skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The interface is freaking unusable.

It's funny that I keep hearing people say this, yet hundreds of thousands of people are using it just fine before it's even released. A large number of them even using it as their daily OS. This indicates to me that it is usable. Perhaps by "unusable", some people really just mean "different than I'm used to"? Because to me, unusable means impossible to use, which we know isn't true.
Impressive sayings of Steve Jobs.
I think you may have linked to the comments unintentionally.
Elizabethan courtiers hid many of their assets behind nominees. If Chinese leaders are also using nominees who aren't family members (I don't see why they wouldn't), the fortunes they control could be a lot bigger than the NYT can discover.
Not true. Look at Russia, Brazil, Mexico, most of the Middle East, etc.... In general, the only thing you can do about it is leave. Few exceptions are where there are enough opportunities that it pays for everyone to benefit or where a small group of people with no resources realize that they need to band together to prosper: Singapore, scandanavian countries, Japan. Notice some of these are in Asia too?
Our school once had this competition as well. Given the short time period of these competitions, you have to buy high beta stocks in order to do well, or very low beta if the market is falling overall.

In order to win this a friend and I decided to team up and split the winnings. Basically what we did was to get one of us to buy the riskiest investments that we could (penny stocks, other low cap stocks, risky derivatives etc.) and the other would short them. This way over the course of the few weeks one of us would be dead last, and the other far ahead.

Worked like a charm.
The fact that people are willing to wait a couple of days for Amazon when they can buy exactly the same product immediately for slightly more money at the local Best Buy speaks to how much they're willing to put up with for a marginal cost savings. I think that anyone who expects a "sinister phase II" where Amazon takes advantage of their market share by jacking up prices fundamentally misunderstands Amazon. They are, and always will be, a low-margin retailer.
Somewhat related: Pandoc supports delimited ("fenced") blocks as well, but as an alternative allows you to use tildes

~~~python
print "hi"
~~~

rather than backticks

```python
print "hi"
```

My own 2 cents: I like the more symmetrical tildes.

Anyhow though, yes, I agree; it's great that github supports delimited/fenced syntax-highlighted code blocks and renders .md files there automatically.
I remember reading a review on EMP weapons in Nature magazine some time back. The conclusion was, that it is nearly impossible to reliably knock out equipment without precise knowledge of the setup, weather conditions, etc...

Here's the original article: http://www.nature.com/news/microwave-weapons-wasted-energy-1...

And a quote from it:
"... a prototype non-lethal crowd-control weapon that emits a beam of microwaves at 95 gigahertz. Radiation at that frequency penetrates less than half a millimetre into the skin, so the beam was supposed to deliver an intense burning sensation to anyone in its path, forcing them to move away, but without, in theory, causing permanent damage.
However, the day of the test was cold and rainy. The water droplets in the air did what moisture always does: they absorbed the microwaves. And when some of the reporters volunteered to expose themselves to the attenuated beam, they found that on such a raw day, the warmth was very pleasant."
You've never been enraged by poorly written tools or technologies? There have been times I wished I could reach through my monitor and throttle some well-meaning idiot for wasting hours or days of my time.

Imagine that you're a mechanic working on a motor that uses the ProprietaryNew fastener (hex heads? so 20th century!). Unfortunately, the only ProprietaryNew wrenches are made out of cheap metal, and the sockets strip with regularity. You can't imagine saying a few nasty words about the parentage of everyone in ProprietaryNewCo?
Regarding the URL handling, I also used to hate it, but wrote a tool to make it easier to deal with; details are here if you're interested (despite the title, the relevant tool is not Vim-only): <http://tadhg.com/wp/2012/10/07/tools-for-writing-restructure...;
Major props for the reading material at the end. That's one of the best books on programming ever written, imo.
20th century history
Luck is a big unknown except in hindsight

Tools, techniques, and strategies for dealing with "the unknown" are a fundamental part of intelligence. As a corralary, the denial of uncertainty is the most un-intelligent of strategies.

It follows that your statement has within it a bit of insight: just knowing that risk matters. So even if you can't know (with precision) your exact 'luck' at every moment, you can build upon the fact that X,Y,Z observed variable could have gone another way had P, Q, R not happened by chance. Just being aware of the magnitude of the potential variation is a useful piece of information. For example, this can guide you to more rationally hedge your bets. Or to "make luck" by managing variables to not happen by chance. Or to just know when it makes sense to keep rolling the dice -- persistence & resiliency. Etc. In this sense, Jessica did touch on something that seems to come in handy here -- resourcefullness -- just in general but in particular when the "enexpected" happens.
> Who says creativity can't happen while you're washing dishes?

It can't if you actually focused 100% on washing dishes. Which is my point exactly, which you seem to be perfectly missing.

The whole concept of 'mindfulness' is contrary to serendipity. It is also, thankfully, contrary to how intelligent minds work.
I can confirm this. It is blocked in Shanghai
I used to believe, that legislators used a outdated model of intellectual property. Unfortunately I am wrong, after all if I buy a book I am allowed to modify the content, by writing in the margins or by tearing out pages. ( I may even make a collage, using several pages of the book.) At least as long as I do not sell or perform my modifications.
So I wonder, why I am not allowed to do the same things with software? Linking another library is simply not different than gluing the first half of Lord of the Rings to the second half of the Cryptonomicron.
I wonder if her strength in picking up social cues also causes people to panic because shes the office warrior, detecting problems/issues and cutting through to their core.
> Exactly right! but if you trade in comex futures then you are still trading in paper - albeit paper gold.

I'm not trading gold. I wrote "non bubble futures" (which includes gold - it's definitely not a bubble), but what I wanted to write was "non fictional futures" (gold and silver are fictional in the sense they cannot be settled). Many other commodities actually have a chance to settle most of the open interest should trading stop tomorrow.
I didn't confuse them - I explicitly distinguished between them. Scalability is a category of performance - it is performance at scale. Most of these suggestions may help with individual browser loading - but will not make a significant difference in scalability. However, the pretense for the investigation was the high level of traffic that was imminent - a scalability challenge.
And if you like Markdown... I wrote a Chrome/Firefox/Thunderbird extension that lets you write email in MD and then render it before sending: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here

Enjoy.
BSG should be required watching for all future military leaders. Just in case.
That sounds neat. If by chance you ever write a tutorial I'd be all ears! :D
One of the requests I want to make is to make Markdown suitable for a ebook toolchain. This means some of the abilities from Tex, like including one MD file in another. Including images, etc.

A lot of these would not impact Markdown as such, but would be a massive boon for those doing self-publishing. I do understand that image alignment is not a light topic, but it is an opportunity to define a text/image layout standard for reflowable content. I dont know if Tex does that well enough.
Interestingly tptacek commented on this saying - 'Matasano' ==> 'Last doctor you would go to'. And they were sad for a few minutes and then were 'very happy' with the name.

The implication being that 'Matasano' is the last doc you go to who 'CURES' you I guess...
If you want to hire anyone probably best not to look at their genitals.
If consensus-building is one of the goals, then I would agree with you that Gruber's blessing is important. But one of the goals of Markdown is to provided easy-to-use markup for text. Whatever the next iteration of this looks like, I think that people will get on board if it provides a clear advantage over Markdown as it exists as well as other markup formats. With or without Our Dear BDFL's blessing.

Only geeks will complain about whether the successor of Markdown is deployed. Others, the majority of whom user-friendly markup is aimed at, won't care.

If enough people get behind this, it won't matter that Rockdown is a peer to Markdown. With good tools and support, Rockdown has the potential to exceed Markdown, even if it's just providing a better canonical parser and documentation since it's pretty clear from most of these comments that this is where Markdown is lacking.
I don't know if Reddit's implementation of Markdown is principled, but as a syntax it's pretty ubiquitous so you might have the traction to make it standard.
Wondering why a talented group of developers that left one large Silicon Valley-based search company to form a startup would work for another large Silicon Valley search/media company.
This is one of the reasons Why left the programming community. People are not thankful. Even if you release a great idea - with obviously _not_ the best code - the one thing you get is criticism. Maybe also the words that "you are the worst programmer on earth" following the words that "you put your family in such a shame".

You know what programmers think because of such comments? "My code is so bad I can't release it. Even if the idea is good." And this Sir helps no-one.

Stop this shit.
If it's legal to jailbreak it, shouldn't the company be oblige to provide an official way to do so? Why is it expected that the users come up with the means? What if it's next to impossible due to hardware encryption and whatnot.
It's already not trivial on most devices.
You're wasting your time conversing with the parent. Mann is a good scientist and there is no credible evidence otherwise.

But let's say the parent could discredit Mann and erase 100% of his research output tomorrow. It would not change the scientific theory of climate change one bit because so many other scientists have now confirmed Mann's findings.

The politics of personal attacks don't work against science because nature is what it is. Once we know something about nature, tearing some guy down personally does not wipe out that knowledge.

But since the attack against Mann is a political campaign run by political operatives (note the link to Tucker Carlson's site the Daily Caller), they don't know any better.
Design and Build your own Pinhole Camera
It's about CPC not Asian, more precisely
The common Chinese understanding of government is cyclical: each dynasty dispels the abuses of the past when it arrives, then becomes corrupt and is itself overthrown. The current regime is trying to base its legitimacy on "results" - ie growth - not clean government. It is also using nationalism to divert popular attention. This may work. If it doesn't, however, Chinese tradition makes it unlikely that the party leaders will be forgiven. A bloodless transition to democracy is sadly the least likely outcome.
I can't speculate on antidaily's reasoning, but I can tell you why I don't like this way of doing markup. (I thought I was the last one.)

First is the lack of standardization. Asterisks traditionally meant boldface, I thought, but in some of these systems they mean italics. Some use underscores for italics, while others use slashes. And those are just the common conventions; the less frequently used ones tend to be even less standardized.

Second is the fact that the more conventions these languages implement, the more likely I am to emit one unintentionally, and then have to figure out how to escape the input so it's treated literally, if the language even supports that. (Note for instance the long-standing Lisp convention of putting asterisks around special variable names.)

Thirdly, the syntax rules of these languages are often ill-specified and incorrectly implemented, making it difficult to tell at times how to get the effect I want.

EDITED to add: if you're wondering what I would suggest as an alternative to Markdown-style markup, this is an example of the kind of thing I prefer: http://nbsp.io/development/doccy-a-mid-weight-markup-languag...

The syntax is uniform, but much easier to type than bare HTML.
I, too, would be strongly against "automatic return-based linebreaks." Given that markdown has constructions for lists and code blocks, one very rarely needs a hard line break anyway. Currently markdown works fine both for people who hard-wrap and people who soft-wrap. Let's keep it that way.
Steps For Using VPN On Smartphones
Blast from the past: Developer books from SGI
For example, SGI C language reference using mipspro compilers:

http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/manuals/0000/007-0701-150/pd...

Send mail to the following address:
Technical Publications
SGI
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, M/S 535
Mountain View, California 94043–1351
• Send a fax to the attention of “Technical Publications” at +1 650 932 0801.
SGI values your comments and will respond to them promptly
Top contributors to politicians
Implied assumptions:

* Normal People have a consistent expectation regarding the behavior of line breaks.

* Normal People are comfortable with markdown in the first place.

Neither you nor your wife are Normal People.
Go on the Samsung ARM Chromebook
> Is this just because it doesn't wrap, and mobile safari doesn't display a scrollbar?

Pretty sure that's it. OS X (Safari and Chrome, at least) does the same thing unless you have a mouse plugged in. The formatting is such that it doesn't feel like it should scroll, even in the common case of characters being cut in half. Better styling on code blocks would do wonders for this.
Some developers seem to believe that more options are always better, even if removing the bad options makes the software better and easier to use.
Well I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm surprised that in a centrally-managed, state-controlled, corporatist economic system, the family of the most powerful individual in the nation would have managed to amass great personal wealth. That just runs counter to all of my instincts, and if these stories are true, it would really be the first time this sort of thing happened throughout history.

I'm shocked, really. I would have thought the People's Republic of China is above this sort of thing.
Thelastpsychiatrist.com expoused on this model in his perceptive piece about Paul Ryan enjoying Rage against the Machine.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/08/paul_ryan_vs_rage_aga...

Is there a name for this idea?
kramdown[1] is a ruby based Markdown parser. AFAIK it is P-E-G based and has some nifty support for tables, etc.

[1] http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/
Then make the form that the user enters data into be either parsed differently, by pre-processing it, or have some javascript magic that automatically adds the extra two spaces required to make it work.

This way if the user presses <Enter><Enter> then the JS can remove the extra two spaces and it will still be valid markdown.
Yup... I've seen a lot of java code aiming at high-performance that does awkward/ugly things (e.g., class-static objects which are actually constantly-reused temporary objects, manually-managed temporary object pools, etc) to avoid heap-allocation, in cases where C++ code would simply use its very natural stack-allocation.
Javascript Debugging
I'd be more than happy to accept payment in the form of Bitcoins. OTOH, Apple Store Credit is worthless to me, as I don't own any Apple products, nor do I have an account on Apple's digital store.
I have my computer screen tilted which causes the image to be stretched at the bottom in a very unflattering manner.

Apart from that it looks pretty simple and clean.
If that was the case, the smartphone apps wouldn't have come about either. But they did, as evidenced by the made-for-smartphone apps that look silly on tablets, which is what this whole conversation is about.

The fragmentation in smartphones is incomparably worse than the tablet market. But Android has nice ways of dealing with it in display-independent ways, and they work.
That hidden feature is so thoroughly buried that I didn't even know about it until I read your msg - and I've been writing markdown for years. For mainstream users, it might as well not exist.

Thanks, btw :)
Nueva Fuerza Aérea: Misiles de ondas electromagnéticas,
Depth Controller firmware build 23 — brightness sensing, event log
A question : is there any way for my application code to transparently "recognize" that (at runtime) there is a new follower PG database that is assigned to the application and that it should route some of the reads to the new follower DB? Or do I have to manually change my app's db configuration and include the new follower's address?

Does Postgres actually natively support this and is there any client library that makes use of that? I know that Zookeeper serves this sort of purpose (automatic service discovery etc.), but I have no idea whether/how it works with Postgres.
It's far too early to call Coursera the incumbent and Udacity the challenger. Plus, challengers sometimes win.
It'd definitely be cooler if they could do it from colored flowers or something...

[I've seen a huge range of shade variations in honey, but nothing quite like that bright blue!]
Looks awesome. I found 'experiemnt'.
Coursera is awesome, don't get me wrong. I am on my fourth Coursera class (if you count the pre-Coursera ML class, and Quantum Mech that I gave up on a couple weeks in), and I haven't had any real interest in anything Udacity has had to offer. Their offerings seem more basic and less academic; I am happy to get hands on experience at work.

But Coursera fundamentally has the same problem that Hulu has, they are just a platform for distributing content. Hulu is toally at the mercy of the media industry, likewise, Coursera is totally at the mercy of the universities. Now, it is possible that universities will be more giving to Coursera than the big media studios are to Hulu and this won't actually be a problem for Coursera. But it really might actually be a problem if Coursera starts biting into their bottom line.

Thrun, on the other hand, is happy to blow the whole higher ed system up if he can. He is way more outwardly ambitious[1]. This adversarial relationship with the universities might end up killing his strategy, as is consistent with your 200 vs 14 courses number. But it might not, Udacity might just carve up enough of the territory that they really own that they aren't held hostage by the university system they are trying to replace.

[1] When I watch Andrew Ng or Daphne Koller talk about Coursera I notice their unwillingness to say the word "disrupt". I wonder if they are actually equally ambitious as Thurn, just unwilling to admit it, for the sake of not biting the hand that is currently feeding them very well.
Hacker News Tokyo - Meetup #17 (Nov. 7th, 2012)
Work smarter on *nix with jobs
Many people use screen and tmux. These tools are useful but are not always available and tend to be a bit overkill. There is a lighter way of switching between tasks in *nix environments. Say your working in vim and want to fire up ipython to test some code. Pressing <ctrl>-z backgrounds your vim job. You'll drop to your shell and can fire up ipython. When your ready to leave ipython you can again press <ctrl>-z. Now you have two jobs in the background. The `jobs` command will show you what is in the background and their numbers. To bring the most recent job back to the foreground use the `fg` command in this case ipython come back to the foreground. If you want to bring vim back use `fg 1` to bring, that's `fg` and the number of the job you want. You can also launch commands and send them to the background by appending the & character to your command. To run tail in the background allowing you to work in your shell but still see log output as it's written to the file try:

tail -f /var/log/syslog &

Here is a link to jobs man page.

http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?jobs+1

Since learning jobs after much poking and prodding from people smarter than myself I have realized I don't need screen. The only draw back is jobs will go away if you exit your shell. If you need to leave and come back but don't want a heavy terminal multiplexer check out dtach.
As the post mentioned, game developers aren't really interested in the platform. As a result, they file less Radar reports and Gamekit continues to be buggy. I'd really like to see Apple up the ease-of-use of Radar (or something new).

It's becoming a trend that iOS devs are forced to struggle with the ecosystem, but like I've been saying, from my experience the revenues are strongly tilted in favor of iOS. While we complain about certain aspects of iOS, on a whole, (at least from anecdotal evidence) it's still better than the problems that other platforms face.
Physical keys can be lost, copied, forgotten about, etc. The chance of that becoming a problem increases massively with the number of people that need access.

It's quite easy to avoid all those problems by digitizing access. Cost of keys is basically irrelevant (maybe two dollars) compared to the headache of losing them.

To be fair, most locks offer very minimal physical security - like you say, someone targeting you will just break a window. But some random junkie is just as likely to pick the house with the door unlocked. The trick to avoid being a randomly-targeted victim is to be harder to attack than your neighbors.

Also Paul if you read this, can I get my camera back again? :)
Nice job riffing on a criticism of Clojure from another of today's threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4697874
Freedom of the press & internet has a lot to do with this. Indonesia's corrupt president Suharto was toppled in the 1990s only when the press started going after him. When you look at Russia and China, one thing they have in common is restricted press/internet freedom - this keeps the status quo, no change.
The bit I hate is that I have no desire to have a global list of URLs and manage them. So instead I have to put a double underscore suffix after every url otherwise you get bizarre error messages. eg `foo <foo.com>`__
FaceTime App Not Working After iOS 6 Update How To Fix
Microsoft Is Giving People $100 Coupons For Standing In Line For The Surface