skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I lost the plot where you said if there are 12 confirmations, it means that the transaction is 12 blocks behind .. :-(
>I would not spend $X billion and risk bankruptcy to invent something

Then spend that money on resources and sell them for a profit. Buy a mine or a farm or something else that works with that perspective.
Backstory: I built this last year and forgot all about it. Re-discovered it on my junk server last month and I've been using it ever since.

Polished overnight and now released to the lions den.

Take a look, feedback welcome. What do you think?
Leave Your Cellphone at Home
This is a problem with education (a lot of introductory textbooks and teachers miss the point). To be fair, people learning to code need different comments from more experienced developers (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/portrait-of-n00b.h...)

Another cause is paranoid architects. Lint-testing to ensure even one-line getters and setters are commented. Come on! But it happens in real life.
The problem is that there are multiple workflows people use and dont want to change. I for instance rely on invox zero and calendar, so they function as todo list. Many people i know use other methods.

On the other hand, some people argue that if tou cant keep your todos in your head, you have a bigger problem ;)
I'll be surprised if Apple has not patented iPhone 5 in China by now, their second or third biggest market.
Source is my boss telling me to make it that way. ;) Curious how you're getting the new one on occasion...that should be very consistent, unless some of your requests randomly come from a different IP, and our geoip DB thinks it's US?
Can I get your email address? Check my profile for mine please. Thank you!
Ok, I must be confused then, I didn't want to troll.
You got your facts mixed.
Anyone with a kindle version of this?
5.4.6 is in Quantal right now. Presumably 12.10 will have that.
Rails vs Padrino
I was a little disappointed when they didn't include the ruckus about Zed not starting out teaching Array#each. That should probably have earned a spot.
Confirmations = "Current Block Number" - "Block Number your transaction is in"
Am I right in saying that Arch still doesn't have package signing by default? I know they've been working on adding it. Until it has that it can't really be used imo.
Actually what hes done in the example works a bit more subtly than his description. The brightness of the comments (yellow) is similar to the background (white), which allows you to read the code by itself (squint and the code stands out, whilst the comments fade into the background). The same thing wouldn't work nearly so well if, for instance, you had white text on a black background (with yellow comments).
The UK has always depended on import to sustain its industry. Pretty much nothing's changed since it was a colonial empire - it's just that the materials and parts are sourced from independent countries now.

I was surprised to find out that Land Rover outsources the manufacturing of most of the exterior and interior trimming on the mainland, then ships everything for assembly to the UK, for example. The same is probably true for the electronics and most engine parts, as well.

Volvo (Sweden) does the exact same thing...
I would rather not have to resort to that sort of stuff here on HN.
To those who haven't heard about LFS before:

You really should also check out Gentoo which is basically the same thing but more elegant and easier. :)
This is a great post, I particularly like this quote:

"Motivation is the start, but if it’s not solidified into
discipline, it usually fades away into regret pretty
quickly once you realize you never acted on it."

I think it's worth mentioning Stephen Presfield's concept of Resistance here from his book "Do the Work" [1]. I often find myself fired up with a new task, but lacking the follow though that discipline would give me. It's too easy when I want to do something that I don't know how to do (write some Haskell for example) for my little monkey brain to jump off to some interesting shiny thing (HN). Resistance explains this as a way of protecting yourself from the pain of struggling to understand and the risk of failure, by replacing it with something easy and non-challenging.

[1] Read it: http://www.stevenpressfield.com/do-the-work/
Here's the link and intro I copied from their FAQ:

https://scriptrock.com/

> We help you automate the testing that is usually performed manually by technology staff when making changes to desktops and servers. The result is an automated test suite that runs 100's of tests per minute against your applications, systems and infrastructure.
Oh please. Can we stop pretending Apple invented everything in 2007 and everyone else had been clueless for centuries before? I get to see this every week on HN and it gets seriously old.

And even if it were true it seems like Apple never had a problem to keep selling their devices while the evil copiers were swarming the market. Hardly a good example of useful patent protection.
Your editor can display comments in whatever way you want. The flipside is that it's an individual setting (as opposed to, say, source control settings).

AFAIK the way to fix bad or stale comments is do it during code review.
I’m being cynical but my experience of building from source even with automated tools is one where things going wrong and being very difficult to resolve: there’s a cyclic dependency here; this things compiles but won’t link; this thing just segfaults; you need a new version of X to build Y but Z, which is a part of X, needs an old version of Y; I know you wanted to run the latest version of X but author of Y didn’t update it to work with that new version of X so you can’t but that was the whole point of doing this thing in the first place; etc.

Nowadays I avoid building anything from source if there is a binary I can download and everytime I have to build from source I cringe in apprehension as to whether it will work or not. Too often, if something fails, I just give up.

OK, I’m not really this aiming this criticism at the LFS project. I’m really just griping about shitty this aspect of software development in general. People should be working on solutions to these problems. Or maybe this is a problem with me. I’d be interested other’s opinions.
Isn't GET lists practically the same as GET lists/all which in turn is renamed in 1.1 to GET lists/list ?
In 99% of cases you are right. Though it is unclear if the tradeoff to use a more expressive language is worth it. For example, compiler optimizations can be quite naturally expressed as graph transformations. However, the implementation is C/C++, so an occasional comment [0] with some ASCII art of the transformation is really helpful.

There are cases where I disagree. For example, TODO and FIXME annotations cannot be always replaced by something like NotImplementedException. Sometimes code is so concise that it is not obvious why it solves the problem. Sometimes it is good to state why an "obviously better solution" is not applicable in a special case.

[0] https://github.com/MatzeB/libfirm/blob/master/ir/opt/cfopt.c...
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Yes that exactly,

And also for Newton re-inventing the laws of diffraction back in 1672 when humans before that were just staring at rainbows like dumb elephants

And also for Thales re-inventing triangles just before the the 58th Olympiad (548–545 BC) while peasants back in the day thought they we just fancy things children used to draw with sticks in the dirt.

And also for Uguuk Buguuk (not sure about this one's name) for inventing something called the iWheel that enabled objects to be transported in batches, more easily. And he was dumbfounded when he saw how fast it leaked, the iWheel thing.

Come on, now... Serves them right (and WTF with apple anyway, Steve is dead). Nice thing the Whole world is not yet under US (patent) legislations domination.
I didn't know about PostPic, that is really useful, thanks for posting this.
I'm sure you've read the regular postings on HN bemoaning how the eternal september is setting in, and how it is descending to the level of all other internet forums. This answer is a perfect example.

If you don't have anything helpful to add (you didn't - unlike olalonde, cpg, ...) then don't post. Rescuing HN is as simple as that.
It has package signing. A quick Google search would have answered your question - http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/01/17/1446248/package-sig.... Voila!
There are those who write comments and those who read them. Obviously, former would normally want them to be grayed out and latter might want them to stand out a bit more. So his problem is certainly not the problem, it is barely a problem at all.
One of the guys that managed the Norwegian (no.) USENET hierarchy and used to be responsible for newsgroup creation for it used to go under the nickname Dr. No. Whether because of the no prefix on the hierarchy, or because people liked to complain about it whenever he rejected a proposed group, I don't know. But people repeatedly suggested campaigns to get the .no NIC to let him have the address dr@no. Never got anywhere though.
Thanks. Will read again.
Totally agree. I have used index cards as a planning tool and a to do list for a long time. Trello, in all its nothingness, is the only thing that has come close to the efficiency of a pencil and stack of cards.
I, for one, don't want anything WYSIWYG in what I'm trusting as my code editor.
The problem is most programming languages do not distinguish between comment and documentation. There should be syntax for documentation not convention (comment documents code directly behind).
Your build system could automatically include "banned.h" with every source file e.g. via gcc's -include switch.
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I agree, and I also take issue with the term 'churn'. Churn would imply that features are being removed, replaced with these new ones.

What we are instead seeing is growth of the framework, and community.

To offer an alternative viewpoint to your later point, wideroots, I find the TPL based Task Asyncronous Pattern introduced in .Net4 much more useful that older patterns like Begin/End (APM) pattern, or the event-based pattern (EAP) . I'm looking forward to using the new async/await keywords too. Some things I could rewrite, some things will be better using the underlying tasks directly, and for some things I use other supplementary async technologies, such as Reactive Extensions (Rx) and TPL Dataflow.

But this is just an example of growth, not churn, as the older patterns are still valid, and the community can choose.

As an anecdotal counterpoint to your last sentence, I'm not using these technologies for small applications, rather the complete opposite end of the spectrum. My observation is that the community is embracing these new tools. But again, this is just an example of growth of the community, not churn.
I decided to get fit and healthy a few months ago, and boy was I motivated and stuck at it for a week or two well, but I was pretty undisciplined and slipped pretty quickly. I had to essentially codify it into a quick routine, get up and do x, after x do y, when z is true etc. Amazingly treating it essentially as a programming task helped me stick to it more, because once I'd 'written' the routine in to my life it was pretty easy to just go through it every morning.

Motivation is a weird thing, we all start with the best intentions in the world but sticking with the good habits is damn hard.
Apparently like most other people here who tried it, I found that Google won conclusively for me (4.5-0.5), though in each test it won by only a small margin.

My queries: one software-technical python virtual machine, one philosophical argument from evil, one highbrow musical/artistic (this one was the draw), one engineering-technical, one geeky-popular cultural.
That is a really huge list.
Same here. So, how does a person recover his lost electronic device if tracking software is "illegal" ?
I usually try to justify our whining about driving comparatively short distances by pointing out that our roads are rarely straight and normally badly maintained :D

And you're right about the neighborhood; I'd probably not consider mine to stretch for more than 5 miles from where I live.

It's on topic enough for me!
The way I hold the kindle rests my thumb lightly against the next page button. I only have to do the tiniest movement to change the page. Tapping on a touch screen is unattractive by comparison.

I would prefer a model with touch and hard keys, but it doesn't look like that's forthcoming, so I stick with the basic model.
In my opinion the why belongs into the commit message not into a comment.

Whys are usually highly context-dependent and you should not include all the context into the comment ("in 2004 we benchmarked A,B and C on such and such a machine and B was fastest"). If it is not context-dependent the solution is obvious and needs no comment.
Which is why it's odd that they seem to abandon their older devices the moment new hardware is released. You can't report passages with errors in them on the KK for instance, because that feature only exists on the Kindle4 devices.

It's possible that the new software couldn't be ported to the older hardware of course, and keeping multiple lines of software current takes more developer resources, but if Amazon doesn't want people to upgrade, then turning their hardware into abandonware seems like it's a counterproductive move.

Amazon makes a virtue internally of doing everything 'on a shoestring' supposedly, this is probably just an external reflection of that I guess.
Agreed, I was very irritated when an elitist is calling me second-rate and couldn't bother to implement a destroy method for me to delete my profile.
Works fine here in Chrome. Are you sure you're entering http://dk/ and not just dk? The latter will trigger a search instead.
You get the feeling that Postgres needs some marketing. It's a great piece of software but if people can't easily find out if it's been used at massive scale they aren't going to trust it.

Like it or not most deployments of MySQL are probably because people can easily hear about it being used for massive databases. The decision isn't based on technical merits (or lack of).
Thanks for the list. I have an organized list here, at http://talll.com. I have tried to place the reading list under various groups - I thought this might be relevant to this discussion.
How about you let us solve it for you: let me delete my profile.
Apple Lifts Ban on BitTorrent Apps, Or So It Seems
I agree with the overall tone of the article but is this really true?

> The dispute between Apple and Samsung is less over how the devices work and more over their look and feel.
Unfortunate timing indeed.

To be fair, the final RC's for Symfony2 and ZF2 were announced last week on the 28th and 29th respectively, both with a note stating the final release would be this week. Today was the last chance to release without half the world packing up for the weekend or breaking their promise.
I know right, yet the site still weighs in at just 46.29kb thanks to the wonders of gzip compression (156kb without).

Any ideas on feeds worth adding?
I'm a big fan of comments having a different background color. My code windows are black background, and comments have a very dim magenta background tint to them (with bright green or yellow). I find it relatively easy to either focus on the comments, or ignore them, this way.
why java sintax for documentation in comments and .net xml sintax for documentation in comments are invalid? to me, looks that documentation is an effort that most programmers (me included) don't want to do. comments in code are easily to do, instead.
Let me expand: we didn't make it to have python3 be the only shipped python in 12.10 because of several major dependencies. The stumbling blocks (as far as I know---when the rubber hits the road other things might pop up) were twisted, protobuf, and xapian. We have contracted out the work of porting the first two (the results of these efforts will be shipped in 12.10, in universe), and are moving away from the third one.
That's the opposite of the good old tiger repellent rock. Patents don't do anything look how well Apple does without them, wait Apple has and uses them. The truth is we don't know what a high tech international corporation would be like without patents because they all have them. You can't even say Apple would be as successful if they where less aggressive because they are already successful and they do use them.

http://www.criticalthinking.org.uk/tigerrepellantrock/
I have http://www.invisibleobama.com for sale. I'm sure someone with the right attitude could monetize it well since a similarly named twitter account has over 60K+ followers on twitter (@invisibleobama, which i don't own).

If anyone is interested, comment here and i'll get in touch. I'm not asking much.
Tu and Twitter: Is it the end for 'vous' in French?
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Well, no. From what I can see, all the "PaperWhite" models have a touch screen (which I really do not want) and no hardware buttons (which I really do).

So, no upgrade path for me. I'm sticking to my current Kindle.
I ran Archlinux for over 6 months. Gentoo is more hacking. I am back to "bog-standard" distro Ubuntu because once you have learned basics you just need a complete user experience and stop wasting time on trivial things.
German production is almost always superior in quality to the far-east products, there's no doubt about that. You've got to give that to the germans, they do know how to produce things. They're more expensive though, and unfortunately that is what ultimately counts for the big players.

That's also what I suspect to be the prime reason why we haven't got a proper free phone yet. Free as in free speech that is, running some variation of Linux with the necessary device drivers to use GSM/HSDPA/LTE/whatever, since Android isn't really free. It's just jolly expensive to build one of those if you're a small player and customers aren't prepared to pay for it.
Ebay + Hunch + Svpply + Milo = ?
I gently agree. Linux from Scratch has had several mentions on HN before though.
How to auto replay youtube video?
This whole thing is a difficult issue. Who is to decide what devices look similar enough, to deserve calling it a “copy”? In principle what we do here is: we implement a neural network for object recognition, and train it to recognize a certain device. Now we run this classifier on other devices and need to settle for a confidence value which says if a device is a copy or not. But who should decide what exactly this confidence value should be?

For example, what if we decide to say that a 0.921 value means a device is a copy, and we find out that Samsungs older devices get a 0.884 confidence?

All those values are very artificial.
Now that they can do more cross product interactions, I wish it would complete from my address book (like android does).
I know you're looking for advice on your app idea but I just want to throw this in. I'm concerned that you're memorizing math. In my experience flash cards only reduce your ability to learn (and apply) math. You need to understand the reasons behind the operations you're performing and understand why they applied for a particular problem. This builds intuition which is much more long-term than memorization. Memorizing equations for an exam helps you for that exam only (typically). Being able to quickly derive the equation any time you need will help you forever. This is harder but only at first. You'll thank yourself.

As for the app, go for it! Just don't use it for math and preferably don't pitch it as a aid for math students. You'll only be hurting them.
"Say I need my house cleaning supervised"... really? You run into this problem a lot?

Then again, does it work both ways? Say I need the couch sitting on... :)
I've build a few LFS systems, knowing for sure I won't use it as a primary system. Nevermind : it's great for educational purpose, and I'm surely more confident in my sysadmin skills since I've did it.
I agree. Like everything else, the "comments are failures" statement should not be taken as dogma. That's why I set up textmate to show me comments in a bright color; if they're there, they're there for a reason.
China, where they Party all the time. Just don't cause China to lose face, or your's will be seen no more.
Algorithms for the Ages
That's stylistic homage to old (30,40 year old) designs, and in a new, totally different context, like Spielberg basing Indiana Jones on forties adventure movies, or Lucas basing the space battles on dogfighting scenes from WWII movies. Braun's designs, like old Bauhaus stuff, is design language 101, you're supposed to use it and be inspired by it.

They are not copying something just after it came out and in the same concept, just to make a quick back. That would be like the nth thriller to copy the Friday and 13th concept or the nth cheap spy movie to copy James Bond (to continue the filmic analogies).
I think it ha a lot to do with almost all of the software being open source. Instead of having management and organized teams we have.. binary based distributions, package management, and other tools like configuration management.

In that context we're really just solving a management problem with engineering! Machines are pretty great at following procedure and ensuring consistency after all.
All this proves is Dieter Rams is a good guy. Apple on the other hand learned to copy but not to play nice.
Important Portable DVD Player Features - The Must Haves
I'd also like too see some links. I've been here for years and don't recall anything like that.
I think the point where Apple goes too far is the perception that too much is never enough. They're already the most successful business in history - do they really need to use lawsuits to ensure they have no competitors?

The fact that they use these frivolous patents to do so is just icing on the righteous indignation cake.
Ah anecdotes, the facts of the internet. I'm only 1135 days here, this must have happened before my time on HN. Wished I'd experienced the "stern emails from PG".

"You take my word for it or not."

Well, not. Sorry, too much science education to think anecdotes are relevant in any way.
You're one of today's lucky 10,000. :)

http://xkcd.com/1053/
The law will always have to deal with continuous and imprecisely defined concepts. Speed limits, drinking age, gross vs non-gross misconduct, etc. Continuity alone is a weak argument against anything, sometimes it's so weak that it has its own fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

So, while I believe the intellectual "property" should be eliminated, it's not because of the continuity involved in enforcing it.
Nope. That's not the answer. We will be having the exact same discussion in 50 years.
Story of a Startup Weekend Veteran: The Good, Bad, and ugly
So are there any objective reasons to use (modules from) one over the other (apart from already being familiar with one)?
Nice work and thanks for sharing.

If you can add hyperlinks to each title, it will be helpful (e.g clicking on "Make" should take me to make.com).
>This whole thing is a difficult issue. Who is to decide what devices look similar enough, to deserve calling it a “copy”?

Here's a guideline: if there is a document in your company saying ("let's copy this thing") --as in Samsung's case--, it's a copy.

Or if you created your design from leaked photos of prototypes ("as in this case") --it's a copy.

For the rest, how about a "jury" (i.e impartial to both parties common people)?
Analysis of 20 Bootstrapped Startup Landing Pages