contributing Editor Fareed Zakaria Suspended Over Plagiarism
Basically, he seems quite right, give or take a bad example or two.

I think he made a mistake by trying to extend the liberal/conservative dichotomy from programmers to languages. His obsession with static typing versus dynamic typing (which he apparently sees as the universal Manichean struggle underlying every single programming question ever) causes him to label languages in a way that contradicts the way he labels programmers. This is especially apparent right now when many of his "liberal" languages (notably Perl 5, PHP, Python, Visual Basic, and Javascript) are safe, established, corporate-friendly languages that any timid Blub programmer would tackle without anxiety, while many of his "conservative" languages (notably Scala, Clojure, Erlang, ML, and Haskell) are widely considered alien, exotic, and high-risk (from both a project management standpoint and a career standpoint.)

Perhaps he sees no contradiction in conservative languages like Haskell appealing mostly to risk-tolerant programmers and risk-averse programmers feeling quite at home with liberal languages like Javascript, but I find it incoherent.
In the US at least, please stop analyzing these types of social interactions literally. The subtext is quite different. Basically, "Hi, how are you doing?" is the equivalent of "Hi, I'm being a pleasant person going through this standard cultural greeting." Expecting something more from this pattern shows a poor understanding of the culture.

Breaking out of this is easy. As other people have mentioned, simply departing from the script is effective. For example, you can follow-up "Hi, how are you doing?" with "How's your day been going?" or "It's pretty busy in here." There's also subtext here and it's basically "I'd like to engage in a conversation."

I'm not even sure how you ask a person how they're doing in a way that lets them know you mean it without sounding condescending.
Yeah I know and I cannot blame them. To be fair I wasn't looking things up in the dictionary, I do know all the words by heart. Of course I did manage to miss-remember 'PS:'.

It is of course a bit silly to add text 98% of readers cannot understand so I'll keep Japaneses out of future posts.
> If a language's designers came from camp A, yet the majority of users came from camp B, that does not mean the language is not strongly influenced by camp A.

To me the survey suggests that the division between camp A and camp B is immaterial to the decision to use the language. Obviously the designers think the language is worthwhile, otherwise they wouldn't have made it. Obviously the users think the language is worthwhile, otherwise they wouldn't use it.

Since both find value in the language, this political/conservative spectrum is about as valuable as judging physical fitness by hair color.
That highlight makes my eyes jump around the screen too much, it's bothersome.

As for the content, I don't think App.net is dreaming to hit 500m users. They're dreaming to hit a select few, intelligent users, to use their beautiful ecosystem of an API. I don't want them to dream big. If they were dreaming big, they'd cater to advertisers, which is exactly what they don't want.
Indeed. There's no incentive for rightsholders not to hedge their bets, and so even well-meaning user-generated content sites will suffer. Unless they're google properties, presumably.
We're not talking about your average data. We're talking about optimized data. Of course there's an overhead.

EDIT: removed specific type of data
Having lived the last 2 years in NYC and the previous 7 in CA I can say that high speed rail is the more valuable project. The water here is fine, and no one is suffering because there isn't a 3rd tunnel. But the transportation situation in California is archaic and frustrating.

Have you ever been trapped in traffic on the grapevine for 4 hours trying to get to/from LA? Or shelled out $300 for an hour flight to SFO? Its maddening.

I drink water out of the tap here in NYC and it tastes great.

California rail is a crisis, the water supply to NYC is not.
Hey man congrats to you and your team!

It's great to see some people from DCE doing cool things in New Delhi! Loving your success story! Good luck!
Did nobody tell him about http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/?