skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PG himself not only acknowledges that quality has declined but also that he has no idea how to reverse it. I don't know if I can effect change here, but I do know how it is done and I have done it elsewhere. Raising the bar on treating other members with respect and tolerating a diversity of viewpoints is part of how that is done.

You are, of course, free to make fun of me while bemoaning the decline in quality. I am free to think you are clearly clueless if you cannot see a connection between the two things.
You mean like an office suite https://drive.google.com/, laptop computers http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/, tablets and phones http://www.google.com/nexus/?
Do you realize you are replying to the Mark you're referencing in your comment?
Exactly right. I think the post is wrong, so I might be bias, but the examples were rather lacking.
Color me interested. Can you shoot me an email (trevor.ellermann@gmail.com) and let's continue the discussion?
Nice. Add Cleve Moler and Jack Dangermond, I suppose.
They should first build an IDE for Android rather than keep piggybacking forever on Eclipse which is not very lightweight or suitable for a specific purpose, let's say.
Is there podcast version of it?
Microgroups - So minimal it hurts
Even better, pack your own custom glyphs from icomoon.io.
I just tried Panopticlick both before and after enabling private browsing in Safari (Mac OS X) and the site identified the same number of identifiable pieces of information about me. So it looks like that has no effect.

Which sort of makes sense - the info it's looking at is basically the header info. Screen size, installed fonts, IP address, and so on. It's not relying on cookies, as cookies can't be seen/read across domains (you can't tell I'm an Amazon customer if I just visit you out of the blue).
No. He certainly meant sth analogous to Windows or OSX or Ubuntu &c as one system, not fragments/parts of an OS.
Prices are insane because monitor manufacturers are the scum of the earth. They are constantly getting in trouble for price fixing.

It's ridiculous that in today's day and age we still have inferior monitors compared to the mid/late 90s. The korean 27" S-IPS 1440 monitors are $275-300ish US.
Yes, they should absolutely just sell the hardware with no OS installed. That makes sense. Wow, a new account for that comment?
Perhaps some taxonomy is required to help us deal with this.

Some errors are essential/problem domain errors. They represent an impossibility with regards to the purpose of the code. I place validation code under this heading.

Some are accidental/solution domain errors. They represent a failure of the environment or computing platform. They are present to allow the code to decide what to do when a design assumption (network availability, disk availability, RAM availability etc) is broken.

There's also the question of who must handle the error. Exceptions allow errors to propagate up a stack. Both C-style and multivalue return error handling styles force inline handling. Common Lisp conditions allow out-of-band error handling (some other agent freezes execution and steps in).

To me the core problem is this:

1. Error handling obfuscates the purpose of a piece of code. It hides the happy case and alternative cases.

2. Error handling is an unavoidable requirement of all code. Things go wrong.

How best to reconcile these problems?

It would be nice to have an environment that hides and shows code in terms of the path of execution. So you'd have a happy path view, views for each alternative path, a view for the malloc fail path and so on.

No idea how that could be done. Sounds dangerously like generated code; or alternatively a self-contained image environment à la Smalltalk/Lisp.
Poshrunner.exe – so MyScript.ps1 can use MyScript.ps1.config
Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?
I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started?
IME Lua is neither worse nor better than (eg) Python for large code bases.
burning is oxidation, and oxidation requires O2 (although it doesn't always require O2 -oxidation chemically speaking is stripping Electrons and Hydrogen atoms out of a molecule. Which liberates energy.

So you are right. My take on your comment was that you had confused Carbon and oxygen... Since Carbon is the fuel and Oxygen is the oxidising agent , and the convention is basically to talk about the fuel as the one that is being consumed.

I don't have any videos or anything but if you are interested I have attached a link to my old biochemistry notes which, especially if you have a rusty background in anything resembling science, should hopefully jump you along a bit

http://sdrv.ms/SHJQHs
> Is Afghanistan totally hopeless?

Afghanistan is doing just fine:
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

3.5x population increase in 50 years.
Why? Eclipse is just reusable UI widgets and a Java editor. That's basically what you want for writing an "Android IDE", whatever that might be. (I personally just use Emacs.)
While this is a nice idea, I don't understand why someone would pay for a simple site like you're describing when they can simply use a wordpress template.

Or, really why you would code out a site of this level of simplicity when you can do the same. If nothing is going to be custom at all, which is pretty much what you say, why not use a template?

Obviously if you've got the code saved in a few files anyway that's pretty much the same thing as a personalized template I think.

Am I missing something?
Now what would be really cool is if the owner designs and builds a contraption for the parrot to fly... oh wait....
It seems as though it has fallen into the public domain in Europe, perhaps. [1]

[1] http://www.gutenbergnews.org/20101127/public-domain-day-2011...
That would seem to me to be the least of the problems. Just as you can install GNU coreutils on OS X, you can compile the BSD utilities to run on Linux as well.
I love stats, but I do not consider myself a professional statistician, so maybe someone else can give you better suggestions.

I'd just say I understand the basic ideas such as DeMoivre or the Central Limit Theorem, and it helps me a lot.

First I'll assume you have a basic understanding of probabilities (odds, dices, cards, etc).

If you don't yet get probabilities, try the CK-12 books probabilities and advanced probabilities book - free on the kindle, and easy to read : http://www.amazon.com/CK-12-Probability-Statistics-Course-eb...

After that, my recommendation is to study the distributions suggested - from Bernoulli to Hypergeometric - and any source you "understand" will do.

The important thing is not the source, but to understand how these things work together, how they "articulate" - i.e. why taking a bunch of samples that follow any distribution will get you something that follow a normal law (LLN, CLT, etc) - even if the law they follow has a big hole in the middle, that'll where the mean of the normal law will be. Or under which conditions you can replace a law by another law, etc.

Then it's a good time to learn what moments do - how they shape the graphs you get. After that, you can try intervals - calculate intervals given a population parameters to see how a sample can predictably differ, then from a sample of a given size how you can estimate the population parameters.

After learning all that, to bind all this knowledge I'd suggest the free courseware on MIT 15_075 (even reading only the slides online on http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-075...)

I've recently "refreshed" my knowledge of statistics, and used the slides from 15 075 as a base. They get to the point and give a better mathematical understanding - something important to build your knowledge on a solid base after you understand how the things work together and what to go down the rabbit hole.

The course suggests the Tamhane and Dunlop book (which I haven't purchased yet but which is on my buy list) ; some other people recommended it to me for the demonstrations - I did the E(S^2n) E(S^n-1) by hand and I would love to see the proof for the Chi2 stuff, because I usually understand better after I see or do the demonstration.

Regarding Chi2, "Introduction to business statistics" has a great chapter #13, giving practical application, but I strongly suggest you understand the basics first - it's too easy to make mistakes with statistics.

Yes I don't fully trust myself with a tool as powerful as statistics - it takes a professional - but even with my limited understanding, I can see the value it provides, the warnings it gives (ie the article read like some basic logical stuff, but then I realized it wouldn't have been that obvious if I hadn't known basic statistics.)
Thanks. I will try to look for something some other time to clarify my understanding. Some time when I feel less crappy.
The New University Of California Logo Needs To Die A Quick, Painful Death
If a book is public domain, any transcription is in public domain as well (in the US at least.) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#US_copyright_...
I think this is very cool, and I think using a skill set and applying it to charitable need is great.

I would feel more inclined to pick a local charity that needs a site / site update and take them on pro bono for x amount of hours of work, especially if you can improve the way they take donations or something; might have an overall greater effect.
Look at those prices!

I am so thankful for my parents paying an arm and a leg to get me a computer at a young age. I'm guessing the Apple ][ they bought me 30 years ago must have run them a few grand at least.
You're confusing impossibility with human ignorance. A great example of human ignorance is nuclear fission, which is known to have occurred naturally long before Humans figured it out[1]. An immortal toy maker with flying reindeer capable of visiting billions of households in a single evening violates the observed laws of nature and encourages magical thinking over critical thinking.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
Remember we are talking about "power user" hardware, or something like that. Of course I'm going to install the O/S of my choice on my work laptop.
Nice! Great UX thus far.
I would suggest starting at /r/coding for pure technical/coding discussions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/coding

Then follow the sidebar links for related stuff.
Huh? Slashdot is almost all politics, very little technical content.
Are these worth anything? I think I have an older one with the Model I somewhere.

This is obviously a much later catalog because of fancy 5mb harddrives and the model III is in there.

We could never afford any of this but I learned Basic one summer by repeatedly visiting the store demo unit and flipping through the books. I vaguely remember it only had the "level 1 basic" rom so there was only $A and $B (whopping 4k of ram?)
Yep. (The flashing cursor on the Wiki page gives it away.)
The Samsung Chromebook is $249 and doesn't include MS tax. Alas, it is 2.5 pounds rather than 2. I don't know about the boot into backup cycle.
> As Android currently dominates the market, there is probably little reason to invest time in such an effort.

What a snarky comment. I suppose because Windows dominates the market there's little reason to invest time in Linux then?
Cable companies are beholden to the content providers, who have contracts that say if $CABLECO wants to carry channel X, they also need to carry e.g. these 5 other channels.

However... if you want to start a cable company... the easiest way to make a million dollars is to first start with a billion dollars.
$3k/mo buys you a lot of bandwidth, though; even at CloudFront's somewhat-high-for-a-CDN pricing, that's 30TB of bandwidth; to see a 95% reduction in your hosting costs over CloudFront with $3k/mo unmetered bandwidth you'd have to be pushing 1.8PB of data. (edit: I originally said 600TB, but I had done the math wrong for the later discount brackets.)

Even if you were down at the $200/mo plan, that's 45TB/mo before you get to the "95% less expensive" point; I have tens of millions of users worldwide downloading megabytes of packages from me (while the Cydia ecosystem has tons of things much larger, I don't host those: I just have the core package), and I don't often go above 45TB/mo.

Is the idea here that CloudFlare is seriously giving you ludicrously unlimited amounts of bandwidth (and will not give you any crap about it) with a high cache-hit ratio even at their $20/mo plan? If so, I'm going to have to run some insane experiments with their service ;P. (Part of me isn't certain that I want them to hate me that much, though ;P.)

(edit:) Ok, I looked into this some, and this argument ("they don't charge for bandwidth") is just as false as one would expect given that it isn't feasible of them to price that way ;P. Their terms of service makes it very clear that they are only designed for HTML, and that "caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited" <- yes, even "pictures".

With this glaring restriction, there is really no way I can imagine any reasonably-normal company getting a 95% reduction in hosting costs over another CDN, even CloudFront: if you are pushing tens of terabytes of mostly-HTML content a month, you are doing something insanely awesome (and we've probably all heard of you ;P).
Isn't IQ normalized relative to your cohort? The mean IQ should always be 100 if you're doing things right. I would be interested in changes to the test historically.

Edit: my tablet reinterpreted 'doing things' as 'dong tongs'
I appreciate that, I really do, but I would find it hard to believe some of the smaller cable companies wouldnt be at least in part willing to play ball if I am willing to pay them more than they are used to.

Also, the easiest way to make a million dollars is by doing what you love, nobody ever said losing 999m is easy.
My Aunt taught me to program in the 80s on her TRS-80 Model III. She gave it to me once it was obsolete and I continued to use it until 91 when I got a 386. Seeing dancing Demon in the catalog brings back memories. Hardware prices have sure come down, but software seems to be similarly priced.
This is brilliant. A smart keyboard program. I'd buy it.
AAA game engine in C++. Will this trend ever change?
C++ is the industry standard for writing game engines, and AAA game studios withought C++ is unimaginable. There are no indications for a change in the future. Will C++ always remain the standard? It seems so.
What caught my eye was that Radio Shack was selling a version of UNIX back in 1983!

From page 5:

"TRS-XENIX is derived from the powerful UNIX operating system developed by Bell Laboratories. UNIX has been extensively field-tested for the past decade and has demonstrated outstanding performance under heavy workloads. The TRS-XENIX "core", or runtime package, includes the modules required to set up and operate a multi-user system. It includes a hard disk initialization routine, a text editor for modifying the parameters of the system, utilities to transfer files from TRSDOS diskettes, RUNCOBOL to support our COBOL software, and full password protection."

One question, though: is this the same XENIX that Microsoft was licensing from AT&T?
OP here: it's simple, but not cookie-cutter. I'm going to use Bootstrap to try to keep things manageable, but even Bootstrap can be quite expressive. Part of the process is meeting with the client, sorting out what they need, and guiding them towards a good, manageable website. I've explicitly targeted academics because they are notoriously too busy or too unknowledgable to set up even a simple WordPress template. I've posted this with the hope that others might get inspired and take their own spin on it. I'm really an academic, not a hot-shot dev, so this is just my modest attempt.
The point of this is not to make people adopt abandoned dogs because they can drive, it is to make people more likely to adopt abandon dogs by removing the conception that they are stupid/uncontrollable.

I think the real issue with overpopulating dogs is that they are treated as a commodity, so eccess stock is almost inevitable. Of course, every species that ever existed is always in a state of overpopulation, or exponential growth.
I was going to suggest Zoho as an alternative - I have my personal email set up with you guys :) , and had no problems whatsoever.

However, I'm still used to Gmail's web interface, so I redirect my mail there.
What is your planned transport mechanism? Do you plan to build out an entire town with coax cable, amplifiers, and headend? Do you have a franchise agreement in place with a municipality?
A useful tale, a shame this didn't get any traction on HN.
Greater than Dr. Strangelove?
HBO have the lowest non-carry-on rate out of the major networks. Meaning that a HBO pilot is much more likely to make it to a full series than a non-HBO pilot.

They also rarely use the pilot process. A lot of the big series are just approved and produced as full seasons.
Oh wow. This is delightful.

As a younger(?) (24) person I am astonished at how many options there were for different home computers back then. Computers computers computers. I wonder what the margins were like back then compared to today (HP and Dell have around 5%, and PCs arent even the most lucrative in % parts of their biz). Does anyone know where we could find such numbers?

I highly encourage people looking at prices to adjust for inflation to get a feel for things. Here's one such calculator: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

Word processing for $200 ($450), crappy games for $10-20 ($22-44 today), real games (page 48) for $15-35 ($33-78!!!). I feel spoiled rotten.

Today people throw better-than-the-best-games-in-this-catalog at us for free. For a lark. For a laugh cause they were bored and made something in Flash or Canvas that is fun and incredible and we click and move on.

I think its interesting how little game prices have moved since the cost of making a game has gone up so astronomically. I remember a lot of people balking when the change for A-titles went from 50 to 60 dollars, but in terms of money invested, that's so damn cheap.

I wonder if that contributes to modern game-makers hesitation to pursue really innovative titles. Common A-titles when I was growing up were things like The Secret of Monkey Island, a hilarious point-and-click adventure game, and Warcraft/Starcraft. Both of these genres are nearly dead in the mainstream except for names with a lot of clout behind them (Starcraft) and indie developers.

Big publishers, it seems, want to stick to the (admittedly very popular) formula of shooters where you fight Russians, Arabs, Aliens, and Zombies.

---------

Also note that not a single mouse (or pointing device of any kind) was mentioned in the catalog.
Please shut the hell up about Somalia. We get it. The joke was stale the week it came out.
Print a sell sheet of the channels you want to offer in various packages. Go door to door and ask if anyone would be interested in switching.

Once you have a decent number of potential customers in a small area phone the content providers and find out how much it is to license the channels.

If you're still profitable you'll then need to estimate costs for building out your headend, source a location for your satellite dishes, call centres, etc. Find out costs for this. A lot of cable companies, especially Rogers in Canada outsource a lot of their infrastructure / install work, you should be able to find out from their builders rough estimates of build out costs.

Write a business plan and then find out if you can find someone to fund it. When you find someone to fund it, go build it, then sign up your customers.

But seriously the trick to this plan is to figure out how NOT to build out cable infrastructure, I'd look at piggy backing on LTE / Internet in the same way that hulu/netflix/youtube do.

You'd be far better off spending $50 million figuring out how to build synthetic aperture recievers / transmitters and figuring out how to transmit data over the wifi spectrum within the power limits outlined by the FCC rather than building $50 million in 1990s cable infrastructure.
The traditional firms are actually trying to divest their interests in cable. For example, a few years ago Verizon sold off landline buildout in some rural areas to Frontier Communications
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora for example. diaspora is also using backbone.js for some front-end stuff, which is quite interesting to have a look at.

also, check out http://railsapps.github.com/rails-examples-tutorials.html
This site has a boatload of catalogs from '39 onward.

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html

My 'golden years' were in '79 - '84 so much changed, so fast, you felt like every year there was new chip or a new gizmo that you could do _something_ cool with. Later, in the 90's it became a sad joke. We had an informal contest at the Robotics club to come up with anything you could build out of just Radio Shack parts.

These days they are kind of confused. They started adding Arduino kits, and stuff from SeeedStudios (an interesting business model there [1]) I look at the AdaFruit catalog and see hints of the Radio Shack of my youth.

[1] Originally gave you a place to 'sell your design' for other folks who wanted to build it, they were cheap. But now they are selling those same designs through retail channels which seems not quite in spirit with what they started as.
According to Wikipedia, yes.

"Microsoft did not sell Xenix directly to end users; instead, they licensed it to software OEMs such as Intel, Tandy, Altos and SCO, who then ported it to their own proprietary computer architectures."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
> Canonical added the idea of connecting the laptop to the cloud, so that users could develop on LXC containers, replicate the environment on the actual client, and then jettison it to the cloud via the JuJu service deployment and orchestration framework.

This is a very nice idea (although with mobile share plans, we may see 4G support gain popularity in laptops, making this less of a factor). However, I feel that the hardware was neglected to the point that software gimmicks can't make up for it.

I wrote about my experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon on HN a week back[0], and the hardware simply blows the XPS 13 out of the water. The fact that installing Xubuntu (which is much more pleasant for devs and power users than Ubuntu) on an X1 Carbon is laughably easy doesn't help Dell's case.

0: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4848375
This is a problem all sites with multiple sign on options face. I suggest going the Pinterest route of requiring the user to fill in email no matter which path they take.
Agreed. I've done all kinds of accidental abuse to AVRs, shorting outputs while testing, powering an entire circuit through the USART pins, switching the PDI connector on an XMEGA (3.3V) with a +5V USB connector, that sort of thing. They seem to be quite resilient.
A classmate of mine apparently had a 5V AVR powered by +12V for quite some time in one of his projects when the voltage regulator silently failed. Apparently it operated for several days like this.
My favorite discussion about the resilience of the AVR comes from 26C3 "Advanced Microcontroller Programming", available here on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
"You can zap 15kV spikes into the clock inputs and it will continue to run..."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101106

Lots more via
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+npluso...
It's convenient that your historical definition lines up perfectly with the ideology of limited government. Do you have a source for it?
I think you overestimate how easy it is to hire people capable of overflowing buffers on their own initiative.