skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Silvia Hartmann is exploring the idea of allowing the reader to follow the creation of a novel by writing on Google Docs. you can follow her on real time here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AwxZlO1uVnFFKh_NWAlZ78oK...
With Github we can add to this the revision history plus branching, forking... I think we can go beyond the idea of a novel as a unique finished version written by a unique author. Novels could be as open source software : you don't have a finished product, but versions, and you don't have an author, but several contributors.
What is the point of having every service class have an interface?
Can someone explain why they say it will take 2 hours for him to reach his altitude? Right now he's 12.5 miles up after 35:26 minutes.

Will he slow down as his altitude increases?

I keep hearing them talk about dropping ballast -- is there a danger in ascending too fast?
Amen. Not to mention most Tech sites make no attempts to do investigative reporting.

What annoys me most are the "news" posts about startups that throw around all these insane numbers that aren't even remotely realistic. Six months later people are surprised that the company is "pivoting" or is nearly bankrupt.

More often than not they simply wait for the next press release by X company and present it as if its hard hitting news then move on to the next post.
Its a problem with CSS frameworks these days (especially bootstrap). No longer are they the starting point for a design but instead they are now considered the final solution.
I think this is a perfectly fair debate, with good points on both sides. It's similar to the incredibly ironic sponsorship of sporting events by tobacco and fast food companies. Or perhaps to Bill Gates using illegal monopolistic methods to impose the Windows Tax on the world and then spending the wealth saving lives.

These are deep issues to ponder about morality, touching on Ends vs. Means, although that may be OT for HN. But Felix's ambition is somewhat noble, even if RedBull's sponsorship may not be.
12.5 miles is 66k feet. He's at 44k.

EDIT:

But yes, he will also slow down as he goes up. The balloon will also change shape and expand greatly in size.
Developers Deserve Residual Royalties
Stately.js:JavaScript based FSM engine for Node.js and the Browser.
he will slow down as he gets higher
You're right, it's an ad at the end of the day.

But there are much worse (debatable) products that spend money on really shitty ad campaigns. So this isn't really bad.

I personally respect Red Bull for having found a niche (crazy adventure sports of all sorts) and making possible whole careers in these amazing sports.

At the end of the day, not a lot of people believe you NEED Red Bull to make this jump, but thousands of kids around the world are being inspired right this minute.
You could say exactly the same thing about any network news program (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc.)
A high school failure? It looks like he got a BA and then went to the best management school in the world and then became a billionaire. I'd like to be that kind of failure.

Maybe his understanding of physics is wrong. But maybe your understanding of the importance of that is wrong?
Yes, and he will stop going up complately (vertically) after the density of helium will be equal to the density of air.
Sorry saying "taking advantage" and "take advantage of people's generally trusting nature" is not the same thing. Or at least that was not my intent when I stated that. If I do consulting in an area I am knowledgeable in I am "taking advantage of people's lack of experience in XYZ".

Further example: "Taking advantage" used alone without a qualifier is like "taking advantage of a girl" (say at a vulnerable moment). Someone is vulnerable so you take advantage of them. "Taking advantage of a girl's tendency to want a well educated guy", used in that context is not the same "taking advantage". The first is a negative. The second realizes and fulfills people's innate makeup. What about "taking advantage of an airfare sale" or "taking advantage of a discount offered". So why is the use of "taking advantage" with a qualifier bad?

"take advantage of people's generally trusting nature" does not in itself imply someone has done something wrong. Just like saying "take advantage of lax security and therefore brought extra liquids on board the aircraft" does not imply something bad has happened.
2 thoughts - "under appreciated" is a better way of thinking of it. And, there's no accounting for taste.
If you want to know where the metaphor of philosophy as an operating system comes from:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c8an2XZ3MU

(The video is called Culture Is Your Operating System, but what he's talking about is the philosophical assumptions that are completely invisible unless you find a way to step outside your culture.)
Looks wonderful. Love the "clean on paste" function.
Yes, he will slow down the higher he gets. What's driving him up is the difference in density between the Helium inside his balloon and the air outside. The atmosphere becomes less dense with increasing altitude, so the density difference, and thus the buoyancy decreases as well.

Not sure about ascending too fast, I'd imagine at high speeds there's a risk of damaging the balloon due to wind.
Thanks for sharing the details of your interesting experience.
This has been of special interest to me since (please excuse my shameless plug) my company, https://iridize.com, allows any website to create just such site tours - with no coding required. Go ahead, give it a try and let us know what you think.

thanks again,
Eyal, CEO @ iridize
Ok, I didn't realize the number to the right of the clock was meters and not miles. I guess the decimal instead of the comma threw me off.
Kaufmann Study - Immigrant Entrepreneurship Has Stalled
I'm pretty sure I seen someone doing python macros using a custom codec: http://docs.python.org/library/codecs.html
Trinity Accused Of Imaginary Commits And Accomplishments By KWin Developer
Nice article, although a bit terse. One part that jumped out at me was:

> It is possible to implement fully persistent arrays in O(1) space per update, with O(lglgN) time for access and updates [4].

This is surprising because it would guarantee at most a log(log(n)) slowdown for any immutable data structure (instead of the log(n) bound I was aware of). But then I checked out the paper and it turns out that the complexity is conditional:

> Fully persistent array use can also be provided
at O(1) amortized cost, provided that the algorithm satisﬁes a simple requirement as to
uniformity of access. For those algorithms which do not access the array uniformly or
single-threadedly, array reads or updates take at most O(log n) amortized time, where n
is the size of the array

By uniformity they mean no index is used more than K times the average use-per-index (for some constant K). A simple example of a data structure breaking that condition is a heap. The top element is accessed every query but the bottom elements, that dominate the average, are accessed once per n queries (not a constant).
"your comment about being tired of the pitch is confusing

It actually makes sense in context though. The parent's profile states the their account was setup 12 days ago. Of course it could be another account for someone on HN for a longer time (a throwaway) that would know what you are saying but my guess (because of the comment) that's simply not the case.

The parent has leveraged their lack of experience on HN to actually throw patio11 and the OP into the same category. I've seen this happen in other cases where someone has limited experience in a particular area and tends to "lever" any new thing they observe to greater importance than it should. (For example there are time periods on HN where certain articles are in vogue. If you joined during that period you would get the impression that that was always the case most likely.)
Y'know how "work expands to fill a vacuum"? Well in media noise expands to fill bandwidth.
UCAS, universities and open data
Very cool. Also worth noting these guys have a CSS framework (who doesn't these days?) that looks similarly clean and elegant, though I didn't dig into it enough to make a truly informed call. But still, worth noting...

http://imperavi.com/kube/
Imagine if LOTR was on github...

I like the idea of modularization in fiction. This already happens in fan fiction, but you have to extract most of the parts yourself (I think?)

It would be really useful in SF/Fantasy novels where you have to build out lots of worlds, characters and miscellaneous details like languages, landscapes and history.

If you could "borrow" a lot of the structures that are in a Creative Commons license and use them in your story, you could focus on the parts that are important to you, and let others focus on what works for them.

Artists could come in, draw characters. Cartographers could make maps. App developers could make interactive features. Linguists could make fictional languages.
But, will it advance the state of science? Maybe if he actually goes to Mach 1 that could prove interesting but otherwise the "science" part of that whole thing makes me cringe.

For example they put the "edge of space" at 36km (it's actually usually considered to be at ~100km), there is no explanation for such gross errors except that they want to market the crap out of this.
3,749,231 watching now popele watching live on youtube, this must be a record?

Update: 4,924,693 watching now
Update: 5,056,344 watching now
The Amazon S3 support seems to suggest that the authors believe it is acceptable to store your AWS key ID and "secret" key in your client-side JavaScript code. Am I missing something here?
I agree, but then I get worried that the same kids don't understand what sponsorship means, and that they'll assume that drinking Red Bull is what people like this do, and then they'll start up a very unhealthy and addictive habit (drinking lots of Red Bull). Which is pretty bad.
Awesome mate!
37 Tested PHP, Perl, and JavaScript Regular Expressions
Don't forget, caffeinated soda

It is certainly a worthy project to be funded, with a significantly smaller moral compromise than in the case of tobacco companies.
If your philosophy starts in Seneca you've got a problem: missing the real thing (Plato & Aristoteles to boot but many others as well).
The Death of Free Speech In The West
The Verge, The Next Web, ArsTechnica, and other sites produce lots of high-quality tech journalism regularly.

It's true there's a lot of crap out there, but this has always been true in the journalism world. And it's true that many sites have dubious practices that are 100% for reasons that don't matter to readers, like advertising and SEO. But is that the journalist's fault -- or the system's?

I speak to editors and writers regularly as part of my work at Parse.ly, and many of them are extremely worried about being "dinged by Google". They also hire experts who read the tea leaves on declarations from Matt Cutts and the Google search team, hoping to come up with a strategy that will make Google treat their site as one of several "blessed" domains.

Why? Showing up well in SERP pages or Google News can often be the difference between an article that fizzles and one that garners thousands of eyeballs.

The problem with SEO isn't that some editors/writers do it. The problem is that it works. And, it often has nothing to do with the quality of your content.

It's like complaining that public stock markets are "broken" because some companies goose accounting numbers to look better to investors (e.g. Groupon). Yes, some do, but not all companies. No system is perfect.
There's no argument. You are just correct. Saying Bootstrap is overused is like saying Wordpress is overused which does not matter. The fact is, as you said, the default look and feel of websites using these frameworks is overused, not the technology behind the websites. The backend should be overused.
A level maths from 30 years ago
Ask HN: Open Sourcing GWT/APP engine based daily deals startup code
Hi Hackers,
We worked on a daily deals startup in 2011 which was catering to the Indian market. Unfortunately we did not take over the world and decided to dedicate our time and resources elsewhere.

Now I am thinking of open sourcing the code as it can serve someone out there as a good resource for building a bigger application in GWT.

What is the best way to do this and are there any tools which you will recommend which I can use to cleanup and search for any information which i might not want to release in the wild (hard coded pwds etc?)

Also, even though it was failed startup does it lend any credibility to the resumes of the founders :). The interns moved on to land gigs at FB and I am pretty sure the experience helped them but what is the hacker communities take on how to sell this experience.

I apologize if this sounds an odd question but thoughts are appreciated.
Here’s To The Death Of “Personal Branding” On Internet
Really helpful set of Regular Expressions for multiple operations.
Value is always subjective. Beane's analytic model doesn't calculate value it defines a model for winning games and analyzes players based on the model.
“Suicide Prices” (and the Coming Crisis) at Big Law Firms
TinyMCE have something like this, but yeah, it should be a easy-access function.

The only downer for me : it uses JQuery, which I often avoid in admin pages.
Good tech journalism exists

Are unpaid comments and blog posts, however, not asymptotically approaching/surpassing their quality?

What about signal/noise ratio?
Big data is useless unless it’s also fast, diverse
Yes you are absolutely correct.
http://imperavi.com/redactor/examples/s3/
Why not

alias ls="ls --block-size=\'1 --color=auto"
For me it wouldn't load in Chrome but works perfectly in Firefox (on OSX)...
What are "hygenic macros" and why we should import them from Scheme and Rust?
WaspDB - NoSQL(on disk) database for Android
"I've had this conversation with architects and city planners and they all say this."

Now you are having a conversation with one who isn't.

The analogy between architectural patterns and software patterns is more akin to the way in which software patterns are not relevant to an application programmer in regards to the structure of black boxes such as third party libraries or the OS kernel. Architectural design depends on OPM (other people's money) to execute.

Urban planning not writing a web app. It's maintaining legacy spaghetti code in within an institution with entrenched interests. Brasilias only come along every hundred years or so, and your average joe doesn't get appointed. But just about every one of the major urban planning patterns is standard consideration in most contemporary municipal planning departments [in the US]. Politics and money of course tend to have an influence over outcomes, of course.

On the architectural side, a lot of A Pattern Language is not directly applicable to most architectural commissions because it is focused on domestic architecture rather than commercial. Banks don't offer a place to apply, "The couple's realm."

Incidentally, complaining about the impact of building codes has probably been going on for nearly FOUR millennia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
here in germany 25 paid days off is the minimum, I get 27 where I work, then there's holidays of which there are a lot. And I think this makes me a lot more productive. A month ago I took 2 weeks, after 9 months with no break, and I've noticed my productivity skyrocketing - 9 months with non-stop development can be really draining. With my own company I am definately going to give adequate paid vacation time, I think its mandatory for staying motivated and in top condition at the job.
FYI, there is no need to change GNU ls to get that behavior. You can make it use your locale's separator with either the --block-size="'1" option or by setting the LS_BLOCK_SIZE envvar to that same string:

$ LC_ALL=en_US.UTF8 ls -og --block-size="'1" .
-rw-------. 1 5,145,416 Oct 5 16:44 A
-rw-------. 1 5,137,692 Oct 4 14:37 B
-rw-------. 1 5,147,168 Oct 8 07:52 C

This feature is documented in the "Block size" section of the coreutils manual: i.e., you can type this to see it:

info coreutils 'block size'
This is a pretty good list of data structures that are out there, that are also useful, and to which most programmers never seem to have been introduced. I regularly use variants of some of the data structures listed (plus several that did not make the list) and frequently get questions about the design and structure from programmers that have never seen them.

In practice, you can get away with knowing just a handful of data structures and most programmers do. However, when it comes time to profile it is valuable to have alternatives to what the standard libraries and implementations offer. For any given set of constraints on the intended use case and workload for a classic container, there is usually a data structure that is nearly ideal for that use case. Also, there are often neat ideas buried in some of these data structures that are worth learning for their own sake.

For the work that I do (high-performance C++) the first pass will often use the C++ STL. When we start profiling, the STL is usually among the first things that need to be replaced. Having a large number of workload optimized data structures in the toolkit for the same abstract container makes this relatively easy.
Another test case: I pasted a couple paragraphs of John Gruber's Kindle review in there, and it shows me (only) "Fleetwood Mac" (derived from the phrase "my Mac"), and "I Love" (the country music song, from the sentence "I love glowing screens").

It skipped terms that seem to me much more obvious links, like "iPhone", "iPad", "TiVo", "ATM", "Kindle", "credit card", "supermarket", or "e-ink".
Redbull is generous to fund science. We should thank our corporate overlords.
It doesn't really say the problem at all -- it just uses examples and lets the reader think between the lines.

They're great examples through. Exactly the kinds of reasons I got out of tech journalism.
Stapes.js 0.6 released: a tiny Javascript MVC microframework, 1.6kb
When press is free, it's not free press anymore.

If a website is not behind some kind of paywall, he lives on ads and must enter the crazy linkbaiting/SEO dance.
Of course he doesn't. This is Tim Ferris. He didn't spend more than 4 hours on this crap.
Could someone explain to me whether this is a marketing stunt and nothing more or whether there is some substance behind this? Put another way: Will any scientists or engineers (at least potentially) learn something interesting from this?

It's cool no matter what, but it would be even cooler if there were some substance behind it.
I wonder, for every vote on a submission here, how many people actually visit the link?
Black hat world, fiverr, although the price is a little higher than 10000/$10 if you want US.

Not an endorsement, just info for those who are curious and a warning that numbers aren't necessarily real.
Actually, Red Bull is also investing in "serious" sport, with profit interests. Successfully so, as well:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/sep/26/red-bull-raci...

They also own a NASCAR, a football and an ice hockey team.
I really like the way Coffeescript is documented.
http://coffeescript.org/
There's this page on their website that should help you answer your question: http://www.redbullstratos.com/science/scientific-values/
What you're missing is that the secret isn't present. What's there is a policy, which is a way to preauthorize file uploads to S3. The policy is signed with the secret key ahead of time. It looks to me like all the fields in that form are safe to be exposed publicly.

See http://aws.amazon.com/articles/Java/1434.

Addendum: The "key" there means key in the S3 sense, as in the name of the object being stored.
This is easily the biggest databreach that I have ever seen. I sincerely hope no one noticed this before, this has the potential to have a severe impact on so many lives in New Zealand.
I use "du <directory> -h -d 1|sort -h" for this because large files may be nested in directories and ls doesn't display the size of content directories (as far as I know). The output is sorted. Note that the "-d" flag for "du" doesn't work with all versions, but there were similar flags on all systems.
Art Of War? Book of Five Rings? Huh?) Seems like 4 hours for research is not enough..

And, of course, Meditations isn't any war journal.)
In the US at least, you can also watch live on TV on The Discovery Channel.
Valuable Lessons Learned In The First Year As A Startup CEO
So that's one month of a micro instance?
how does the NLP work for this?
Felix's helmet heating apears to be broken. They've also cut the radio talk between Felix and Joseph.
Xml digital signatures with X 509 certificate in Java
Why not use pseudo elements?

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/dpceK

edit: actually looks like it doesn't work in chrome. Anyone know why?
You may be victim of the "usb fuse" issue. I soldered some 1ohm resisters across the usb fuses that are present and my lockups went away (except when I try to do 2 things at once, hit swap and thrash)
I've personally found language books that spend chapter after chapter introducing syntax and standard library to be brutally boring, and never finish them.

There's a lot to be said for just having a project idea in mind and picking up knowledge on the fly as you try to hammer it out.
Not to belabor the point, but I think it bears repeating that Terence McKenna recommended a chemical perturbation of the brain, that is, a visionary substance, be used in order to 'step outside your culture'.

Some substances can temporarily remove/obscure one's entire personality structure and linguistic faculties while enhancing awareness. Such an experience offers one the opportunity to truly exist outside their biographical circumstances for a time.
Yeah, something like a finger tree is amortized constant time for sequential access, but log(n) for random access away from the ends.

What is nearly ALWAYS overlooked is constant factors. A finger tree is in a nice complexity class, but still requires a lot of per-object overhead compared to an array, that can turn a 10MB chunk of data into a 100MB data structure.
This article argues yes, there is more than marketing: http://www.wired.com/playbook/2012/10/felix-baumgartner-stra...
Besides proving our thoughts on what happens to the human body going through the speed of sound, there's an aspect of safety as well.

If successful jumping at 120,000 feet, that means that NASA could deploy these same space suits as an exit plan for astronauts in an emergency.
Some of the ones that didn't make it:

Smushed list. Size O(1). The smushed list is a list of variables (of the same type), stored in a single variable of that type. To produce the smushed list, simply XOR all the elements of the list together, then store. To get a value back, simply XOR the smushed list by all the elements other than the one you want. Smushing is also embarrassingly parallel (you can smush two halves separately and then smush the results) so producing smushed lists is blazingly fast.

Unlinked list. O(n). This is slightly faster than a linked list, and acts as a "black box". Simply allocate nodes that are not linked to each other in any way. The data normally stays out of the way of your program, but in case of a core dump you can find it again. NOTE: If your language does reference-counting this will not work. Get a real language that does what you say.

Search-bush. Search trees are good at bisecting data, but they are not really conducive to a random walk for inspiration. Begin by constructing a binary search tree, keeping track of all the nodes you've added, and simply add a third, random, pointer to each node - have it point at a random node somewhere in the tree. In the search algorithm, either follow the left, right, or random node, depending on how much meandering you are interested in doing. The journey is the destination.
Heidegger and Wittgenstein may have more in common than the year of birth.