skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have mixed feelings about hackathons.

I'm seeing this culture of hack all night and attitude in the industry and it bothers me a little bit.

Mainly because hackers are the only ones pulling hackathons.

Sure you might enjoy it to some extent, but should we do it in a commercial environment?

This trend over time has created an expectation of hackers and programmers to work like machines.

It's everywhere, pulling all-nighters, hacking for ramen noodles, sleeping on the couch, staying until 5am, etc...

Whether you want it or not, or like it or not, this sends a signal to everyone else, that the opportunity cost of your time is lower than them because you enjoy what you do, soon enough it becomes the norm, they will take it for granted that you are a hacker and you enjoy what you do and that's all you do.

Compare that with the attitude that lawyers have for example, who knows maybe they fucking love their job, but they don't brag about it everywhere and will make sure to never look like they enjoy their job in front of you. No one asks them to say until 4am and hack on legal documents for fun. If they want they can do that too at their own place.

They charge you per minute and you wont dare to ask them for 5 extra minutes because hey it's no fun! But god forbid you are a programmer and working on an open-source project. If you don't dedicate your evenings for free to other people you are doing nothing.

I feel like we are being taken advantage of because we are constantly talking about hack and fun together.
The Ace of Spades post suggests that Orca was a key reason for the defeat (though it doesn't explicitly assert it). The post attacks Orca and asks "If this had worked could it have closed the gap?"

Erick Erickson makes the suggestion more strongly. He points to the "Ace of Spades" post and uses it to reject the possibility that the election was a defeat for "conservatism". In http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/09/the-only-thing-you-need-t... he says that "the biggest problem the Republicans had on Tuesday night was not demographics, but turnout operations."

The post on Breitbart makes a similar suggestion and leads with "As Republicans try to explain their Election Day losses in terms of policy, tactics, and strategy, one factor is emerging as the essential difference between the Obama and Romney campaigns on November 6: the absolute failure of Romney’s get-out-the-vote effort, which underperformed even John McCain’s lackluster 2008 turnout. One culprit appears to be “Orca,” the Romney’s massive technology effort, which failed completely."

Orca is just the latest reason I've heard, previous theories (from staunch conservatives) can be best summarized by what I heard Charles Krauthammer say on Fox News (on election day). He dismissed the defeat by describing Romney as a "northeastern liberal".

[edit] See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/11...
“I’m very surprised, as digital guy, about the pushback people are getting” over Orca, Moffatt said. “This didn’t materially change the course of the election.”
If he can't pick a reliable deputy to manage a single IT project how could he possibly manage a government? The President has to delegate well: Mitt either couldn't or didn't place a key service under someone reliable.
You seem to be very confused. The facility that blocks gdb is part of the standard ptrace APIs. It was not extra code that Apple added.

In any case, there's also a very simple explanation that should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it as to why Apple did this: because iTunes deals with DRM. A one-line change to block debugging is something I'd absolutely expect any app that uses DRM'd content to do.
So, I've read in several places that QWERTY was designed to slow typists down. Therefore, there must have been an older layout that was actually faster. According to wikipedia this is not correct (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwerty).

The first layout was a simple minded alphabetical layout which jammed, so QWERTY was designed to let typists go fast AND not have the mechanical stuff jam up.
In case joenathan's comment isn't obvious, all iOS apps use the same core WebKit library to provide for their "browser" experiences. It's an embedded UIWebView I believe. All "browsers" have to use this because Apple. [1]

[1] That's not fair, it's a JIT thing but then again you can have full other engines on Android if you like (see: Chrome for Android).
While cheating on his wife was obviously a really terrible thing to do, it looks like he is in fact following his own advice. He screwed up, but now he is taking responsibility for it by openly admitting that he made a mistake and resigning. Some may not think that the resignation was necessary, but being the director of the CIA doesn't exactly leave you with much time to mend your broken marriage.

I thought that this list was mostly full of great advice, but as someone with substantial military experience I have to say, it's pretty goddamn easy for a 4-star general(or any field grade officer for that matter) to say "don't rely on your rank" when he's already got it. Most soldiers and younger officers, even ones in supervisory positions, are told to do what they are told without question. When I was in, I had some really brilliant, creative, young soldiers who eventually got out because they were tired of being treated like they were stupid even after years of establishing a good reputation. I'd be more inclined to agree with him if I had heard him say it when he was LT Petraeus.
He was soaked in advanced calculus from puberty. Not quite the same as skipping college.
While I am pro 2nd Amendment I don't believe that a politicians stance on that issue alone is enough to get a full picture of their worth as a candidate.

I personally am more interested in their position on the 1st Amendment and how they stand up for our civil liberties.
The sample was from a subset (geolocated tweets) and involved only a very specific set of keywords. In other words, this was not an exercise to see how many racist tweets there are. It was an exercise to see where the racist tweets generally come from. All that was needed here was a relatively small random sample. So the analysis, at least in terms of the sample size itself, is almost certainly valid. You may have misunderstood the point of the post...
Nice! I was curious how it looks for actual code, so I added a few random code examples (HTML5 Boilerplate index.html, JQuery grunt.js) and reran it:

texts/index.html:
colemak:
alternation_effort: 799
reach_effort: 1100
raw_score: 1899
dvorak:
alternation_effort: 695
reach_effort: 1166
raw_score: 1861
qwerty:
alternation_effort: 779
reach_effort: 1490
raw_score: 2269

texts/grunt.js:
colemak:
alternation_effort: 4243
reach_effort: 5588
raw_score: 9831
dvorak:
alternation_effort: 3510
reach_effort: 6226
raw_score: 9736
qwerty:
alternation_effort: 4577
reach_effort: 7373
raw_score: 11950

Sent you a pull request with the minor changes, in case you're interested.
You don't even want to think how much more than $12/hour they paid. Big consulting companies are usually $200+ for fresh grads whose best work happens on PowerPoint slides
Toytalk gets $11.5M from Charles Rivers Ventures
November Software acquired by Zynga
I honestly I can't think of a single example where I was unable to determine the right level of explanation for someone. I think it's a unique skill that even non-engineers are often only superficially proficient at; though on that note, I do think that engineers aren't exposed enough to communication topics in University - most CS classes don't require group work, don't require verbal explanation of complex systems, etc. [1]

Reading, writing, and any sort of public speaking (especially debate if there's an opportunity) are TREMENDOUS for teaching you how to get into other peoples' heads, figure out how they're perceiving what you're saying, and adjusting what you're saying. I will sit in most of my CS classes and be PAINED when the class spends 10 minutes on a question because there is a disconnect between the misassumptions the student is making and the instructor thinks something else is the culprit.

These skills are also incredibly helpful in being charming and getting what you want without being manipulative.

[1]: Which is why some, like mine, created programs to blend CS and business to start to solve that problem. Students have to interact with paying customers, have to be accountable for their own code releases, are responsible for ALL of the requirement soliciting and fulfillment, etc.
Surface users report Touch Cover splits and audio issues
You can do anything you want with a context manager, it's just Python. IIRC, they were first added to the language to get rid of boilerplate while acquiring/releasing locks to make multi-threading easier.
Enlightenment epiphanies result in proselytizing. Can't be helped, its like tapping your knee with a rubber mallet makes your leg kick out.

The 'secret' or the thing that most people don't get early on when programming, is that code is data and data is code. A binary tree is data that is carefully surrounded by the semantics of the data's relationship with its peers. Reading the structure reads out the data in sorted order. Lisp just makes that painfully clear, that there is no distinction between state and semantics as far as computers are concerned and it allows you to move the 'computation' between data structures and algorithm at any point.

A grad student at USC explained it well when he described it like learning your third or fourth spoken language, Suddenly you brain "flips" from having three or four different ways of naming 'milk' into a single concept of milk with an infinite number of ways to identify it. The relationship between the root concept and the expression of that concept change precedence in your thought process.

Once you have made that switch you can write code in any computer language.
I know that feeling all too well.

A few months ago I decided to focus on high quality comments after feeling like I was contributing to the HN noise a bit too much.

As a proxy for that, I tracked my average comment score, trying to get it above 10.

Today it's 14.93, which is quite high - only 4 of the top 100 are higher.

I think my comment quality has risen substantially, but I also subconsciously started making decisions based on score - not posting on topics that were sliding down the front page, or where there were already hundreds of comments but I did have something to say.

In short, the gamification overtook the original goal, and the tail was wagging the dog.

I've now started using a much simpler method - taking a deep breath before hitting reply, and trashing the comment if I don't think I'm adding anything to the conversation. I like this way more.
Show HN: My First Micropublishing Product — ABCs of Strawberries
Forth.

Constructing the basic machine is trivial, then the rest just comes along with it.
Sounds like a plug for sugared chewing gum.
I'm an open source developer – working on Linux servers since 1997 or so, etc. etc. Please stop what you're doing: it's not very funny and it's not helpful, but it does give OSS people a bad reputation.

You can host plenty of high volume things on Microsoft's code – Azure, Bing, etc. have proven scale. We can argue about cost, ease of use, etc. but a decent team should have no trouble making a serious service. The problem here is that they didn't hire a decent team – from the sounds of it, it was the usual executive-level schmoozing and managerial incomplete you see throughout large organizations of every type. They could have used HN'a favorite stack and failed just as hard.
Never heard of this theory. Black refers to ink color. Line items in red are loses, black are break-even or profit. Black-friday is when retailer make so much profit they get back in black.

Business type-writters had red and black ribbons.
One way I used to "detect" good content was by keeping track of the amount of discussion content items generated (ie. blog comments, Reddit/HN submissions and discussion activity). There are other mechanisms including the social elements similar to how Prismatic works.

I'm currently working on a related startup that we actually applied to YC W13 with, so we'll see what happens next. The current version of FavoritePosts will require a couple of weeks before I can launch it as an MVP.

But thanks guys for the encouragement! I'll start dusting off the codebase to see exactly where I'm at.
Most people can't type that fast. But read the article again; it also talks about comfort and ergonomics.

I literally never had the thought, "If only I could type faster, I could get this done more quickly..."

I think few slow typists would have had that literal thought either. I know I never did as I approached up to my ceiling of about 70wpm.

If you're a heavy vi user, it's probably not worth it, but if you weren't and you did a lot of typing it might be worth it to see if it helps with comfort. Also, what's wrong with the fun of trying new things?
Romney digital director: Orca wasn’t a loss
I would agree on passing standard compliance, but a great browser should allow fluid swipes, many tabs, syncing between phones or devices, and render things accurately and quickly. The look of the chrome is just as important as the look of the page, and the feel of navigation is the most important of all.
Ask HN: Please, I need some feedback/suggestion on my launch page 
Hello,

I'm planning to officially release the launch page for my startup next week.

I'd really like to receive some general feedback about the contents, and since I'm from Italy - my english is not perfect I guess - also about the copywriting and the very short disclaimer for the "instagrammers".

I've browsed through Iubenda service but looks like I can't find any policies about the use/collect of Instagram username and pics - I know that the pics in Instagram are property of the photographer -

Here's the page

http://www.needle.me/

I'm thinking about to ask subscribers their @twitter too, but I don't wanna looks too intrusive.

Best,
Filippo
He retired from the military last year.
Being head of the CIA qualifies as a special security issue.
Funny to see so many front page articles with no comments.
> "Using Windows was a mistake" is a truism

If you use or have used StackOverflow or Newegg, realize that you too are using Windows. Projects' success and failure is much more correlated with the folks running them than the technologies they use.
Nate Silver and the Rise of Political Data Science
Regardless of what you use, touchtyping is better than hunt'n'peck because it allows you to multitask. You can write what you want while looking at other things and evaluating them - there's an increased continuity between what you're writing and what you're thinking.
Don't worry, we hate spam too. And is not classy to sell emails. We are classy.

And it is not classy to sell...

Instagram agreement looks fine to me. Twitter, Facebook etc. are not intrusive as long as they are clearly optional. Lots of luck!
Don't forget to factor in 3 years of lost wages, tuition, nd a lifetime of mind numbing, soul crushing, meaningless paperwork. Oh, and 90% of firm lawyers don't make partner. Look at how many rich lawyers there are, subtract off the ones that are actually rick salesmen, and compare to how many rich programmers their are at big cos and liquidified startups, some of whom actually make something cool.

You can do great work as lawyer, as a broke public defender. Or a supreme court justice -- one of nine.
Absolutely, but if I may suggest that you are looking at it as an engineer :-). Shortly (and by that I mean some few years, not a decade but more than a couple of years) there will be an abundance of cellular equivalent 'data' space. So a manufacturer will be able to 'add' to their devices a small transceiver which can make small data transactions on this spectrum for 'free'. The manufacturer will pay a 'remainder' type fee to the cellular carrier in exchange for their simple device sending the occasional small packet through the network or getting back a packet. This ability will let the manufacturer effectively 'remote boot' your gizmo with firmware that the person who manufactured it didn't have access too. That helps on copy cat stuff but it also means that small changes or 'improvements' can be pushed out to the field as necessary, but you see this gizmo is mostly software, it looks like a hardware device but it really only has enough hardware to run the software that makes it amazingly gizmotic. And of course there are the good, better, and best versions of this gizmo which all have exactly the same hardware but they get their software based on some sort of exchange between the device and the 'cloud' which tells them which beast to become. All of this benefits the manufacturer quite a bit and the consumer not a bit, but as long as it is reasonably 'transparent' to the consumer nobody is hurt or gets upset.

Gamers go to experience a similar effect where the manufacturer would ship the box art, a CD (which contained basically a playable demo) and an authentication 'key' which would download the 'patch' which was bigger than all of the data on the CD to install the game. I have some of those games for Win98 and its hilarious (not) to try to play them on a VM running Win98, they can't even patch to a playable level.

So that your manufacturer wants your mouse to connect to the Internet means that they are pushing the edge of the envelope and are only slightly ahead of the curve when the mouse will talk to the internet without your permission to update itself and figure out what features it should 'expose' to you based on how much money you paid for it. I would love to be wrong on this but sadly I don't think that I am. We'll see.
Every keyboard layout is going to be optimised for a particular language.
I agree. It's a good project to experiment but the intended goal is not practical.

The stated goal is: markup [html], style, and code in one language. However, I still have to deal with the syntax of the 3 languages, just that they are wrapped in the Javascript library calls. It doesn't help in lessen the effort in working with 3 languages. In fact, it adds complexity. Now I have to worry about how the code generated with respect to each language, another indirection. Just more trouble than it's worth.
I remember reading Reddit before it even had support for comments!

E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20050809014858/http://reddit.com/
Yeah, so, ideas someone just makes up one day, which directly contradict all existing scientific observations, tend not to become clear in a few years.
Why I'm a Programmer
One thing to remember is that when the Mozilla team originally created XUL browser engines were a different beast. At the top you have JavaScript which is _significantly_ faster on many different levels. Combine that we current html features supported (and or optimized) by some WebKit ports such as hardware accelerated CSS transitions and you get a much a strong base to create applications on top of. Also writing large JavaScript applications were new back then. These days we have several years of lessons about what works and what doesn't. Lastly the tool situation is much better. Simply what you can get if you limit yourself to inspector is pretty crazy. Remember Firebug didn't even come out until 2006 if I recall. And if all that isn't good enough the HTMLRuntime is multi-process so you absolutely wont run into the contention for the JavaScript engine between the chrome and the pages. To see some animations in action checkout the above video links.

Disclaimer: I am part of the WebKit team at RIM these opinions are my own
> and continued to be the most standard compliant, fastest
> browser on the planet

That really depends on how and what you measure. For example, Gecko's CSS implementation was much more standards-compliant than WebKit's at the time... and continues to be so as of last time people actually measured, with the CSS 2.1 test suite.

But yes, WebKit does have better marketing there.
The idea isn't to ship the code from these events, but to test and idea end-to-end without worrying about scalability, code cleanliness, etc. Just see if the idea has legs.
Do you want to see Scott Adams's project status reports too? Just enjoy the stories.
> As mentioned in the video one of the neatest aspects of the browser is the fact that the chrome itself is written in HTML/JS.

Why, as an end user, would I ever care about this? All this says to me is that the part of the browser which should be fast and get out of the way is written in an abstraction layer with significant overhead (compared to the alternative, native code), which - to me - means using more RAM and CPU, increasing the cost or decreasing the performance of the device.

As a tech demo, I think it's a neat idea. But as a "one of the neatest aspects" of a commercial product, I'm not inclined to be interested in the rest of the app.
Come on, Homebrew doesn't even have gcc.

I am not a Mac user, but a designer using MacBook joined our team last week, and we struggled for half a day with Homebrew. The next day, we installed MacPorts instead, and with just:

$ sudo port install python27 py27-virtualenv gcc46

we were able to proceed and get the whole stack up and running. Not to mention everything from MacPorts is installed nicely under /opt/local.

MacPorts is just way ahead of Homebrew. OTOH, Portage is way ahead of MacPorts ;)
Very nicely put. imho, it could serve as the tl;dr for the op, which was also excellent.
Try keeping it running while growing to millions of users in weeks. The simple data model lets us focus on elasticity and performance. There's a lot more to production quality software than the algorithms, but there are only a few NoSQL databases that get the algorithms right.
Someone knows about other languages? For instance, what about french?
you're from the UK, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britishness In November 2007 The Times' Comment Central asked readers to define Britishness in five little words. The winning suggestion was "No motto please, we're British."
I use vim and dvorak, and haven't remapped the keys. It's still usable since J and K are next to each other and H happens to be left of L.
I work at Heroku and sometimes forget sometimes. They're very supportive and very hands-off.
Good things don't change. I guess the bugs haven't changed either, e.g. the "More" link at the bottom is still broken wrt expired link if you let HN sit for any length of time.
Interesting.. I was thinking of doing an picture book in ebook format.
If I had a nickel for every lint-clean properly indented file of spaghetti code I saw, I would have.... to be at my job, where we have tools and rules for surface appearance, but no accounting for quality in depth.
The big problem here is that the browser test was developed by Facebook so it probably only passes the test if all kinds of creepy tracking features are ON.
No way anyone cares about you enough to judge for the ugliness of your free code. Unless you are Obama or Trump or Ferris or something.
Sad end to a great general's career.
I find it interesting that they made this exact point in the article we are discussing here, and you don't appear to have read it.
3-4 drinks several times a week is a pretty low alcohol consumption.
Verything written in the language of DNA. It has some bugs, but generally not system-fatal showstoppers.
congrats heroku on 5 years. you make my life easier.
At least its not a software patent!
More like a Tourette's attack.
There is a standard for representing string (see sibling comment) and your type information is the field name. So you know your document has a type if you give it a d_type field for example and then based on that you know your tstamp field is the date.
It's up and down here in Guangzhou over the past few days unfortunately.