skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not so sure it's poor practice. Rich Hickey makes an excellent point about not confounding data and functions. And Javascript provides excellent structures for avoiding mutability altogether (if one wishes to) thanks to first-class functions. Javascript was always an amalgam of C-syntax, object-oriented "ideas", and functional "ideas". To "think with the language features" is to tie to together two disparate programming paradigms that in my opinion perform better independently than in combination. So I just happen to focus more on the functional aspects of Javascript (and CoffeeScript provides syntactic support to make this much easier).
One of the problems I think is that MS dictated specs too tightly. So basically there are about 10 versions of what's basically the same phone in different packaging, which really doesn't appeal to carriers much.
>It was thus difficult for Semmelweis to make a "scientific" case for why the lime worked

Aren't you supposed to regard empiricism above all else in science? While holding to that rule would force Semmelweis to alter his theory as well, the observation of the highly reduced mortality rates should have forced the medical powers that be to reconsider things also - the burden is on them to make a scientific case for why lime had nothing to do with the decreased mortality rates.

I agree there were probably other reasons they fired him, but I think that only helps Aaron's points.
Oh, it's goofy, no argument. The only way I'd be buying it is if my income were greater sufficient that it could be kept as a shiny toy. But, oh what a toy.
Fair enough, that is your opinion. But why point to a badly written smear-piece full of "ad hominem" attacks.

Write what exactly do you find wrong with such reasoning.

Or maybe read the other point of view and see if it maybe makes more sense than you originally though...
It seems bizarre, but it's just because they were part of different versions. StringBuffer was in Java 1.0, and StringBuilder was added in Java 1.5. If they were both part of the original Java libraries they would hopefully have been given better names. I suppose they could have called StringBuilder "UnSynchronizedStringBuffer" or "NotThreadSafeStringBuffer", but those are problematic on their own.

You have the same problems with Vector and ArrayList I guess, although since ArrayList was added as part of the collections libraries it makes a bit more sense.
The first person to bet against sub-prime mortgages
On the other hand, I expect that, under EU consumer law, that single "buy" word has dire consequences (on the ground that, when selling to consumers, the buyer should get what he expects to get, based on what was advertised)

I really would like to see that tested in court.
Oh, ok. Well I barely consider that meat anyway ;) And I'm with you, I wouldn't eat it either.
So, lets say I bought 100 CDs, ripped them, destroyed the CDs, and then somehow the RIAA says that I don't legally own those MP3s.

What happens?
Rethinking content and it's consumption in a digital era
Show HN: pry-rescue — workflow-optimized debugging for ruby
Semi OT, but I signed up for email alerts at the bottom of the previous article in this series, and haven't received an email since. Am I alone with this?
A comment I left on a LessWrong post in July might help people understand why it is such a problem:

The genome is the ultimate spaghetti code. I would not be at all surprised if some genes code for the direct opposite characteristics in the presence of other genes. It is going to take more than just running relatively simple correlation studies to untangle the functions of most genes. We are going to have to understand what proteins the genes code for and how the proteins work.

Edited for clarity, eliminated a couple of ambiguous pronouns.
Developing countries need initiatives like this one! The future of programming is in countries like Colombia, Brasil, Chile and Argentina that have millions of potencial great engineers!
Yup, thanks for the fix.
Right, but the different physical locations on the sensor have different spectral sensitivities due to the bayer CFA. Ideally, you'd have panchromatic pixels with no bayer pattern.
Ask HN: Anyone working with physical products and shipping logistics? 
Full disclosure: I'm a hustler...

Just wondering if there are many people here working on an MVP that has physical products that will need to be shipped and how that has played into costs and feasibility of your business.

I'm currently working through a primarily B2B concept that will have a heavy shipping component and I'm wondering if there are any good resources for learning about how to minimize costs and time as I'm getting going. Also just interested to hear of others failures and successes when dealing with physical products.
It is not evident that Semmelweis himself regarded empiricism above all else. Rather, it seems like Semmelweis made an empirical observation (death rates plummeted when attendants washed their hands in lime), but then jumped to a conclusion (lime was removing cadaverine particles) and fixated on that conclusion instead of of the observation. Convert the narrative (lossily) to modern science, and imagine someone far more focused on their journal article than on saving lives.

Semmelweis went "on tilt" with his hypothesis. Even after doctors adopted a regime of disinfecting hand washes, hospitals still saw a significant rate of childbed fever. Semmelweis demanded of the scientific establishment that they recognize cadaverine tissue as the cause, going so far as to suggest that tissues in the mother were occasionally being crushed during childbirth, and later becoming gangrene, and thus mothers were infecting themselves.

Again: my point isn't that Semmelweis didn't make an important discovery, or that the scientific establishment of the time didn't miss a critically important opportunity; my point is that there is more to the story than the missed opportunity of Semmelweis' detractors.

I don't much care about the injustice of Semmelweis losing his post at a hospital in the 1840s. I am, on the other hand, fascinated by how poor framing and communication, close-mindedness, and overall bloody-mindedness prevented Semmelweis himself from becoming the godfather of the germ theory of medicine.
I still believe in reading books and solidifying your fundamentals first before jumping into a big project. I've learned the hard way that just jumping into and try to figure out things as you don't understand does not work for everyone.
You echo the sense that I've gotten after a cursory look into the field.

What do you think are they key barriers limiting clinical demand for genomic data?
صور النافورة الراقصة في دبي
Anyone want to explain meta classes for me? Without knowing anything from the start, I would think that they are some subset of classes, maybe they inherit from some built-in classes in Python? I'm somewhat familiar with what classes are - a defined object that has certain characteristics that describe it and store information about it, as well as methods that can be used on that object. I always think of a rocketship class that might have a size, color, velocity, health, fuel, etc. and then have methods like accelerate, decelerate, rotate, shoot, etc. How do meta classes differ?
Oh I hadn't thought of that. I assume some calibration would be required for each device anyway, I wonder how hard it would be to detect and correct for this effect?
My guess is the same reason ArduSat uses phone hardware.

All the sensors one might want on a Satellite (motions sensors, cameras, magnetic field detection) are all built into phones now. Android (or more to the point Android's Linux kernel) is specifically compiled to be compatible with most of that hardware. So less work for them as opposed to using another version of Linux.
I'm a developer, a good one people say, but I'm not a computer scientist, or any kind of scientist, nor a mathematician (and my CS degree won't change that)

I get code, and I get design, but I didn't get that example without the (very interesting) simplified explanation

Bought the Kindle edition (price is very reasonable), will let you know what I think of it for grown ups...
Good idea but tough to scale!
Running correctly is natural/instinctual. Running poorly is what we are raised to do in crappy over cushioned shoes. Watch videos of barefoot kids running, their form is great
And I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family will be fighting Apple to transfer Britney Spears' last CD from grandpa's account

I realise young folk think they are immortal, but people don't just die from old age. And the problem is, digital media companies like Apple and Amazon don't implement a concept of a "household" account.

I am sure I don't live in the only household where the kids watch stuff from an iTunes library populated from the account of one parent. Granted if a parent died the kids' first thought would not be "Drat, no Backyardigans" but it is definitely an issue beyond bequeathing media that nobody else is interested in.

An iTunes library may very well be an asset worth hundreds of dollars to survivors. Even if you know each others' passwords, technically it is still illegal to keep using the dead person's account.
It's quite common for someone to be "on a roll" and have most of their blog posts do well on HN for a period of time. These things come and go a lot here. Authors eventually don't keep up the volume and/or quality or people tire of the topic.. but I can't think of anyone whose posts have done strongly on HN every time over the span of years except pg.
I find the basic c tutorials a nice refresher. Here is one from a few weeks back on memory addresses and pointers in c http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4399498 .
If you have a spare 100k "to be cool" then go for it. If I had that much money to throw around I'd get one as well. It's an awesome car.

That doesn't however just make it "my problem." There aren't very many people buying any of these cars, so I assume it's a problem for more than just me.

The point I'm trying to make, is that if I'm spending 50-100k on a car, I want it to solve "the driving problem." i.e. if I need to drive somewhere, I'd like to be able to do it. Whether I do it often or not is irrelevant. In my case I actually do do it quite frequently, but I suspect that many people don't buy these not because they actually do this once every month or two like I do, but because they want to be able to if they want or need to.

Maybe it's vacation, maybe it's seeing family, maybe it's an emergency. You need to go somewhere and you want to jump in the car and go there. With this you can't, and instead have to go spend several hundred extra dollars and a have a huge hassle of renting a car. No thank you.
The point is this, even if I'm the fastest coder on earth, write the most elegant software, quickly with very low bug rate, innovate and spread my creativity to the team, if I don't know things like the above, I probably won't be able to work for Google... or will ever be considered a "real" software engineer. Computer Science and Application Development overlap, but are not the same thing, and require at many times, different skills. A great front end developer can understand performance and write efficient code, regardless if he knows all the details of big O notation.
Cool, but why not just use a laptop then?
People have done it for a variety of purposes (natural image statistics, astronomy, etc). I can post references later. Problem is that it almost universally requires you to photograph a standard light source or a standard reflectance target under a standard illuminator. Or a monochromator. So you can calibrate your cheapy device but you need an expensive/scarce standard.

It's an interesting problem and I look forward to seeing how they solve it.
I'm not really asserting any sort of causal effect; I just thought it was interesting. Here's a bit more detail on the topic:

http://biasandbelief.pbworks.com/w/page/6537201/Is%20Bias%20...
While this, on its face, looks like good, morally sound advice, I worry about the practicality of it for a certain class of individuals.

The people I see in leadership positions are far more likely to be narcissistic sociopaths than reflective mediators.

If you're not in a position of power / individual freedom, this is excellent advice to make sure that you can, and are seen to, play nice with others. It will probably help your blood pressure and promotion prospects. I'm just not convinced that this strategy is one that leads to the top more often than brutal myopia and conceit.
That specific argument has been made a lot of times and overruled as many times. Don't be so naive, a world without copyright could perfectly work. It would just be very, very different. It's not like anyone wants just the complete abolition of copyright law to happen, and nothing else, obviously that wouldn't be very fair. You're misrepresenting the situation by depicting a world just like ours, with the single difference that you'd be free to steal the work of an author.

Think about an analogous situation. If you would have told people 40 years ago that a variant of Unix would be made, completely open-source and free, and with large companies working on it too, not just some hobbyists, would they have believed something like that is possible. And yet, Linux still exists. I know copyright is very relevant for Linux (GPL etc...) but I want to show that it is possible for completely other systems to develop than the traditional, where you pay for an (unexpirable) license on the copyrighted work which is kept completely proprietary with some fair use additions.

In any case, fixing copyright doesn't seem that hard. In a world with copyright, which is perfectly fine by the way, the term could be much much shorter. >70 years is a disaster. 7 years seems fair and I think it would vastly enrich our culture, for a very small price to the creators of original work. Obviously it's more complicated than that, but that seems like a good start.
New nanoparticle could save lives, limit brain damage
scan it across the spectrum

What kind of spatial resolution would be needed to get a good scan using a diffraction slit when moving the sensor across the spectrum?

Likewise, how wide is a typical slit when using razorblades?

If you had access to the unprocessed RGB data from the camera, wouldn't this provide the same information (for the visible spectrum) without needing to split the light?
Actually on Mac with a combination of alt/option key and the letter you should be able to right {} in cyrillic without switching layout. Search a little, and openthe "keyboard viewer" tool.
7.85″ iPad expected to debut in October, after next-gen iPhone
Good Design is Obvious: Or, Why I Hate the Hidden Email Link.
Even worse is that Big Media uses the very same misleading words in their advertisements, and that reinforces the consumer misconception of ownership.

How many times have you heard the announcer on a tv ad say "Own it on Blu-Ray or DVD now"? So much for truth in advertising.
Where happiness fails, existence is a mad and lamentable experiment
You can replace 'Semmelweis' and 'cadaverine' with 'Pons & Fleischmann' and 'fusion' and this comment still works.
awesome Meta Tool, how do you guys make this, where is HN's api documented?
I face this issue as well. I see the value in TDD but at the beginning of a project I often end up wasting a lot of time churning through articles on TDD and researching the documentation of various test frameworks because figuring out what I need to test before I start writing code never seems to click with me. I believe it's a skill that I simply need to improve but my progress is slow-going which often gets frustrating.
AOL Is About To Give Away $1.1 Billion To Shareholders
To a point this makes sense, but I think you underestimate how many people greatly overspend on cars, and how many people have big car payments as a result. The extra cost can definitely come into play here, at least on the low end of the range. Lots of people spend 35-50k on cars which is what most of these electric cars cost. Obviously this excludes the roadster. I assume anyone buying that has plenty of money and they aren't buying it for roadtrips. Or taking roadtrips for that matter. I'm discussing electric cars in general and saying that, while tesla has made something better than everyone else, it still isn't good enough.
I see your point.

The original post doesn't address these issues, and I'm not sure it is ever designed to. If someone wanted to create a globally accessed, multi-language, all-encoding supported fully validated business information XML-RPC protocol they certainly wouldn't have arrived at "business.txt".

The main problem it was trying to solve is to prevent business owners from having to update their information everywhere it ends up - not to ensure proper encoding (99% of applications would be happy with UTF-8) and formatting. In almost all use cases simply copying what was there and plopping it into a string would be fine.

Which brings me back to my point about XML. A lot of the time, XML produces complexity that simply isn't necessary. Following the 80/20 rule, designing it for your specific use case will be multitudes faster and work fine for your target audience, no need to build an enterprise system and standard global protocol out of the gate.
I think a founder is unlikely to be the kind of person who can sit around all day doing nothing. I used to have a job where I had literally nothing to do four days of the week and it almost drove me crazy. I could not sit idle all day on purpose.
This is a really cool idea. As a small business guy, this is definitely worthwhile and usable. Please keep working on this.
That advice mostly comes from the fact that most startups don't have any semblance of a business model. So, the only thing to tweak is the product in search of blowing up user "engagement" numbers.

But even with a business model, the product needs to evolve based on customer engagement and feedback, which sometimes takes us to a place we would have never imagined in our vision.

I don't think I understand your stance on when to put your visionary foot down and when to listen to customers.
Ask HN: What's in your front-end kit?
I'm a front-end developer and I've noticed that the number of tools I use day-to-day has been expanding quite a bit (especially with responsive design becoming more popular). Out of curiosity, what's in your kit? What I'm most curious about:

CSS Frameworks - Do you use any? If so, what size of project dictates its usage? Do you prefer using a framework or rolling your own code?

Javascript/jQuery - What polyfills, plugins, or other javascript do you use to run the front-end (e.g. Scott Jehl's respond.js, HTML5 shiv, etc.)? For web apps: how often do you use things like Backbone or Ember?

Organization - How do you structure your code/files? I've had to really rethink how I organize my files when working on bigger sites. Any tips?

Anything else - This is a gross generalization on the topic, but really I'm looking for anything that might improve the quality of my work/help simplify my workflow.
Pocket Gems Eyes A Younger Female Audience With Tap Campus Life
I've been driving a tesla roadster for about a year. It's my daily commuter.

I plug the car into a regular 110V outlet. I typically get 30-50 miles of charge overnight, depending on what time I get home and when I leave. My commute is only 10 miles each way so it's 100% full most mornings when I get in.

I've verified the car can do 240 miles between cities but you have to set the cruise to 60 mph or below. I keep a gas car for long road trips and camping, etc., but I don't use it much.

The Tesla is very cool. Strangers stop me to talk about it multiple times per week. Customer service has been off the charts.

High recommend. Go buy one.
My father used to give me similar advice when I struggled with physics problems: "Keep your pencil moving."

Along similar lines, John Carmack once said: "If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."
Here's a more full-featured C++ REPL: http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/what-cling
It's slow:

http://www.teslamotors.com/roadster/charging/spare-mobile-co...

(They also have higher power options)
Using Keyword Analysis to Maximize Returns in Vertical Markets
Twitter Sockpuppets Attack Writer Jeremy Duns As Spam
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I have some extra requirements, and Linux doesn't come anywhere close to meeting them, at least not out of the box. I suspect that many OS X users have similar expectations to me.

I do the same things as you with my computers, except with the addition that I am very picky about aesthetics and usability. The reason I wanted to use Linux was because I wanted to use my powerful gaming system as a development machine, and didn't want to go the hackintosh route, but my experience seems to indicated that it's going to take a lot of work to bring the Linux install to an acceptable standard.
IAC is already the Viacom of the internet
10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life
Facespook: Russian spies order $1mln software to influence social networks
We are unclear of the project. We are going to put waveforms into the database. That's all we have been told.
So... this appears to do little more than normalize prefixes. So why not just throw a normalization gist up? The first part is:

HTMLElement.prototype.requestFullscreen = HTMLElement.prototype.requestFullscreen
|| HTMLElement.prototype.webkitRequestFullscreen
|| HTMLElement.prototype.webkitRequestFullScreen
|| HTMLElement.prototype.mozRequestFullScreen;
that running with correct form is not an intrinsic, instinctual human ability

That has to be the most ridiculous sentence I've read on hn in a while. Obviously running with the latest running shoe will skew 200,000 years of human evolution, but humans are very much well adapted for running 'correctly'
Yes, that's it, though it probably shouldn't require a particular position in the URL, so that you could e.g. put it on Dropbox, make it public and link it from somewhere.

As long as it was called reviews.txt and had that particular format, it'd be valid.
> Tech jobs in San Francisco have nearly tripled since the start of 2012 — from 13,000 to 44,000

This doesn't sound right.
Big data storage. It's expensive and a pain.
>> In any case, fixing copyright doesn't seem that hard.

You're right. Sadly, the hard part is making politicians fear enough for their jobs so that they don't bend to the desires of special interests.
Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
Work or rest
Direct link: http://refer.ly/blog/a-doable-sacrifice-y-combinator-as-a-ma...
I've found the economic effect 'Price Elasticity of Demand' to be fascinating and to hold true on the App Store. My interpretation is, for paid apps, there is an absolute value associated with your app that is independent of the price of the app.

E.g. if an app costs $1.99 and sells 100 per day, reducing this app to $0.99 will result in a doubling of sales. But the revenue gained is roughly the same
And the best way to mitigate the risk of making a bad decision is to track the right metrics and know your market.
Having programmed a fair amount of C, I regret never learning properly how to use gdb. This article is quite helpful!
I forgot to mention what is maybe the best part. Surprised the article doesn't talk about this.

When you drive an EV, acceleration is instant. Like, at the same time your foot goes down, your shoulders get thrown back.

Gas cars often take 0.5-2 seconds to get response from the engine, depending on the car & current conditions at the time you accelerate.

You get used to the acceleration in the Tesla after a while. But one year in, I'm still loving the instant response. That's what I really miss when I'm driving the gas car. It's just awesome.
MobileApps.com shuts down, domain name going for one million dollars.
wow... I didn't even know Samsung was selling cheap iPhone knock-offs. I thought they were just selling phones that had similar look and feel to iPhones (and others) and used similar UI as iPhones (and others).