skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
your library has no tests! it's a good effort but I honestly wouldn't use it yet.

a few nit picks: i can't imagine a scenario where i'd want my logger to close stdout (or any other file descriptor) for me.

there is a lot of missing error handling, which is really important for something critical like a logger. what happens when disk space runs out? no timeouts on network operations?

also your SMTP and Gmail loggers don't form valid MIME messages (I can't log non-ascii?). you also seem to just swallow exceptions which is totally not what I would want or expect from a logging library.

keep at it though, the logging module's API (inspired by log4j) is fairly painful.
Ask HN: Who would use a weekend hacks site?
I'm looking for a real world project to work on and test my skills etc. I've been thinking of an idea where instead of showing off what you've hacked together over the weekend on here you show it off on a site with a bunch of other weekend hacks! Sound like something you'd look at? Think of hacker news for weekend hacks. I'm learning php, Ruby on Rails and less right now so be fun to try it out.
This article is asinine. Hitch hiking never went away. Maybe it's been less visible for the class of people who can get Op-Eds published in the New York Times, but it's gone on as normal long past the time of its "murder" given in this article.

It's a commonly-repeated myth that hitching is illegal in the U.S. Most states simply have laws making it illegal to stand on the "travelled portion of a public way", which is a stupid way to hitch anyway. See http://hitchwiki.org/en/United_States_of_America for details.

See http://hitchwiki.org for tips if you want to get in on the fun.
ナイキサッカースパイク ティエンポ
> I don't know what moral to draw from that.

The same moral you get from living in a region (city, state, country, etc.) where serious crimes happen: Unlikely things occur.

The same reasoning that says the dice (2d6) can come up twelve even though there's only one way for that to happen says you can be killed hitchhiking, or picking up hitchhikers.
When I started my job as a fresh-out-of-college SW Engineer, one of the more senior guys there suggested I read The Psychology of Computer Programming (I later went on to find out that this co-worker had some editor credits in it), which talks about ego-less programming. I did adopt a lot of the message in my work style, though I feel it goes a little far by suggesting an engineer not say statements like "I believe that..." or "I think this is better". I think that there's some amount of ownership, excitement, and conviction in an engineer's approach that adds to the project's success. There's definitely the chance that this goes over the line, and then I see examples such as in the article above ("oh, I've been here before so I know why this approach is the best so I don't need to value your opinion). Good read.
omg, there are so much better things to spend time on, this is ridiculous. Think about what all the well paid programmers are going to have to pay in additional taxes - if you can't image this you aren't a well paid programmer.
It depends on how you organize your utility classes. For example, if your project has a lot of serializers, then you might have a package that contains them. Or you might create a bunch of static methods on a single "SerializerUtils" class.

The other thing is that I prefer symmetry. I would probably write the function to take and return the same thing.

Finally, I might strongly consider writing a generic method that, using reflection, traverses arbitrary data structures and constructs an XML DOM. The caller can do what it needs, e.g. serialize into a string.

If, for some reason, your system requires a specific transformation from a custom data structure into a string, then it belongs in the custom data structure class - possibly a toString method, or something more specific.

RouterMessageHeader.toXMLString();

or

XMLSerializer.stringify(routerMessageHeader);
Incredible. Thank you so much!
Don't Panic. just put your towel over your ears!!!
I have to admit to indulging in my fair share of schadenfreude this election, though I've personally only seen it directed at the campaign and right-wing blowhard pundits -- not at Republican voters, of whom the many I know are intelligent and good-hearted people.

However, this page really is not compelling to me, because these graphs are such a prime example of a blatant misuse of vertical scale. The y axis currently ranges from 12,046,000 to 12,050,000, which makes the decrease look like a sharp 45° falloff, when in fact it's fallen by 0.02% during the time shown. The numbers are the same to within four significant digits. So what is this supposed to be telling me?
That's interesting since they doubled there money not paying Groupon, but still getting the customer.
Ambiguity, Gangnam Style
There's a difference between "background app that quietly does it's job and stays out of the way" and "holy fuck, what the hell is using all twelve cores and 8gigs of RAM and making Google take 30seconds to load!?" Running your software on my hardware is a privilege; don't abuse it, and I won't delete your oh-so-important-crapware. That includes not nagging me to update and/or register.
AFAIK, the breakdown is this:

Frequentist is a special case of Bayesian. The Frequentists have much more mature tools, because they've been working on them since Gauss's day. Bayesians (especially less experienced ones) may claim that that Frequentists are old school, outdated, and don't teach undergrads the new Bayesian way of doing things.

Bayesian methods are more flexible and general, but are often slow (computationally), and can be too flexible. A Bayesian can prove anything. Frequentists have trouble eliminating some biases (because their tools aren't as flexible), but also have trouble purposely (or subconsciously) biasing their results.

I'm not going into the specifics of the methods here, just the source of their disagreements.
Downvoted. I can't tolerate comments like this on HN.

Your comment has been ruined by the first paragraph.
I don't even have a car, guess I'm tasteless :(.
It's to keep all the railway clocks in sync. You could have one that's running up to 1.5s slow and it will still be able to keep up with all the rest, and they're all resynchronised with each other every minute. This is important when it could be the difference between catching a train or not.
tiling omg boring
You didn't get the point of this comment and article at all. The question is not in the quantity of things, it's that a hardware vendor (or here, distribution maintaner) would think so lowly of his customers that hes ready to just shove advertisements and annoyances into their face by default.

And theres no magic switch to get them back to a point where they recognize that users matter.
I agree that many "all nighters" turn out to be just the result of poor planning... But I think there is an important exception. I have found (others too I'm sure) that trying to finish a complex problem in the space of a typical workday, filled with other obligations, interruptions, social niceties, not to mention family commitments, is quite difficult. Sometimes it takes me a good 30-60 min in the morning just to ... reboot myself into the headspace I was in when I left the problem, on the previous day. Then I am not left with much time to dive into the problem and swim around, with maximum concentration.

The all nighter is a natural solution to this. If you have a way to recover afterwards, then it is perfect. No interruptions from co-workers, family, friends, students (I am a Prof), tv shows, sports, etc (the world is asleep, at least your immediate surroundings).

For me, there are two activities I regularly engage in that require full concentration and "loading up" my brain with the full information, for me to make real progress: writing, and coding.

Others have written about similar topics before: http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html
> your library has no tests! it's a good effort but I
> honestly wouldn't use it yet.

You're right, and I'd love to have you help me add them!

> i can't imagine a scenario where i'd want my logger to
> close stdout (or any other file descriptor) for me.

By default it won't -- see https://github.com/peterldowns/lggr/blob/master/lggr/__init_....

> there is a lot of missing error handling, which is really
> important for something critical like a logger. what
> happens when disk space runs out? no timeouts on
> network operations?
> [...]
> you also seem to just swallow exceptions which is totally
> not what I would want or expect from a logging library.

Lggr will fail silently by default, because your logging library shouldn't cause your
code to crash. If you'd like, it's quite easy to stop it from suppressing errors. For
more complex error handling, I think users should write their own coroutines for
handling log messages -- the default file printing and network sending coroutines
are merely the most basic case.

> also your SMTP and Gmail loggers don't form valid MIME messages
> (I can't log non-ascii?).

Please help me and add loggers that do format valid MIME message! The included loggers/coroutines
are just a few examples I came up with, but I'd love if other people were to contribute more :)

> keep at it though, the logging module's API (inspired by log4j)
> is fairly painful.

Thank you, and thanks for your feedback :)
It's said that Lisp programmers often work by first building a domain-specific language for solving their problem, then solving the problem in that new language.

Some object-oriented programmers do something similar, where their programs are expressed in a domain-specific language written as an object relationship graph. Only they skip the part where that language is supposed to make it easier to solve the problem.

What do I mean? Here's my (somewhat ancient) attempt at parody: http://pastebin.com/TyNrvRmB

It has all the hallmarks of production code I've seen in this style: it's about 20 times more than the necessary amount of code, it's subtly buggy, and it needs explanation because what it does is completely non-obvious.

It is arguably slightly easier to extend than the obvious solution, but at a great cost, and in a silly one-off program at that.

The worst part? This doesn't scream parody in some circles. This is just how things are done, as if anything less involved is fundamentally broken.
EProf Puts Teachers In Control Of Live, Interactive Online Classrooms
I'll say for JDBM3, the bugs must be few and far between; we haven't found any yet. Many thanks for a rock-solid library!
As much as it is possible for a large company to reflect a single person's taste and judgments, Apple reflected Steve Jobs.

Can anyone imagine Jobs working under someone else in some multi-billion dollar corporation like Apple? I can't. Scott Forstall can -- take that for what you will.

Jobs founded Apple. No other person (besides Wozniak) has that kind of claim on Apple, or could run it the same way as Jobs did.

Looking for the next Steve Jobs at Apple is pointless: people like Elon Musk will found their own companies, just like Jobs did with Apple.
> Some developers are angry about Windows 8 because they perceive that Microsoft is caring about them less, and that's probably true

C'mon, Microsoft just handed them an app store for the entire ecosystem. None of their technology stack was designed to do that before surely some stuff had to change.

assuming they survive, that's pretty cool.
Add interactive graphics to PowerPoint
If the CMS collector can't 'keep up', meaning it doesn't think it can avoid running out of heap space based on its duty cycle and the current memory state, it will do a full on complete, stop the world GC. Based on the article I'm guessing this is what is kicking in.
lxml is great. The docs and the installation aren't the best.

For a windows install.
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/
I think it's acceptable to leave details like character encoding in the documentation, so:

msghead_to_xml()

Are there any 53-character function names in the multi-million line Linux kernel?
Well over half the country didn't vote for anyone[1]. Even of those eligible, only a little over half voted.

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/presidential-election-voter-st...
Carpeting the floor will likely solve their noise problem.
urllib2 is so bad (and I know how to use it) that I have at times used subprocess + curl, which says a lot, because subprocess ain't exactly pretty either. But the thing is, urllib2 is included and is the devil I know.
Public transportation is now an "affluent aesthetic"?
In my early 20s, I had an awful experience hitch hiking. I'll never do it again because I seriously thought I would not live to see the next day.

During that time, I knew quite a few people who hitch-hiked long distances. Every single one of them had experiences where they thought they were going to die or sensed they were is serious danger. Don't get me wrong, 90% of the experience is positive and interesting, but that 1 / 10 ride you get will scare you straight.

The numbers may suggest that hitch hiking is safe, but the numbers don't, and cannot, tell the stories of those that had good reason to be traumatized by a bad experience. As an experiment, try hitch hiking across one entire state. I would gladly offer my $10 to your $7 that you wouldn't want to do it again.

EDIT to add: I hitch hiked in Florida.
Camera made out of legos, cardboard, and duct tape
Google or Gallup? Changes in Voters’ Habits Reshape Polling World
Scientists Detect Starlight From Early Universe
me either, actually. living in Melbourne sort of obviates the need for a car about 95% of the time.
there are some CLI sample code in ./bin/
European public transit is, at least from the perspective of non-Europeans.
So, we are in agreement I think. The example I picked wasn't from java but C (but that's almost irrelevant), so your:

RouterMessageHeader.toXMLString();

Ended up as

router_message_header_to_xml_string();

So 35 characters in all. Not quite terrible but also not very elegant. At least it says what it does :)

I still can't help the feeling that the data structure leaked into the naming of the function and I see no way to solve that, I can't even imagine how one would go about that and still have a function with global scope (in itself something that you'd try to avoid wherever you could, but in this case we can't for various good reasons).

I've looked at making this a generic system but that increases the overall complexity of the bookkeeping (creation, destruction, modification) around the objects to such an extent that it probably isn't worth it (though I can see some other advantages of this approach, such as easier debugging).
Polynomial curve fitting can be "dangerous". As in, extrapolating results can be unpredictable if not done right.

I recall an example where 7-8 points, trending up, are fitted with a polycurve that sharply dropped right after the last data point thereby giving erroneous prediction.
or on Windows

new file, paste

createobject("sapi.spvoice").speak("hi world")

save as 1.vbs, then double click it.
I was googling to see the status of the 'requests should be in stdlib' debate and discovered PEP411: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0411/

Basically this helps mitigate the downside of a module getting included in stdlib.
Democracy does not come before Culture; though Democracy can certainly influence Culture.

Only when the Culture is compatible with Democracy can you have it.

Not only is this logical, but it's also demonstrated over and over in the world.

What worked for America 300 years ago, does not translate to what will work for Iraq or Lybia today.

Even things like georaphy, rivers, and the type of soil you have can influence the type a government or system the country subscribes to. Not even mentioning the big one, Religion.

And when you have a miss-match... Instability replaces a stable structure (even if that structure was based on strong rule, it at least keept things working "better").

You should also refrain from name-calling other people on HN just because you don't agree with their opinions. It doesn't really help you ... unless you're looking to impress the anti-Microsoft or KimDotCom crowd here (just a helpful tip someone once told me).
The salient point being that having a "secret" ballot has not stopped it from happening either. My employer can easily verify if they choose if I have donated to the "correct" candidate already and rampant job discrimination seems not to occur in a significant amount.

So, one has to balance the risk of someone acting illegally in either case to discriminate against/coerce versus the increase in voter participation that would naturally occur in having online voting that was verifiable.

I think it's an easy case to make, but perhaps I'm overlooking something.
3-4 Hours of net profit. :)
I made the mistake of looking up what "El Pozolero" meant -_-
It actually uses 'funded' or 'funding unsuccessful', not failure. To me, failure says 'funding successful but failure to deliver product (by a set time/at all).
DDoS Attacks Take Down What.cd, BTN and Other Trackers
I don't see how this name is a problem beyond giving cannon fodder for language hipsters to rant about Java.

How many programmers have been affected by this internal class? How many programmers have used it and complain about it?

Java allows long identifier names and gives people the freedom to name however they like. Why is that a bad thing? You want syntax rules in the language to force short identifier names? We had those long while back and it's a really bad idea.

And BTW what is so wrong about imperative? It's simple to learn and simple to follow. It has solved many problems, given whatever the real world constraints. Just because functional is the in-thing now doesn't mean imperative is totally bad.
Create commits using `add -p` up to the point that the current state of the work tree is fully committed. (You can `reset HEAD^` if you need to add some stuff that you do not want to become part of your branch's history, at least not in its current form.) Then test using run-command-on-git-revisions[1] on the new commits.

This lets you create multiple commits at the same time and run tests on all of them. You could argue that committing and resetting is effectively the same thing as stashing and popping, but I think the benefits of being able to iterate over a list of commits and test each one is worth creating additional commits that you will probably reset shortly after testing.

This is also what you should do after a rebase to test all affected commits as they have not neccesarily existed in a testable state in the work tree.

[1] https://github.com/garybernhardt/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/ru...
Well, I take it tracking people gets significantly harder in rampant hitchhiking, without a car registered to someone's name, or a bus/train ticket in their name (possibly tied to a credit card).
101 East - Ageing Japan
True, if somebody called Levi, Wrangler or even Nike stood for election they would do better in such area's I suspect with this bumper sticker logic.

Now if only he was called Nike Romney and had a logo like the Nike sign, he may of done exactly the same.
Almost as good as Microsoft Office's tristate enum with 5 states (three of them not supported), where 0 is False and -1 is True:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa432714(office.12)....
> It worries me when the first two sentences contradict each other:

I don't think that's necessarily true. The service lets you get payment processing up on your site in a short time. There is no waiting period to get an account set up to receive payments. It makes sense, its just not super specific.
To stretch the cloud/powercompany analogy (perhaps too far)…

The power company only provides a "standard" volt and amp rated supply, and just like cloud computing, there are various standards to choose from[1]. You're probably thinking "120V 60Hz AC with type-b plugs", whereas for me the default assumption is "220V 50Hz AC with type-1 plugs". Fortunately, half my electronics doesn't actually care what voltage/frequency/current is available thanks to modern power supplies (I've seen my iMac happily keep running during a brown-out where the wall sockets were measuring just 90V AC, while all the routers/modems/harddrives with less capable power supplies were flickering and rebooting continuously.) Other devices I own I can use a transformer to change my 220V down to 120V, though still at 50Hz. If I needed to (and I never have) I could use a US targeted UPS or inverter to provide 120V AC @ 60Hz.

The "cloud" market is kinda the same. Cloud storage, for example, expects 8 bit bytes delivered over tcp (or perhaps udp). In general, "everything just deals with that", pretty much every modern-ish 8/16/32/64 bit device, regardless of native endianness, will happily emit and receive the same 8 bit bytes that S3 stores (converting on the fly, much like a switchmode power supply does for voltages). If you're an edge-case customer, perhaps wanting to use Amazon S3 to store data for your 12bit wide "bytes" from your PDP8, you just convert them on the way in and out. And much like the end result of electricity consumption is pretty much all the same, electricity is mostly just converted into heat - but with side effects varying from cooling your beer to blasting pixels onto your screen at 100fps to making your coffee machine hot; ultimately cloud storage is all just ordered bytes more-or-less reliably stored and retrieved - whether that's plain text passwords, or massively de-duped mp3s in Dropbox or Amazon/Apples cloud music storage, or cryptographically secure blobs which no-one can tell whether they contain your bank records or your secret research project data or child porn - it's all just bytes. There's no "vendor lockin" at the "it's just a bunch of ordered bytes" level. You might need to "change the plugs" if you want to switch you cloud storage from S3 to BigTable to Dropbox to Tahoe/LAFS, just like I need to switch cables or use a plug adaptor for US delivered electrical equipment. It's the same with cloud compute resources - sure EC2 and Linode and CloudNine and AppEngine have different interfaces, but you can view that as all just the plumbing on the way into the "remote universal turing mschine" which, much like the topologists who can't tell the difference between their coffee mug and their donut, in spite of their interface and language differences all the programmable remote computing offerings are identical - if you can compute anything on one of them, you can - in theory- compute it on any of them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country
I think HN would really appreciate the story of Dick Proenneke, the cabin he built, and the simple life he lived there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke

There are several documentaries made from footage he filmed, later edited and narrated by a friend of his from his journals. Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss

More info and links to buy the videos:

http://www.aloneinthewilderness.com/index.html

(Sadly, I was unable to legally find them available digitally, so you have to order and wait for the DVD.)
After reading this, I think what I really object to is the sales process. The whole act of wheeling and dealing and never really feeling like you got the best deal.
I think a Stack Exchange website for educators would be a very good first step in the direction of collaboration. Stack Exchange is by far the most effective platform I have ever seen for questions and answers. Wouldn't take much to set up a teaching beta.
That's an 800+ line, system-wide file under the control of the package manager. Just because it's "easy" to hack it doesn't make it a good option.
The first that comes to mind is raising a series A. You should not do that if you want to sell early.
> i pathologically pick up hitchhikers

In the early 90's in Homer, Alaska, this was just normal behavior.

> but there is a lot of "color" out there

Also true for Homer. However, at no time did I ever feel unsafe. (From picking up hitchhikers.)