skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where do drone OPERATORs get their pilots license...?

Radio shack.

lol
I'd really like to know if people on HN "share an absence of literary culture" as Taleb suggests. Can you please respond if you read literature other than science fiction?

I definitely read more than just sci-fi, but - while I am a fan of Taleb's work - I don't give two shits about his "literary culture". I enjoy "classics" from the Greeks (Plato, Aristotle, etc.); Enlightenment era philosophers, to more contemporary philosophers; history; biographies; science & nature; economics; etc. But I don't see how that makes me any more (or less) cultured than anybody else. There's far too much material out there for anybody to read it all, and we all have to pick our battles.

I guess I'd say my position is that I enjoy and read all kind of literature, but I dislike people who draw boxes around people, and put labels on them, based on what they read. "High brow" and "low brow" and "literary culture" are terms I find to be devoid of almost all value.

Of course Taleb would probably say that I just proved his point...
Swap Your Laptop for an iPad + Linode
Hey folks,

We've been working on this for the last 12 months. It all started by repairing a few too many dropped iPads and thought we could make a better protection system for iPad.

We followed a engineering design process which started by dropping iPads thousands of times and measuring the results with accelerometers, strain gauges and load cells before proceeding to design our protective product.

Any feedback is appreciated!
My biggest to do list is the marketing side at the moment but I'd love to have your feedback.

indieintern.com

Hit me at will at that domain and I'll send you a code for free months if you're interested.
My advice is similar to jsonmez.

If you are trying to lose weight, I would mainly focus on weight training. I would also add in walking, swimming, running, or biking.

Diet wise: more protein rich food, more fruits and veggies, and cut out high-fructose corn syrup/high sugar products. Eating healthy is just as important as the exercise itself.
Germany Has Built Clean Energy Economy U.S. Rejected in 80s
Its a great article. Unfortunately, the problem plagues Seattle too, which also has the potential to be a world city, but can't get over its incredible NIMBYism. You can't even remodel your kitchen without getting your neighborhood to vote on it.
Each customer only has a limited amount of QoS high priority traffic. If someone flags every packet with high priority, all the QoS mean is that the first packages get improved priority and everything else get default low priority.

That mean a customers software can balance the use of QoS for time sensitive traffic, and maybe even flag some data as below default to get bonus high priority traffic points. If its the software that runs on the consumers device that decide priority, the software developer can pick the exact needed QoS his program or service need.

The bonus effect here is that if the QoS fail and the program breaks, its the software developer that are liable and not the ISP. Currently, if a ISP QoS software breaks, the ISP is actually quite open for lawsuits from both the user and the service that get effected.
Ask HN: Enduring Repetitive Stress Injury to the hand
Hi,
Are there any hackers out there who've had repetitive stress injury to the wrists/fingers? How did you work around it?
I think I might have early symptoms.

How do you avoid a career threat from RSI/hand injury?
Yup. The ol', it's not the miners who make it big but the guys selling them shovels.
Everyone, please write better emails. Provide me with a single, clear call-to-action (aka next step) so that I "level up" and become more awesome. Side effect: I'll use your product and learn about your company.

Remember Kathy Sierra's advice: Don't buy this because we kick ass, buy this because we want YOU to kick ass.

http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/06/...
SF rent control is profitable for landlords. It resets with each tenant. So, only if you overpay when you initially buy are you ever going to lose money b/c rent control. And if you do that, its a fault of the bid being off.
CrossFit isn't a scam. It's just another tool for in the realm of eating less and exercising more. I'd say CrossFit is worth if you like it, the price is right, and it's convenient.
Actually I think we giggle a little too. But, while we may never make watching advertisements an enjoyable experience that is rewarding in of it self. I do think that we can make them less annoying. For example when watching television at home I've see Cialis ads about erectile dysfunction, because I'm a twenty-something guy this ad is not interesting or relevant to me furthermore the company the makes Cialis isn't interested in me watch the ad because no matter how slick their marking is I won't be buying Cialis. Targeting allows you to not see Cialis ads, and it allows old people to not see Call of Duty ads. This means as a publisher you can make the same money while showing less ads, and as a viewer you have to sit through fewer ads. This is how we can make ads more valuable.
Eke, not ink.

"Eke out every bit of performance"
India Gets its First 1Gbps Internet Connection.
>"Social support, similarly motivated peers, role models, and even just the knowledge that they have access to expertise that can get them unstuck when they're tired and frustrated are huge factors in getting people to learn. They will be more fearless, more intrepid, and work their way up to a place where they have the confidence and skill to both learn on their own and on the job."

Yes! That's what makes this kind of thing worthwhile!
I am planning on creating a startup that would do something along these lines. This would be a great opportunity for me to learn about coaching through Skype. If you are interested, I would love to devote a few hours a week to code coaching.

I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but I have been coding for 9 years or so now. What level are you at, and what level would you prefer your coach to be?
Thoughts_on_rails
In case of learning to program though, I think the express edition is more than enough. Hell, I even know some company who are using the express edition for their main production tool.
I'm one of the lead devs on the Chrome Windows sandbox, and I can assure you that what we do with Vista+ on the security front is leaps and bounds ahead of what we're stuck with on XP. DEP is unreliable and pretty worthless anyway without ASLR. You also don't have things like SEHOP or other memory mitigations that are the first line of defense between your system and the average stale pointer exploit against WebKit.

As for the sandbox itself, we run as "Untrusted" integrity level under Vista+, which buys a solid layer of defense on top the SID, rights, and job based sandboxing we do on XP. Our GPU process sandbox in particular (used for accelerated graphics) relies heavily on Vista+ integrity levels due to deficiencies in the Windows XP driver and graphics model. Then there's the fact that XP is lacking hundreds of security fixes that Microsoft has chosen not to backport.

Seriously, I've spent many weeks trying to wring every last bit of security I can out of XP, and I really do think that Chrome does the best anyone possibly could on that front. But in the end XP is just an OS that's far past its security expiration date, and running it at all means taking a big risk.
The ability to build should not depend on whether a boom will last...even if we could trust people that predict that it won't. The entire US continues to benefit from an overly exuberant boom in fiber-optic cables in the late 90's. San Francisco would continue to benefit from the housing stock even if all the nerds packed up and moved to Oakland.
There were several factors, but the two big categories were:

1. Familiarity. The original decision to use MySQL was arbitrary, and as the team grew, we just so happened to hire lots of postgres-philes.

2. Death by a million paper cuts. Locking/slowdowns as load increased. Useless EXPLAINs and naive query planning. Truncation (rather than rejection) of VARCHARSs and INTs that exceed length constraints. Having to rewrite queries in weird ways and/or use MySQL-specific syntax to work around performance issues. Lack of partial and expression indexes. No transactional DDL support.

Additionally, the stars aligned. We had a very large customer -- about as big as our other customers combined (up to that point) -- that wanted an on-premise Postgres install, so we added support for it. Eventually the customer opted to move it into our cloud. We didn't want to have to maintain multiple types of database clusters, so we just moved everything to Postgres.
It doesn't really solve the same problem.

IAP allows SaaS providers to provide their "App" via the quickbooks "App Store". That is great if your a SaaS provider, someone like Freshbooks.

What IAP doesn't allow is using its APIs via your own custom in house application that you don't plan to publish on their "App store". If your using QB desktop your only real option is web connector hell.
it's almost entirely a side-effect of the funding bubble.

-- Which is an effect of Bernanke's QE, and is open ended at the moment.
1. Color Theory. How to decide which colors to be used for particular type of project/audience?

2. Typography. Which types of fonts to use for given situation and that works on all windows/mac/linux/android/ios? Categories of fonts and where to find free fonts/web-fonts.

3. Layouts. What different types of layouts are possible and how to decide which one to use?

4. Responsive Design Techniques.

5. CSS3 art. How can we use CSS3 to create things like Text Logos, UI elements?

6. Design Case Studies. Pick up a good well known design and redesign it explaining the design decisions taken in the process.
First of all, this account isn't me. Second, you're not allowed to post my name like this. Patrick are you losing your mind?
QoS generally gives ISPs incentives to deliberately cause congestion by not upgrading their networks. Also, pretty much nobody is talking about customers paying for their own QoS; the idea is for Netflix to pay for it.
I don't like it because it makes it sound like they are running stuff on my machine. Which sounds like hacking to the layman. Cookies are closer to name tags than bits of code.
The customer isn't the one flagging the packets with QoS, the sender of the traffic is. So sure, if you're talking about outbound VoIP traffic from the customer's computer, they could do that. But what about inbound traffic, which for nearly all customers is the bulk of their traffic? There can be no way to put controls on who sets the QoS flag, which means everybody needs to set it or they risk having their own service degraded because someone else decided to inappropriately set their own QoS flag.

Basically, it's tragedy of the commons. All incoming traffic is going to end up with the QoS flag set, and thus the internet will basically behave as if it didn't exist.
I would say the thing I struggle most with is also Typography.
Think of San Francisco as a bowl, with it's limited real estate and finite density. All the money pours into the bowl and sloshes up the sides and overflows, resulting in very high housing costs.

The central valley is more of a sauce pan, when money is poured into it, it spreads out at a low price level.
You completely miss my point. I have no problem looking at ads, or with the publishers selling ad space that obscures 50% or more of a webpage. That's their prerogative.

I object to having the details of my life collected and monetized by strangers for other strangers. My vacation plans are no one's business; my political bent is my own concern; my shoe size is between me and my podiatrist; and I must absolutely insist that it stays that way.
I agree that C++ is complicated, and the future direction is not c++. but isn't c# supposed to be dead soon? and even MSFT is well prepared to discard it anytime.
C is much simpler than C++. whereever c++ is needed, c is a much better option.
I stopped reading about the time the author implicitly compared C++ to Java and C#. Sure, these things all share a similar syntax, but one of these things is not like the others.
Stormpulse - Full-time in Austin, TX

(We are patio11's first angel investment!)

Position: Full-Stack Polymath

Relevant tech: Python, MySQL, Postgres, AWS, Backbone, Bootstrap.

* Able to rapidly gain (and enjoy gaining) new expertise in a previously-foreign, non-technical domain (e.g. weather, earthquakes, wildfires, solar flares)

* Derive joy from seeing huge leaps forward in the customer experience

* Mastery in a non-technical discipline (i.e. you are not only a great developer, but also a master at jazz music, mountain climbing, chess, skiing ... something that has taught you how to think beyond a keyboard).

* Ability to collaboratively apply the design principles of Stormpulse to new projects

* Not satisfied with a compromise -- always pursue the possibility that two seemingly contradictory goals can be simultaneously achieved through great feats of design / engineering

* Derives pleasure from the final aesthetic

Come learn why businesses like Honda benefit from our technology.

Competitive salary, benefits, stock options. Email: founders@stormpulse.com.

Thanks!
Everything I see from Buffer seems to be high quality. From their product to their jobs postings.

I'm now on a mission to teach myself more Javascript and Backbone.js...
Even as early as the turn of the 20th century, there was private development on every single acre that was privately owned in Manhattan. It still grew and continued to be developed. You don't have to worry...if people stop liking cities, they will move to the peninsula or the east bay.
Post it here too please, it'll make for a good conversation.
So, the argument is that C++ is too hard to learn for the average programmer, and that's why it's not "back"?

I don't get it, isn't that win-win is many situations. I'd rather have a solid developer who can master C++ or at least understand the concepts when explained to him/her, than someone who can't. Basides dealing with compiling/linking (but scons greatly simplifies this), I really don't feel like it limits me much compared to other languages like Python once you know a bit of STL.
I think you're misunderstanding what a "black swan" event is supposed to be. It's not just something that is unpredictable; that is normal. It's something that is so outside the whole frame of reference that it wasn't even not predicted; its very existence destroys the entire framework used to make the predictions.

In that sense, although your definition was wrong, you're actually kind of right - the reason predictions so often fail is that they do not take into account the unknown, which is basically a tautology, though one probably worth repeating since it's so hard for our brains to actually accept.
Why? Why should you get to say that the city can't grow when others want it to? I don't understand where this sense of entitlement comes from.
It is the purpose that matters the most. Your reply in comments make me feel your primary goal is to build a portfolio of side projects to get hired. I will suggest you to do different kinds of side projects that reflects your qualities like creativity, designing skills, technical skills, writing skills, etc. I believe 2-3 great projects will be more beneficial that 5-10 average projects. Do different kinds of projects using technologies that are popular in startup ecosystem.
Or turn of your internet connection while playing.
correct me if I am wrong, but I dont think he said anything about the iOS safari and internet explorer on windows phone. More like.. Because of this web version, he went further with windows development than when he tried to start with actual windows phone 8 development on his computer..
> I don't buy the taller buildings = more wealth, creativity and energy argument.

If you haven't read The New Geography of Jobs, I highly recommend it. It gives an excellent explanation of why having a higher density of knowledge workers increases their per-capita productivity and creativity.
It's certainly possible to grow SF up like NYC or HK. Both are bounded by water and yet manage to make more living quarters.

As for whether building up and having more people is a good thing that really depends on the people, the culture and the management of the city. Personally Tokyo an awesome place to live with all kinds of activity, culture, etc and it has a population density much higher than SF so it's certainly true that an SF that grows up could be a great place.
There is extremely high demand and artificially limited supply. Without corruption land and buildings would be purchased at fair market value and additional housing units would be built up in their place. As it stands the few real estate owners can continuously increase prices without further investment because corrupt politics prevents any new competition.

San Francisco has a love affair with beat-up 100 year old victorian houses and outrageously high prices. If I owned one of those houses I also wouldn't want to let any new real estate developers into my Cool Kids Club.
This is your fake noob account, sharing your same image that you posted from your "wellfrankly" HN account. Please stop adding unnecessary noise to HN. Thank you.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4856708
Gives new meaning to the term helicopter parenting.
No. There are increasingly lesser avenues where the raw power of C++ will make a difference. C++ need not be a main stream language when many simpler more elegant alternatives exist. Use it where it is abosultely necessary - where active memory management, access to hardware and performance are absolutely required.
I can't help but wonder why they didn't try this 20 years ago. As it stands now, it seems hopelessly out of touch with reality. Why would people start paying more for online services when the price of everything tends to decrease over time? And why do governments think that the big internet companies are going to pay for this? They have shareholders too, after all.
Or is cialis playing the long game? I kid, I kid.

I personally don't buy google ads because I think they are overpriced; google does too good of a job advertising their ad service. But I certainly acknowledge that they have made ads much more efficient, for people buying and selling ads.

But, really? I think for the consumer? irrelevant ads are probably healthier than relevant ads. Being subject to your vendor's reality distortion field is not in your best interest. As much as possible, you want your filter bubble to exclude media created by your vendor.

(The really interesting case, I think, where you can argue that I am wrong is cisco and microsoft. Both publish some really excellent technical books; I mean, to the point where the excellent technical books become a rational reason for buying cisco kit- Probably the closest one can come to the advertising being good for the consumer. Of course, the books aren't free, and the premium for cisco kit is... substantial.)
Will 8K be the ultimate TV screen?
Metaphors and complexity. How do you take an innovative new idea and make it instantly relatable and familiar to people? How has it been done in the past?

I'm struggling with page/group/stream/profile designs and don't know how to make it different than everyone else while still keeping it intuitive and fun.
I want to be contrarian here and say I actually liked this article, whose main thrust I might summarise thusly:

The future will not be as cool as technologists imagine because in the contest of being what it could be, and being what its current inhabits want it to be (especially those in power), the latter wins

It's nothing profound, but it's worth hearing again, and the arguments here underline that. Technology exists to serve humans, and humans haven't changed for a very long time, for better or worse. Any prediction that fails to take this into account will fail. It's an old lesson, but it seems we need to hear these old lessons again, and again, and again.
There isn't just a single axis for developers. A developer who knows the details of C++ may just be (or possibly, probably) a language lawyer. That doesn't mean they know much about how to put out readable, maintainable, performant, simple code in a reasonable time frame.

One could argue that many developers know better than taking the productivity hit of C++.

Disclaimer: I do C++ as my day job, and my MS thesis was in metaprogramming. I still think C++ usually doesn't apply, even though in some important cases, it very much does.
more hallucinogens on the left coast. No surprise BSD was a left coast hippy idea, and mainframe OS was a IBM/east coast thing.
Framing elements on a page. I struggle with this a lot.
Excellent write up.

I am a good C++ developer but my dislike for the language has grown ever since c++11. Many parts of the language are arcane and unfortunately these parts are used over and over again by many programmers either to show of their 'coolness' or because it's the only possible way.

Here try this for size:
https://github.com/boost-lib/bind/blob/master/include/boost/... (sorry if that blurb made you blind)

I also dislike perl. A large amount of perl code contains shorcuts - like $^p or %#p (not real perl patterns but I hope you get the point). These patterns are ungooglable and hard to remember. The only people who know them are those who have spent a lot amount of time with the language.

The result is code that is extremely hard to understand and read.

Languages must be optimized for reading and not writing. Of course, nobody is asking one to go overboard (like COBOL) but reading a computer program should not hurt the brain and should not require years of training.

This is why I will not advocate C++. I would advocate C, Python or JavaScript (yeah javascript, it has it's pitfalls but it's very easy to master). There are possibly other languages like Ruby but I haven't taken the time to learn them.

(BTW, If you want to see how C++ could be done right, look at something Qt from an API point of view).
Get Your Own Riding, Killing Robot
No it isn't. Please stop making baseless accusations.
Coding As A Substitute For Meditation?
Thanks for the list :) I'll see if I can address them all
Can you please elaborate a little on what you mean by framing?
That's pretty funny. But that's really all there is to it. There's no secret formula, just practice.
Is it necessary to make it different unless the changes made improves its user experience? If a particular design pattern works and one is unable to improve its usability isn't it better to not change it? Slight change in colors, typography etc may give it a different look.
"The ability to build should not depend on whether a boom will last"

That's an assertion of fact, when it should be an argument. And it's not a particularly good argument.

There are a lot of valid reasons for the city to regulate construction: fire safety, traffic control, utility provisioning, transit, urban/community planning, affordable housing, diversity, and aesthetics (just to name a few off the top of my head). These concerns mean that the city gets to control building policy, and once they do that, how they control that policy is a question of degree.

Every city in the world regulates the number and type of construction permits that are issued. San Francisco may be conservative about issuing new permits, but nobody reasonable is arguing that they shouldn't be allowed to regulate construction at all. If the city regulators announced tomorrow that it was open-season for new construction in San Francisco, they'd be doing a disservice to everyone who lives here.
Debugging: Art or Science?
It's kind of odd that you would randomly happen upon this thread otherwise. And within 40 minutes of Patrick's post?