skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was trained as an architect and worked in the field for over a decade. Drawing had and still has an important role to play in all of my creative processes. However...

It's all to easy to put drawing on too high a pedestal, and Michael Graves is possibly the best example of the dangers of doing so. His drawings are pleasing: humourous lines, stimulating juxtapositions of shape and colour. But they are not architecture, and Graves' focus on the art of drawing has made him a terrible architect.

Architecture is not experienced in two dimensions: it is experienced in four. It is only ever seen in perspective and in time. What it looks like as a two dimensional projection is irrelevant to the actual embodied experience of architecture. People who spend too much time immersed in drawings tend to lose sight of this.

Moreover, architecture is not just a visual. It also creates a tactile, acoustic, and olfactory environment. It conveys ambient and radient temperatures, and channels the movement of air. It exists within diurnal and seasonal and social cycles, continually changing. Drawing can represent NONE of this, and the architect who approaches their art purely through drawing will lose sight of these facts. Graves certainly has. His buildings -- rendered in three dimensions, out of actual materials on actual sites -- are tacky-feeling, hollow-sounding monstrosities: dank where they should be airy, glaring where they should be shady, completely disconnected from their environments, and not remotely conducive to work or socialisation or rest or any other purpose that humans might want to put a building towards.

But hell, they look great on paper, and that's what counts, right?

The truth is that architecture is a difficult art, because it cannot be iteratively developed and refined in the same way as other arts. If you're a painter, you paint; if you're a musician, you play music until your fingers bleed. But if you're an architect, you develop your art through indirect representation. Through virtual reality, as it were. And drawing is just another form of virtual reality -- better at representing some aspects of architecture (emotional characteristics of a design, for example) -- and almost incapable of representing others (four-dimensionality, acoustics, tactility, air). It should be quite an important form of representation within the architect's toolkit, but if it's too highly prioritised, then you'll end up as bad an architect as Michael Graves. A well-balanced architect should develop all forms of representation available to them -- both visual and non-visual -- if they are going to fully grasp all aspects of their art.
Ask HN: How secure is data on an ipad?
Im trying to figure out, how secure data on an ipad 2 is. I mean the security of the data if the ipad gets stolen. The informations i found so far are contradictory. Some sources say everything is encrypted and if a strong password is set, even law encorcement couldnt extract data like email passwords. Some say thats only because law enforcement are noobs and the decryption key is stored in the ipad so in theory one can extract the data. What do the fellow HNers think about this issue?
Our Show HN Aftermath: Lessons for Managing Users and Onboarding
I would -suspect- that US users are already desensitised to that and have suitable limits set up, and I'm not aware of anywhere else that happens.

So I would also be doubtful that it's a problem.
Kids today! Whine whine whine
Despite all his whining about people hustling to spread their content, in the end he is doing the exact same thing. These people have existed forever, there's nothing new here. Just the pot calling the kettle black.
Looks very nice. I'm a very happy user of iStat Menus for similar monitoring on OS X.

One thing that iStat menus lacks, and I was hoping Glances had (but appears not to) is a "top" like viewer for what is using bandwidth. Both applications only give the overall bandwidth usage. I'll see my bandwidth shoot up hundreds of Kbps out of nowhere and quickly try to determine what's using it through combinations of looking at open programs (maybe they're updating in the background), lsof -i, nettop if I can remember the name, but haven't been particularly keen on any of them. Any recommendations?
As the documentation says, all the processing from physical to protocol layers is done by the PC. Could anyone experienced in wireless technologies explain what is the software radio frontend worth 2000$ actually doing?
Try atop. There's an overview at https://lwn.net/Articles/387202/

It's available through the EPEL yum repository http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/repoview/atop....
(http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=heisenbergs...)

(http://theconversation.edu.au/explainer-heisenbergs-uncertai...)
Ooh, I can see that being useful. As opposed to features like "you can do loops!" which kinda makes me go "why would I ever want to?".
Direct link: http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2012/09/20120903_me_11...
The page warns that it hasn't been tested with python 3. I'm not a python dev, but wikipedia says python 3 was released in 2008. Isn't 4 years enough time to get adoption?
I think what you're saying is a given...
Just to nitpick, the bit at the end about tattoos contains a lot of BS. You can't burn them off with hot coals (unless you want to take your skin with it via 3rd degree burns), and it takes more than 100 hours to get a body suit. Just sayin. Sounds like the guy was fed a line of BS and bought it. Go with Jake Adelstein's writings on the matter as he lays it out pretty bare.
It is already known that open/read/write/close can fail. They are quite difficult to force to fail, so currently you have to write a lot more code to make that happen. And it gets really tedious once you look at all the combinations. eg open has to fail, open has to succeed and then read fails, open succeeds and the 3rd read fails and on and on.

OK, I’m following you so far.

Assuming that

(a) our language lets us specify the possible failure modes for each function, and

(b) we have a test tool that can systematically simulate various possible combinations of success and failure,

what would you want to do in each test case?

Put another way, when we run our test tool and our magic replacement I/O functions simulate, say, success on the open and first two reads but then failing on the third read, what happens next? What’s the result we’re looking for to determine whether the test passes or fails?
You could create a nice desktop widget out of this by piping it to Conky.
The impression I got from that book was Adelstein was exaggerating the personal stuff to add a little drama. He may have been threatened, but nothing happened.

If you tried to write the same book about MS-13 you'd be dead before you got to the second page.
The U.S. mobile market really needs a shake-up if you've got to pay for what you receive even if you haven't asked for it.
Oh, wow - I don't like this at all. Requiring me to have my phone on me to log in? Making me select my name from a list to log in? Then prompting me with a new form? These solutions seem awful and unintuitive to me.

Even worse, how am I going to explain this login system to my parents, or even my non-technical friends?

It's like OpenID login a while back. "Enter a URL to log in" was wasn't quite as easy to understand as developers thought.

This needs to be baked-in to the browser. Unfortunately, because we have loads of different browser vendors, I don't think we'll ever see a decent solution.
Thanks for the detailed bug report. I resolved the issue by adding a 200ms delay after a button press.
Sketching for a Better Educational Product: A Workshop for Teachers
That's exactly what it was.

It was designed to replace a growing set of systems that were all tiny forks of the same basic code base over a couple of years. Managing all that had become a mess, and it did need to be replaced. But there wan an opportunity and we ended up trying to reach for the stars when we should have aimed a bit lower.

The irony is that after the system had been in production for a few months, we noticed it had terrible performance that was getting worse with load.

It turned out the programmer who had written some parts of the system had it recalculating way too much data, things that didn't apply to what was going on and that couldn't have changed. It was probably an artifact from initial development (I'll do it this way to get it going, then cleanup later...). Once we caught and fixed that, it was much much faster.

That was the only optimization I remember it needing while I was there.
'Data Portal India' launched to increase transparency about Govt. functioning
No problem with people hustling to spread their content. It's how they do it that causes the irritation.
It's not about this specific application -- it's about the proverbial slippery slope. If an app that tracks drone strikes, based on publicly available information, can be excluded, where do we draw the line? And more to the point, where do they (i.e. Apple) draw the line, and what qualifies them to be drawing it?

Just to test the waters, I'd like to see an app that automatically locates the nearest abortion clinic. Also an app that automatically locates the nearest gun store. But these apps should be submitted by different people, at different times, just to see how differently they're treated.

But I should be happy about this brouhaha -- in the final analysis, incidents like this can only increase Android's market share, because no single company can exclude an application from Android, as Apple rather arbitrarily does with apps designed for their platform.
This submission brought to you by a likely and undisclosed Ziff Davis employee aka geek.com / extremetech.com / pcmag.com, all of which have quite an interesting history on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4462390
Funny then that rival implementations turn out to miss nuances Apple dealt with in its 1.0 implementation.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoo...

I've implemented pinch-to-zoom in a bunch of different contexts, and I agree that it's easy to do a half-assed version. AFAIK that's not what Apple patented, and you're free to implement half-assed pinch-to-zoom to your heart's content (although you may be infringing an earlier patent).
But there is a maven dependency available. I haven't used this, but what exactly is the problem when you can even use maven to load the file?

And do you know more libs are important? Please post them all to give me a possiblitiy to analyze them all.
I've compared the speeds, and they're accurate. If you're talking about the fast mode in some arcade machines, you can try "play turbo" which emulates that.
"Write the way you talk. Naturally."

WTF... He probably means something different than what he's saying here. The way most people talk naturally is pretty poor. It often doesn't even make sense when they're saying it out loud - reading it back in written form can be headache-inducing.

He's probably not saying "write exactly what you would say out loud", but that's the takeaway I got from it, and probably many others have too over the years.
How much time did it take you to get to $90K/m mark or how old is the site? How do you market something like this, just SEO?
HL2:EP3

Still waiting...
The question suffers from selection bias, the reason you don't have small teams making millions is that small teams making millions hire more developers and stop being small.

Sure there are companies that are financially successful and choose not to grow (i.e craigslist, plentyoffish) but they're a tiny minority.
oh christ!

please change the name before it's too late
This is extremely nice. Thank you!
Questions raised about Spotify through forum
agreed. however, imo, the big one that people overlook is the 'network effects' one. just as it would be appealing to be facebook, trying to become the next facebook is darn near impossible because of the network effects.

Getting someone to use your timetracker can be an uphill battle, but unless they're deriving value from other people using the same timetracker, you've got a fighting chance of at least convincing them to give it a try. But if much of the value they get from timetrackerX is that all their friends and clients are also on it, and they share time info around... it's extremely hard to even begin to compete with that, because it's not a feature you can replicate.
You see articles like this quite regularly and they always don't quite solve the problem. Most solutions rely on computers keeping a secret, usually a hash on the server, or a private key in the browser.

Due to the possibility of poor client side security the private key approach is a none-starter as malware could get hold of it. You could password protect the key, but in that case you would need to prompt the user regularly to avoid the key being held in memory. In that case you might as well just hash the password, and generate session cookies.

Due to the possibility of poor server side security the hashed password option is also problematic. We have to trust that the website will use the right algorithm.

Any solution must avoid the need for computers to keep secrets. That is difficult.
I think the performance gap between ARMv8 and x86 Haswell are just far too great.
Isn't this like the fourth time?
The difference is that most other grey-hat SEO is now ineffective and the only "scalable" SEO left to do is low-quality content marketing.

There was a podcast interviewing an SEO company on HN recently that was getting upvotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412907

His whole recommendation was hiring cheaper content creators on fiverr or elance for articles/videos to build links.
Why Is Startup Culture So Unhealthy?
Bruce Willis to sue Apple over iTunes inheritance
Here's a manifesto: do your job, do it well. Some tools/ideologies will work better for you than they do for others. Strive for perfection, accept reality.
Ask HN: Object realocation with memmove
Hi,

I stumbled upon folly [1], Facebook Open Source Library and in readme of vector [2] I found that it's possible to move objects with memmove. I imagine it's possible for int or char but how it's possible for complex objects? In [2] they even say that Only a tiny minority of objects are genuinely non-relocatable. Could someone provide an example of non-trivial memmoveable class?

[1] https://github.com/facebook/folly
[2] https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/docs/FBVector.md#object-relocation
Black Mesa: Source coming soon
Been waiting for this to come out for years!
Issue 5 of The MagPi out now
U.S. Companies Brace for an Exit From the Euro by Greece
I can think of two modern payment-required forums off the top of my head. They couldn't be more different.

Metafilter: $5, primarily about posting interesting links and having hopefully civil discussions.

Something Awful: $10, very free-form and anarchic, used to be a center of organizing trolls, now it's not so much for that but it still has a kind of "friendly assholes" aura.
Because someone didn't factcheck an irrelevant fact othside of his expertise, for which it is entirely normal to trust 'dubious' sources?

(In which I include the author's memory)
classes with data that has to be aligned to certain byte boundaries might take issue with memmove
Please don't (refrain).

It's not like ANY and ALL HN conversations don't get derailed in some sub-thread or another.

Plus, it is insightful to here comments from a language designer/implementor in language related threads.
As someone put it, Android isn't Linux, it's a Java stack. It could run on Windows CE if Google had made it so.
I use FuzzyFinder instead of CommandT + BufferExplorer.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984
BookBlock: A Content Flip Plugin
Doesn't involving another third-party vendor add an additional point of failure to the system?
> In its response to EPIC, the TSA claims that the earliest possible date it could "finalize documents" before even starting the public comment process would be "the end of February 2013."

And yet they were able to swiftly decide that these things are safe enough and effective enough to be deployed.
Logitech is pretty much killing Squeezebox
A valid point but we all know there is and can never be any true security as long as the programmers of systems are human. This approach is definitely useful but not always. I wouldn't want my email account protected by it but we all have some accounts where convenience is more valuable than security and others where security is preferable to convenience. Since we'll never have a perfect system the trick is to know when to use each technique.
Sequel Pro and PostgreSQL Support
If the certificate is device-bound, then how do you authenticate from another device?
LBE works for Android permissions but not for distinct network endpoints per application.
Architect in the making here.

I was expecting Graves's article to be some form of luddism judged by the title, but after reading it I assume that it is linkbait that was added by the editors. In fact, I don't see anything overly negative that Graves said. He correctly points out the reality: that there are certain parts of a ‘creative’ work flow that are not addressed by any software at this moment. CAD has it's place and has made drafting easier, but honestly drafting is not where the value or enjoyment lies in an architect's day-to-day. The term "CAD monkey" exists for a reason.

There is a very important distinction that Graves points out: “referential sketch”, “preparatory study” and “definitive drawing”. Each of these is very different and has different requirements.

I used to dream of something like a unified work flow for this stuff, where you could do everything in one, well integrated (digital) ecosystem. It does not exist, not for architecture, and I suspect it's mainly because an architects requirements at the first stages are almost the inverse of what they are at last stages. Compare the properties of a sketch to construction documents: in the former you don't want any friction and keep things abstract and detached from technical requirements, whereas the latter has to stand up. An analogy would be going from a fashion designer's ‘inspiration board’ to instructions for making the clothes.

The first stages are rough, contradictory, abstract, idiosyncratic. Things that software is not very good at being. I feel that especially the last word on that list is crucial, since there are some people (like me) who don't even draw that much, I much prefer to work with text and more abstract references in the stage that Graves described as "referential sketch".

CAD has addressed the points where communication standards exist, but nobody brainstorms and researches in the same way so it's difficult to build a tool around that. As an example: another architect, Steven Holl, travels frequently. He does small (A5-ish) watercolours with a pocket set, takes a picture of it with his iPhone and sends it to his studio in NY. His staff knows him enough now to understand them and can use them to develop their projects.
The ethics of cloning: Why ‘original’ isn’t always essential
The URL pointed to this text after it was shut down:

Hi there – thanks for your interest in our phone-based login experiment.
While we have concluded this particular experiment, we constantly experiment with new and more secure authentication mechanisms.

Stay tuned for something even better!

Dirk Balfanz, Google Security Team.
"allowing you to not only add a column without locking the table"

To be more clear, the actual advantage is that adding a column in postgres is an O(1) operation if the default value is NULL. It still requires taking a lock, but for many workloads you won't notice it. You still need to be aware of it though, because it can cause problems if you have long-running transactions.
Well because every site are made different, and uses different tech, with different bottleneck.

But with SSD, RAM becoming a commodity, ( both prices has been dropping shapely ) I/O are much easier to deal with.

And with every release of PostgreSQL / MySQL, Easier Database Replication and more common practice of scaling we are much much better at it then say 2 - 3 years ago.
Downloading now. I'll update my comment with initials thoughts and likes/dislikes.
Ask HN: How do you find clients?
Hi, I'm thinking about doing some freelance web design and marketing for a bit of extra cash.

Aside from cold calls what are some good ways to obtain clients?
>When you say that Go currently isn't very fast, maybe you should try coding something in it. I found it to be suprisingly fast.

I've tried in in 2-3 things which I re-implemented afterwards in C and had before in Python.

In all cases it has about 2x the speed of Python, which I consider meh.

(The tasks where mostly parsing some huge files and doing some filtering and computations, and C made it IO bound while Python/Go both had it CPU bound).
The Mathematician’s Dilemma
Seems over the top, but I think it's great if someone wants to make a commitment to being better at what they do.
Cacheback - asynchronous cache refreshing for Django
Half-Life creator Valve released an updated version of the game in 2004 that was built around its Source game code or engine. That official update of Half-Life was generally regarded as unsatisfactory and led to the Black Mesa project which aimed to do a better job.

Citation needed. Load times aside, Half-Life 2 was a spectacular game, and one of the best-reviewed games of all time. Metacritic's score for it was a 96 with 81 positive reviews: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/half-life-2

edit: OHHHHHHHH. My bad. Thanks for pointing out that they were referring to Half-Life: Source.
Is my southern accent a hinderance for my app demo video?
Probabilistic Routing Protocol for Intermittently Connected Networks [pdf]
Yes, it really rubs salt in the wound when you get a spam text and then realize that cost me money.
It seems you're laboring under a misapprehension -- that quantum effects can be understood in the same way that a pendulum, or a planetary orbit, can be understood. Quantum effects can be modeled and predicted very precisely, but they're not open to everyday comprehension like macroscopic physics. Niels Bohr once said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle can be summarized by saying that there is an irreducible level of uncertainty in measuring a particle's position and momentum -- if you increase the momentum measurement accuracy, you sacrifice the position measurement accuracy, and vice versa. To put this in the simplest terms, if you multiply momentum and position accuracy together, the product of the two accuracies cannot be smaller (more precise) than a certain well-defined lower threshold.

You can force a greater accuracy of either of the two possible measurements, but only at the expense of the other. In the final analysis, if you measure, say, position with an arbitrarily high degree of accuracy, you sacrifice the ability to measure momentum at all. And vice versa.

It's important to say that this fact about measurement at the microscale affects macroscopic measurements as well, but with a progressively lower probability of affecting events, as size and mass increase. To say this in the simplest way, quantum effects are present at all scales, but with a decreased probability of influence as sizes and momenta increase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
Ask HN: Experience selling non-hosted web app?
I realize that this is typically enterprise-y in nature, but there are certain tools (e.g. profiling/monitoring tools), which don't quite work well as a hosted service. I am not talking about Desktop software, but software that needs to be set-up internally behind the firewall.

What has been your experience selling a non-hosted web application/tool?
With that line of logic, don't do anything that's hard and has a slim margin of success when applied to the population as a whole.
Fairly certain they're referring to Half-Life Source, not HL2.