skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not really comparing it to anything, just speaking from experience of having waited many hours waiting for C programs to compile in the past.
Interesting how this website that complaints about myopia on the part of US vendors is itself myopic to the rest of the world.
British Minister likens Anonymous to fascists and racists
Obviously, you didn't look at all the designs Apple claims are copies. Unless you believe Apple invented the mobile phone, I don't think you can just claim that this isn't preventing innovation.
This led me to do some investigating and the fourth season of Arrested Development will not be available in Canada. I don't use Netflix but I pay for an account because I think it's the future of content delivery and I want to vote with my dollars. As of five seconds ago I'm no longer a customer.
One thing that Amazon does way better than Google is handling out-of-country experiences. With Amazon, I have a US-based account, and no matter where I am (I primarily do not live in the US), _everything works_.

With Google, I'll install an app while in the USA. Then when travelling, I'll get a notification that there's an update available. But when I go to update it, I'm told the app doesn't exist. This is actually a security hole: If I have a buggy app, I can't update while outside the US.

If I sign in with my Google account, nothing changes - I'm still given "local" content. This is why I don't bother with Google Music. I'm not interested in having my files disappear to "not available in your country", despite using a USA credit card and address on my account.
Are you a beautiful strong programmer that don’t need no business guy?
Hey, they get free health care, we get a better Internet. I think it's a fair trade.
Perfectly valid YAML
What makes it even worse is the lack of a REPL means that between each change you need to recompile. In any large program this is going to take minutes and they add up. A simple GDB invocation is not only a better way of tracking it down, but can potently save hours.
I think BufferBox in the most recent YC batch is a perfect example of this. They're making an Amazon Locker that works with everything, Amazon or no. They launched in Toronto, and already pretty much own the market with Canada Post addresses, a partnership with Walmart Canada, and integration with the local public transportation.
In the short term yes, but not in the long run. The original services are more innovative and takes over the market slowly but steadily.

I don't know if it's just bad, they drive competition and accelerate innovations in that space. Facebook wouldn't had to innovate at all if wasn't for all these local competitors.
Wait, What Did Neil Armstrong Say?
Why would it mean the project is "dead"?

Do you mean that community projects are by nature "dead" projects?

What does "dead" mean, exactly?

My OS is a community project. OSX/iOS are built from community projects. Lots of scripting languages are community projects. Mozilla is a community project. Wikipedia is a community projects. I could go on.

I realise I may think a bit differently than many programmers, but I care less about how much a particular chunk of code is actively changing than whether it works really well over the long term (simple, stable, reliable, secure). I like "timeless" software than quietly continues to work for many years, remaining relatively unchanged. In my experience, well-engineered software like that is often immune from so-called "bit rot". Because it was designed correctly, with minimised complexity and maximised portability as a top priorities, from the beginning.

From a design and implementation perspective, there are no real impediments to a decentralised social network that cannot be overcome. However first you have to decide what you mean by "social network"? Does it have to be a clone of FB or G+, save for the centralisation element? Or does your definition allow some changes to their approach? For example, what if the network was private? What if there were no ads? What if it was comprised of lots of smaller networks of maybe 100-200 people (like your "friends" on FB) instead of being one massive, public image gallery/chatbox? What if it didn't require the web, as FB does? What if it was application-agnostic?

What do you demand from a "social network"?

Does it have to be a FB/G+ clone?

Anything is possible, so to speak. But not everything is necessarily ready to be received based solely on technical merit. How much marketing and PR is needed?
No I don't, I'll look it up, thanks
Ban this: Apple lists 8 Samsung devices it wants kept out of the US
The only thing I like about graphical debuggers is the ease of which you can set up multi-window dashboards. I can have my stack windows a few watched variables and the code all on one screen at the same time as I step through the program
Yeah; that calculator comes to about $60,000 for her. Ouch.
Software patent attorney needed ASAP
I know you hate SW patents. So do I if it is about tiny things like a rounded border.
I have worked 6 years on a system and now my attorney screwed me. I need help asap. Do you know a good SW patent attorney?

Appreciate contacts, _please_no_debate_
It bugs me that the hyperlinks are black & w/o underline. I was only able to figure out they were links by thinking for a minute and deciding that they must be, because what else could they be?

But they sure do look like body text.

_________

edit: Everything is fantastic otherwise. Sorry to be so negative w/o posting any of my initial reaction(which was completely positive)
I am from Lisbon, not a cheap place by any means. Granted, coffee outside is cheap and going out at night is also affordable, but when you take into account the average IT wage living in Lisbon is expensive.
And what is the point in moving to another part of the country and staying away from my friends and family like I do now just to pay a bit less in rent?

Even with the high costs of living in London I can save more money than when I was living in Lisbon, but crucially I am exposed to more work opportunities that increase my experience and value as a developer.

The kind of stuff I have done abroad just does not exist in Portugal, at least at the time it did not.

And with regards to the patriotism aspect of your comment, I regularly send money to my family and take vacations in Portugal. All this money was earned abroad.
Also, I regularly work for Portuguese customers in projects for foreign clients which means that I am helping with the exports of the country.

Finally, I am not nationalistic and I think those kind of feelings are detrimental to the evolution of civilisation. If anything I consider myself European, and I can't wait for a democratic centralised european government that brings some proper law and order to clean up the corruption and ineptitude of the politicians running Portugal, which is now the most unequal country in the EU with the lowest social mobility and an education level below Mexico.
Ask HN: Best combination of team members for a startup?
I have an idea for an startup and for now, i'm the only member of the team. I know that I would need at least one or two more people to make this work but I don't know what type of team mate would be the best. I'm a web dev so I was considering someone non-technical, for being more complementary.
In your experience, what is the best combiation of team members for a startup?
How has the experience been?
Interesting - my experiences are quite different. I can order some stuff from Amazon.com (US) from Canada, but many things aren't available. I can't use Amazon Prime (they won't even let me sign up without a US address), and I can't order books for my Amazon Kindle purchased in Dubai (it needs a US address as well).

With Google, however, nearly everything works. I've been using Google Music for some time now, although it isn't officially available in Canada. Same with Google Voice. All I had to do was sign up for both with a VPN for the first use, after which I can access it anywhere through the respective apps in any country with no hassles.
Wow, what was the app?
Counting calories might be misleading but it's definitely not pointless. You still want to target a range of calories during the day and not go over it. Even with the inaccuracies of the system, counting calories is still part of keeping healthy.
Yes, Ruby is a "good" language but how many people are able to host ruby projects?

Ruby is a quick application to develop with and they needed to develop quickly. Usually, there are hundreds of particular aspects of a software production process that an outsider could question but just usually the tradeoffs can't be as easily made calculated from the outside as one would think.

I think the OP's idea of completely distributed servers might be as good any IF these weren't website servers but information caches akin to Freenet nodes. Freenet at least does work on some level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
I am not sure I agree with that. If you think about it, the gas costs for your trip are a wash, because you would be spending that money either way. However, with the amount of money that you saved on fuel with an electric (a few thousand dollars a year, roughly), that could offset the cost of renting a car for your long weekend trip (a few hundred dollars).

I do agree with you that the Tesla is not a mass market vehicle yet. But not because of the 450-mile trip issue. It is because most people/families should not (or cannot) be buying a $50,000 car, even if it means saving a few thousand dollars a year in fuel costs. It would take too long (if ever) to break even on the increased cost. Once EV's get down to more competitive prices, then it starts making more sense. However, if you have the cash, and you like the idea of the Tesla, then yes you should go for it, because without early adopters, Tesla could end up folding.
I think it would be interesting to see the responses too
I'm moving to Toronto this month, and am planning on compiling a list of things that are different. Here's hoping that this site gets over their DDOS and comes back on line.
Best tip I got in ages, turned noprocast on
Thank you...
What you get back when you build culture
Well, so does a law that prevents you from selling your labor as a slave, but I don't think you would see that as bad.

For the fact of 'owning' the software... well, as long as you don't redistribute it, who cares. And if you do restribute it, why should you take away from your users the same freedom that was given to you? (by making your software proprietary or by limiting the use they can make)
Can I do this with a hand-written assembly program, i.e. not necessarily one that has been compiled with as and subject to GNU default optimisations or "constraints"?
It would have been most of the cost. I believe they got free office space in an incubator. Heroku's spotlight page said they used 9 dynos, which would have been only a few hundred a month in hosting costs.
I should add that the trickiest bits aren't the apps that could "run on top of" a distributed social network like photo tagging or games. It's setting up the social graph those apps use. How do you add a friend? How do you accept or reject a friend request? What sort of authentication and other security features should everyone understand and support? There are proposals for solving these issues but getting it a) secure and b) widely agreed upon and supported would be a Good Thing.
Could someone explain to a slightly naive young man how these guys ever intended to have a viable business, if the premise of their product was that it would be free and outside of central control?
for the somewhat-graphically-inclined, gdb mode in emacs has the much under-advertized 'M-x gdb-many-windows' which shows your stack, local variables, breakpoints etc. in separate 'windows'.
Not really a challenge, but an interesting lesson nonetheless.
lldb would be even better for using instead of gdb because lldb actually uses clang's parsing for everything.

I was watching an Apple talk on lldb which explained this in more detail, and it shows a lot of promise for a debugger to have a full C compiler inside of it.
Saving Jobs In Copyright Industry Is Counterproductive, Regressive Policy
Its funny you say "for grownups" while more than half the people in YC were 27 years old or older - certainly adults out of school and doing all the things grownups do: marriage, kids, taking on debt to buy homes, etc.
Hi all, this is my site. Not sure why it went down, still working on that. Its hosted on Linode which has been remarkably stable even with traffic spikes (I actually posted this as a Show HN about a year and a half ago and it was on the top of HN for over a day -- which was completely unexpected).

FYI, I haven't updated the site in a while (other than converting it to Wordpress) -- Believe it or not, I live in the states now :) I'd love to get some guest editors on it; if anyone is interested please contact me.
Sympathetic magic was one of the first forays into actual science. It sought explanatory power for phenomena. That they did this ass-backwards and propagated through superstition and rumor is why it's not actually science, but when you start talking about controllable and manipulable mechanisms, you've taken the first important step.

"Magical thinking" doesn't refer to this. It refers to an utter ignorance of the mechanism, leaping from observation to conclusion without isolating any variables experimentally.
Show HN: Unpartial.com
This is the first product released by Stremor, the startup I'm working at.
Aside from being an interesting and useful news reader/aggregator in its
own right, it's meant to show off our language heuristics tech to
automaticaly rate news articles on bias, reading level, detect rants, etc.
I have not used it yet. (I hope there isn't a finite, small amount of spaces and I'm not hogging... but I signed up after this was mentioned on HN last time and got a spot pretty soon so I'm guessing it's not that limited.)
So just skimming through the comments here, the "standard" alternatives to the proposed business.txt include (but are probably not limited to):

• HTTP Headers

• Meta-tags

• <link rel="business"> tags

• RFC 5785 (/.well-known/ folder)

• Microdata

• Microformats

• RDF Schema

No wonder we are in http://xkcd.com/927/ territory...
Success & Motivation
Being someone that has suffered health anxiety since early childhood, I'd like to applaud anyone thinking of taking one of these tests to think twice (Obviously if you have something that runs in the family etc then ignore me). Taking blood tests for the rest of your life for a condition you may develop is a fast road to hypochondria and believe me when I say it's no easy thing, living in fear.
gdb being a utility, I believe the student is generally expected to learn it on their own if they like. Much like version control and other things that make the life of a coder easier, but aren't actually part of "Computer Science".
I was a huge fan until the first code release. Then the reality of how out of their depth they were hit me and I wrote it off. Did you actually try it out?

I can't decide if I'm a fan of what they did because they just went for it and made a big splash or if I'm annoyed that they took all that kickstarter money for something they could never deliver with their skillset. No one else can crowdfund a similar project for a long time after this public meltdown.
Click the notice and click the link. Many 404 or have been "disabled", but a few have counter-notices filed after them in the DMCA repo.
I wouldn't say that library size is only tangentially relevant. After, all, if we all had small libraries, we wouldn't be worried about them as a valuable part of our estate, would we?

You're right, digital media bring all kinds of convenience and portability that make them valuable forms of media that should be transferable. (More important is that they should be transferable across formats/devices in time - I don't think my kids will be able to play my mp3s when I die :-)

But digital media uniquely encourage large library size - they are uniquely prone to accumulation.

How many times have you seen the following argument made, "If you made it easy to buy a digital copy legitimately, I wouldn't pirate?" Well, with successful stores (such as iTunes) the purchasing process has been made extremely easy.

What happens when you have extreme ease of purchase coupled with negligible storage cost? That's a recipe for inadvertent hoarding if I ever saw one!

Digital media enable us to lose all sense of scale of how much we have accumulated(because we have no physical objects to haul about. I don't think it's just a certain class of packrat that suffers, I think we all suffer from this loss of perspective.

It makes the question of transferability more acute to us, because we're investing more (money, time, attention) in gathering and consuming media than we would otherwise. So I stand by my original post - this is a first world problem :-)
Perhaps not self evident, but easily provable. Now, having to COME UP WITH this when all you know is p(a) = x; p(b) = 1 - x, and the fact that p(a)p(b) == p(b)p(a) is some awesome insight.
It's great for instant feedback but IMHO interactive programming makes it easy (or at least easier) to be lazy. If you get used to coding by trial and error you'll never really understand the language or the problem you're trying to solve, you'll just keep trying things until it works. I know that's not how everyone approaches programming but I've seen it far too often to dismiss it
Making games with XNA
ID Your Body For Greater CSS Control and Specificity
I actually expect major pushback to automated cars for just this reason. and suspect that ultimately we will have to legislate that all cars be automated.
Ubiquitous computing enabled by quantum computing. Ultra low power devices, everywhere.
Rant Detection? You mean it checks if it was a thread on Hacker News and if it was, it flags the story as a Rant? :-)

Actually pretty cool. I wish I had this for tech stuff too. Any clue when they are adding that?
The speech that Nixon never gave: ‘In event of moon disaster’
Well there's a couple of things at work. For one, the key barrier to "clinical demand" is that clinicians (other than highly specialized ones) are not really prepared for dealing with genetic results. Most primary care doctors haven't thought about genetics since med school. I would also say that many of them question the utility of such data in clinical care. So I would describe the demand side as "tepid" except for the cases of specialities where it makes a big impact.

The above cultural issue is compounded by the fact that genetic testing is the only kind of test that transcends time. Your DNA sequence determined today could (and likely will) mean something different in the future as we learn more about the genome. But medicine historically has been very transactional: your doctor orders a test, the result comes back, you discuss results, make some lifestyle or treatment decisions and move on. With genetic tests, you could be "normal" today and tomorrow a paper lands in the New England Journal of Medicine that demonstrates with high certainty you're going to get early onset dementia or something. Well that's a problem in the current system (at least in the US). Whose job is it to go back and analyze people's genomes and update them with new info like this? Who do you bill for that? How do you notify someone? Some people don't want to know such things, can they opt out?

Targeted genetic testing has been used for years to identify specific diseases. But the tech to do huge swaths of the genome affordably is only a few years old. So even the diagnostic tech is still a bit "beta". That's the final piece limiting adoption. We're all collectively figuring out how to do this and how it fits in with existing regulatory requirements. All that "figuring stuff out" takes time.
Twitter: How to Check if you have Real or Fake Followers.
Looks really nice, authentication is something many are doing wrong and it's important to have good templates

One question, why not use ensureIndex ? is there a real performance running it once it's created?
Exclusively for you, my friend :)

Fix for Chrome (Stylebot): http://goo.gl/9qoeF

Fix for Firefox (Stylish): http://goo.gl/6tkpz
I attempted this before, even on Kickstarter:

http://www.openspectrometer.com/

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makerhaus/open-spectrome...

Unfortunately we did not hit our fundraising target, and it's now a dead project. I'd love to see this new Kickstart project succeed, especially the online spectral database. Commercial databases of spectral signatures are expensive (thousands of dollars), and they shouldn't be.

Part of our problem, I think, was that we were attempting the project while taking classes full time, and working.

We were planning to release two different designs at different price points. One would have used inexpensive ruled transmission grating, while a more expensive unit would have used a concave holographic aberration-corrected reflective grating. The latter would have had better system efficiency, less "smear" across pixels, and better linearity. Each would have made use of a linear CCD array with good sensitivity (the same chip used in the Ocean Optics units). Concave gratings add a couple hundred bucks to the price, but are well worth it if you need to do UV.

A challenge we didn't get to solve was how to make something DIY that could be used to detect UV. It's difficult to sputter a uniform phosphor coating or remove a sensor window without specialized equipment.
The best feedback I've gotten is typically tough but fair. Some characteristic elements I appreciate help with:

- Benchmarking (to a peer group)

- Clarity (what does/does not come across)

- Technical (pro-tip: this is how to fix)

Of course, some of the onus is on the submitter on how s/he selects the reviewer. This will be a function of how serious they are, and what their purpose is.

An expert reviewer will typically benchmark you to an attainable but more advanced peer group. A lay-reviewer is usually useful for feedback on clarity, direction, or purpose. If something is truly lacking, a reviewer may ask about the intended goals of the project. This typically segues to a discussion on a sub-section of the work that has some merit (hopefully) . Maybe an idea, concept, example. This is still useful, and the reviewer/s avoid painting the whole thing with a broad brush.

Edit: Just wanted elaborate, re: Benchmarking.

For creative work, typically, an exchange is "This part is strong. This part needs work." And the you are referred to somebody elses work:..."Take a close look at what these guys are doing [list XYZ]". It then falls on the reviewee to follow up. And this is where the real feedback takes place. Where you see just what is expected of you and you get a sense of how hard/easy the next step is. But the act of direction, support, and (hopefully) inspiration is what leads to the success.
uhhh, 5k is over 3 straight days of driving at highway speeds. It is longer than the distance between SF and NY. I highly doubt that EV's need to be optimized for these distances, as no one in their right mind would routinely go on trips of these lengths.

Hats off to you if you can put up with that much time in a car, but personally I would take a plane.
As if most of us can afford one. When you take in to account the sticker price of these EVs, I'd rather keep my Civic and pay for gas.
Actually I deliberately skipped music and movies. These are areas where DRM has tended to work very badly. Basically, people still like to collect music. And those who do do it in archivable form, overwhelmingly so. The "problem" there isn't that they're unknowingly buying in to a bad license regime, it's that they're knowingly evading the license regime entirely.
I rely on more of a feedback loop. I eat when I'm hungry, and I monitor simple metrics like my weight, sense of well being, endurance, and physique. I adjust my food intake (but still keying off when I'm hungry), and watch the results.