skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you. Thank You. Thank you.

Fellow sufferer here. "looks horrible" is probably understatement. Some days "makes me want to poke my eye out" is appropriate. I have resorted to custom Stylish font replacement scripts to step around the problem.
Does anyone here have enough 2x2 bricks to try getting it several meters high?
Ask HN: Languages/tech for my website
Hi. I am building a dynamic website with a lot of server push data and connected user interactions.

The server side engine (contains the business Model) will be a standalone Java app, that accesses MySQL DB and communicates with the webserver app in some form of messaging or socket.

The client/browser side I prefer Javascript.

Now what tech and lang do you recommend to bridge the client and the business engine? This will include the webserver and the webapp that will also accesses the same MySQL.

The requirements are: it needs to be fast, able to handle lot of push/pull data traffic in real time to many users, and secure (encryption?). The technology should be well supported on a production level and not a dead end, with consideration for expanding to mobile apps. Any suggestions?
Normally I'd tend to agree with you, but if the gp was using an AS/400, I bet their software was written in RPG.

Now, let's play a game. :) I'm going to Gist the example RPG program from Wikipedia, but with all the comments stripped out. Take a guess as to what it does:

https://gist.github.com/4204324

(Note that the spacing shown here is absolutely essential. Keep this in mind if you ever feel like complaining about whitespace in Python.)

Answer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG#Example_code

My company's entire internal business infrastructure is written in, perhaps, millions of lines of this (commented, thankfully).

"Right," you may say, "but this is surely easy enough to read for someone who's used RPG for a while." Now consider that (afaik) RPG hasn't been taught in schools since the 70s, and that this entire format is alien to folks reared on Java. Even a poor comment in this environment is like suddenly stumbling across a line of semi-cogent English scribbled in the margins of the Necronomicon. Which is to say, it might just hold the insanity at bay for a while longer. :)

Footnote: the Wikipedia article mentions a "FREE" mode that makes writing RPG much more similar to modern languages (what an old hand here might call "freeform" languages, a.k.a. languages that aren't column-based). But I get the feeling that the gp's company would regard such notions as heresy.
And we also gain new common words from brands that become generic, like Tabloid or Bikini.

Bikini isn't a brand that became a generic word. It is a loan word from the native Marshall Islanders(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll), that was stolen for a brand then became generic. Which ironically proves his point.
Smart Startups Never Let Negatives Bury Positives
The Ninjago and film tie-in Lego is overpriced, but the Creator range has been good value. These sets cost $5-$25, with 3 "official" ways to build each one and loads of make-your-own possible models thanks to a good mix of regular bricks, plates and fancy pieces.

The problem with the themed stuff is that it isn't really Lego. It's more like any other plastic toy - pre-built (or made from a few big pieces), not much replayability but "looks cool" on the box and in toy catalogs.

On the company - another anecdote - my son lost a piece of one set, I went through the "lost a piece" process on their web-site and to my surprise they sent it us, for free. Although given all I've spent over the years on Lego, I think I was due a 1x2 grey slope with grill :-)
Canada goose constable jacket
Assuming the rest of the pyramid base doesn't end up flexing around that one brick (which would not be very tall) and distributing more of its weight on the ground...
That depends on whether or not there is a cost per user. If there is a server-side component checking for cheating or multiplayer functionality (from what I gathered by skimming, there is), and whether they are using 3rd party support services (bug reports, notifications, whatever).

If any of the above are true, they are paying for people to steal from him. On top of that, there's nothing worse than knowing you spent a lot of time building something to have people steal it from you because they're too cheap to drop $1, $5, $10 despite how much time or return it gives them.

One of my company's most popular (Android) apps has a 50% piracy rate and it irritates me to no end.
As someone else mentioned, the only criticism I'd level at them is that they decided to split the Lego magazine into boys' and girls' magazines. There's going to be children of any gender who enjoy the Friends sets as well as children who enjoy the Star Wars sets. No real reason to try and fit each child into one of those camps.
Original story: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-ballmers-nightmare-is-c...
IPhone ECG transforms heart rhythm monitoring
What are you trying to do with the UK postal codes?

Address lookup or just validation?

For validation, there's an official regex (archived, but still useful) http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govtalk/schemasstandards/e-g....

For address lookup there are a couple of ways to go about it.

1. You can buy the rights to the Royal Mail's database. You get to parse the sucker yourself.
http://www.poweredbypaf.com/end-user/products/paf-raw-data/

2. You can use a third party system, either over the web, or choose a solution you can host internally. Depending on the type of system you buy you pay by the lookup or by the user (mostly internally hosted systems).
I was irritated and fell back upon the Socratic method, it's condescending, I'm sorry.
It may be that dismantling IP would have the effects you describe. But I would argue that this is not necessarily an argument against IP, it could also be an argument against the current architecture of our economic systems. We need to design them in such a way that these kinds of fundamental conflicts either don't arise or find themselves balanced appropriately. I was saying that maybe rather than throwing out a good idea because it does not fit into the current paradigm, we should address the paradigm itself. We probably do not know enough about large scale complex systems to address this issue appropriately, but we should begin the dialog and arguments like this are too narrow in scope.
Couldn't you use flying buttresses to stabilize the inverted pyramid without lifting weight off the bottom brick?
Smaller Hackathons- More time with teams
Yes you can, what do you think "Block users who have a feedback score equal to or lower than X" means? X can be set to 10 if you want.

That imgurl I linked to was directly from my eBay account.
Apple's Messages:  UI Problemz
Nobel Prize to Get Hedge Fund Boost After Awards Sink 20%
India Had An AirBnB Equivalent In 2007, Jimmy Wales Had Used It
Some creative minds are more interested in nurseries and tea parties than in trains or robots. And it's natural for it to be so.

It's evident once you have some kids. I truly wanted that not to be the case, but reality bites.

For the PC crowd: This of course doesn't mean that girls will never play with robots or cars or that boys won't play with nurseries or tea parties. Of course a mix is healthy and should be encouraged. But the stereotypical preferences are truly marked in most cases, before parental intervention.
I recently started doing professional Django training. Migrations haven't come up in training sessions yet but I'm not sure what I would recommend. I feel South might be too intimidating to thiose just learning Django. Are there any alternatives?
Responsive & Touch-Friendly Audio Player
It's also easier to defend your stuff when you are sitting in the board room.

I've seen it happen to former employees at previous companies; once I even asked at a meeting if anything was being done about their massive dilution and the CEO gave a prepared spiel that was pretty close to Paul Graham's piece about how VC's like to wipe out angels: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html#f9n
And yet we have Gruber still regularly linking to Asymco, who, when first linked to, by Gruber, was telling us all that Apple, RIM and Nokia were destined for greatness because they were "integrated" while in "modular" land, WinPhone would outsell Android and combined they'd never breach the 30% of sales mark.

So the first person that should be called out by these "new Grubers", could be Gruber himself.
When they say it was out of his price range, many mint-boxed sets are available on Bricklink that are the same as or less than the original retail price.

http://www.bricklink.com/search.asp?pg=1&q=10194&sz=...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
Europe versus Facebook
Compared to a PC they are very easy to maintain - if they lock or reboot, it is a pretty easy recovery for the normal person. Amazingly, cable boxes and satellite tv has conditioned people to the "wonky appliance needs to be restarted" thing.
Another way that growing marijuana is benefiting mankind! ;-)
I'm looking at your website and I'm trying to imagine what a "sales team" would do with it. Here's a good litmus test - seek out a sales professional in your area, pitch him or her on your idea of what you think a sales person would/could do, and get their feedback. You shouldn't have that much trouble finding someone - networking groups, friends, etc should be able to put you in front of a really good salesperson. I think you'll learn a lot by (a) having to come up with a pitch that is focused on selling the idea of bringing a sales person on board, and then (b) I think you'd learn a lot from the feedback the person gives you. It's a no-lose situation for you.

I would think that, because this will be a one-sided benefit (your team will benefit from this meeting but the sales person will not), you should keep it brief and buy them lunch/dinner/drinks. Asking someone to listen to and respond to a 30-minute pitch is a LOT, particularly if they are getting no direct benefit from it. Maybe keep it to 10 minutes with Q&A.

Things you'd want in the pitch:

* The idea

* What you've done so far

* Who is using it

* Why you need a sales team

* How the sales team changes things

* Commission plan

* How much of an opportunity there is for them (inc. any equity you are offering)

* 1yr, 2yr, and 5yr projections on both sales and the size of the sales team
I think (?) the room on NS 2 you're thinking of is part of the Quality of Life Technology Center. <3 CMU and #proud. Can we all agree that the robot in the Gates 3 lounge area is somewhat creepy-looking though? His avatar looks like a cross between Julian Assange and Andy Warhol.
Hey Security Teams: Developers Don't Speak PDF
Do you find it easier to believe now that he has admitted the coordinates were correct and the image was real, and has deleted his earlier "apology" in which he claimed to have faked the EXIF? Or do you still think the "contrast on his skin" points to a greater conspiracy?

By the way, how long have you been an expert on the Belizean justice system?
Could curiosity give us a good enough picture of the soil composition on mars that we could recreate it on earth and practice growing plants?
Is this satire? This person is mad that some volunteers helping to rebuild houses after a devastating wildfire used sacrosanct Star Wars imagery to lighten the mood and make the victims happy? Outrage? This article is disgusting and why is it on HN?
I really like this idea.

The other thing I'd add is that basic information about conflicts should be made public on someone's record, along with a high level outcome (and possibly additional comments from the parties involved) so these things can be part of someone's decision making process.
If your nieces weren't interested in the sets Lego should have focused on better sets that were still gender-neutral. That doesn't exclude zoos, camping, or pet orientation.

Near as I can tell, the pet shop is gender neutral, and the "Lego Friends" sets don't appear particularly gendered:

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Pet-Shop-10218

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/LEGO-Friends-Mias-Skateboard?icmp...

Similarly, Farnsworth House (http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Farnsworth-House-21009), the 4x4 crawler (http://technic.lego.com/en-us/Products/default.aspx#9398) and mindstorms (http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/products/default.aspx).

The fundamental difference between Friends and the rest of lego seems to be that Friends is about people, whereas the rest of lego is about building stuff.
While mostly reasonable, I think this is brushing over two large sections of Lego's products: Technic and Mindstorms.

The pieces from Technic are much more Meccano-like, in that they don't all have studs on top, and there are holes down the sides of the pieces with "bolts" to connect them together at arbitrary angles. (And there is cogs, axles, chains and motors.)

Mindstorms is an actual real robot, in the hands of kids, along with a fairly well defined progression of methods of programming it[3] (the Lego supplied methods have several stages of simple/easy to more complicated/powerful, and the third party languages include C/C++ and so on). It is actually one of the major factors in my learning to program. Having a programmable microcontroller so tightly integrated into a 3D-printer-like system gives so much power and flexibility for experimentation, especially in the hands of intelligent 10-15 year olds, who aren't being stimulated by school at all.

As someone who loved/loves both his Meccano and Lego, I think the normal Lego < Meccano < Lego Mindstorms, in terms of promoting technical thinking & experimentation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Technic
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms#Programming_la...
Exporting your Flash Application or Game to Xcode
If you made public details of things like chargebacks and other conflicts after the event that might help.
At least one user, me, is tired of your "typical UI paradigm" and tired of entering redundant information.
1. Ask for country (if not known) allow user to override if it was automatically detected.
2. Ask for zip, or other country specific postal code.
3. Look up zip. Fill form in with details.
Yeah, they may be expensive, but I've played with multiple "clones" as a kid and none got even close to their quality. Even the colors were often off.
How a useless dashboard panel helped us boost usage by 200%
Although if you've got water (and there is water on the moon) and a nuclear powerplant generating loads of electricity, getting oxygen's not a problem.
I use South on a fairly substantial django project (35 models, 85+ migrations). After around a few dozen migrations we got really frustrated with south. We still use south, but now run all migrations via db.execute(""CREATE ... """) with manual SQL rather than using the south models and the south wrappers. There were too many instances when there would be some little thing wrong, and we would get long, very hard to debug error messages. Also a number of times I would get my local install into a weird state where I could not run migrations, and I'd have to manually patch up. By doing straight SQL I always know exactly what is running, and so it is both easier to debug locally and feels safer to run against the prod data.

When we switched to db.execute, we lost the ability to do backwards migrations, but that's ok. Backwards migrations are really, really dangerous. In fact, deleting columns, ever, is really dangerous. If you are deleting data permanently it is always better to hand craft precisely what you want to do, and have everyone look it over, rather than running a backwards migration.
There's nothing stopping a girl from buying "boy" Legos. In fact, there are plenty of solid generic Lego sets available, and stuff like MindStorms, which is an awesome robotics kit, is not really gendered.

The problem is that Lego can't just market to kids, who have no innate idea of what's "supposed to be for boys" or what's "meant for girls" -- Lego has to market to 30+year old parents who have gender stereotypes embedded in their mindset, even some of the most progressive ones.

I think a slow transition is good, and having more toys for girls that involve building and creating is a good step forward, even if they're still a bit gendered.
Our Hype Machine app for Mac, Hypegram, has launched
I built Planscope (https://planscope.io) specifically for freelancers and consultants.

I wanted:
* To know how scope changes affected overall budget
* My clients to know what tasks they were spending money on
* Stupid simple and a no-brainer for clients
* Integrated time tracking

Planscope does all this and more. Check it out, and if you have any questions drop me a line: brennan@planscope.io
But most of the time people need money to do what they really want to do. I totally agree that money does not buy happiness, but if you do not have money, you will probably be unhappy.
Another cool thing about ▶ and browser tabs happens when you open up Soundcloud in a tab and start playing, then open up another Soundcloud tab and hit play. The other tab stops!
This is a fantastic list - keep it up!
Awesome list! Love that Captivate is featured.
At the age of 30, I still get a sense of excitement when I see Lego. I don't know of any engineers who never played with Lego as a kid (or even Meccano to a lesser degree)
I agree that unit tests for internal (non public) functionality are not particularly useful, and can hamper your willingness to change an internal implementation for the better.

I also agree it's painful to trace through dozens of classes/methods to determine what the actual implementation is. However, I don't agree the culprit is small methods. Small, interdependent methods in a single class (or package) are great and can be easy to follow if they are consistent. Usually the culprit is overuse of inheritance and design patterns.

However, one case where I find myself being less "fancy" is functions that run/generate SQL statements. Although there are many cases where you can re-use certain portions of SQL statements and build up a query through smaller functions, this ends up being a nightmare to debug. I find it is better to be as plain and explicit as possible.
Hypegram.... Take my money already.
22 Resources for New Web Design & Development Articles
> inconsistent lighting direction

He appears to be standing under a canopy of trees.
> I guess it's all about having valuable brand

Yet still people call it Legos :(
Hah. It's funny how nobody thought to create a simple static utility function which converted a domain-name to a fully-qualified .com URL.
I really appreciate their Friends series. My son had tons of legos of all kinds. My daughter, who is 5 now, played with Duplo, but refused to try regular Legos. They were for boys. The Friends set are a different matter. The fact that there are real characters, with names, is crucial to her. We went on the Friends website, and went through all the information about the characters. Knowing what their hobbies and favorite colors are might seem inane, but it let her connect. Then she can go and do imaginative play with the figures.

With my son, it was all about the construction. He didn't play with sets much once they were built. My daughter liked the construction, but got more out of playing with the sets and the figures once it was built.

Other parents are entitled to their views, but I think my daughter fits the behavior Lego was going for with Friends.
You can do this now with Google Drive and the Neutron Drive app: https://neutron-drive.appspot.com/
Yes I agree most people are leaving Flash (and Flex) now. I wouldn't use either of them today.

But back in about 2006 Flex was a clever tool
Awesome list, great job Franco!
Well for start, buyer needs to send the item back.
Your anonymity is compromised if/when you use "trusted 3rd parties (e.g. banks)." In order to not get shut down by governments, they must comply with applicable laws, which include identifying your identity in some way. (At least as far as I know).
As part of your Procfile you could add --migrate to the syncdb that happens.
And when an adult stands on it in front of the kid, the kid learns lots of interesting new words!

Lego: you're never not learning.

The only real problem I have with Lego is the price of some of the items. A cursory search will bring you across £500 Technic sets... which is utterly bloody ridiculous.
Science works by peer review, by working on assumed axioms etc.

Also Issac Newton was taking the piss out of a contemporary rival whom he despised who was well known for being very short when he said that.
Awesome list! ... though, there goes my morning, going to be trying out these products.
But victim or perpetrator, if your number is up, we’ll find you.
I agree on the marketing point. They could have one magazine with everything in it.

It seems like, and forgive me if I inferred the wrong thing from your comment, that you are implying that some of the toys aren't gender neutral. I don't have a problem with they beauty bar and things like that. Some girls like those things. So do some boys.

The marketing side I totally agree with though. For whatever reason when I was around 8 I wanted a Barbie. I can't tell you how much I got made fun of and picked on for that. I remember hiding it when friends came over so I wouldn't get made fun of. To my mother's credit though, she didn't really even bat an eye at the thought of me playing with a girl toy.
Bah humbug, don't be snobby about these things, it's not as if HN is overrun with them.

Just enjoy it as a break from the norm.
I've heard good things about nashvegas[0]. It's a bit more manual of a tool, but maybe less surprising to new users.

[0] - http://nashvegas.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
They dub it as 'the portal' but it seems that there is just a really long, 93million miles-long, magnetic field that connects the magnetic field of Earth and Sun. So I assume that it doesn't mean that we can 'throw stuff' at one end and expect it to come instantly over to the other end?

Can someone explain is there an application where we could utilize this discovery?
For those in the US, Meccano's are what are now sold here as "Erector" sets. The older Erector sets were actually a slightly different design from the 1920s by Gilbert, but those are long gone and sorely missed by many.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_the_Moon

There's air, but not much. And I wouldn't want to try and breathe it.
What I do not get about Soundcloud is why they make it impossible to browse the music if you are not a logged-in user. It makes me slap my forehead each time, almost as bad as Jamendo's perpetuum failuri.

Or am I just too dumb to find their "browse" or "search" pages? The link to /explore/ in the linked post just gives me an 404 error page.

edit: wait, what, now it works. I get a cover/graphic heavy browse page.

Hm, pretty much all the titles are cut off. I don't get why music sites feel cover art is so important. It is so generic and interchangeable. Some more tags/genres shown would be much more important to me.

edit2: On second thought, even that /explore/ page is nothing. I guess it changes daily or in realtime. You cannot see a bigger list of tracks for subgenres. You only get one song per subgenre. It is weird how clicking the cover image starts the song instead of taking me to the track page.

edit3: https://soundcloud.com/tags/metal is more like it. That page makes my netbook cry in agony though. Oh god, it has no pagination but infinite scrolling. My navigation keys (arrows, pageup/down, space) do not work.