skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great list. Anyone have a recommendation for a good, rigorous coverage of Bayesian Statistics?
Know someone who did something great in your neighbourhood?
Well yes, forgetting that you signed up is still possible if there's a confirm step. Being signed up (maliciously or accidentally) by someone else, however, is the situation I was referring to and confirm steps exist specifically to prevent that.
Maybe I'm wrong but, when I consider apps, I also consider gaming a part of the equation as well, since they are the most popular apps. We've already seen OnLive fail because the web is simply not ready to handle the tasks of real-time gaming for enthusiasts.
Twitter vs. Instagram – why it doesn’t make any sense
Interview with Guest Blogging Expert Ann Smarty
HTML5 is cool and you can do a lot with it, but it has some very real drawbacks - like Android.

Also, if you are doing a bunch of optimizations to make it fast on HTML5, then you're basically doing the same work as writing a native app, so what are you gaining by doing a HTML5?

Seriously, at some point you can get a better user experience, have better access to native API's and can really leverage the full abilities of the device by going native. So, you know, go native.

Disclaimer: I have wrote HTML5 mobile apps and I think it's a great developer experience, but it feels worse as a user.
Thanks!

Urllib isn't used at all, actually. Internally, I use a project called 'urllib3', but it's totally unrelated to urlilb. It's name is actually a joke.

It is essentially a light wrapper around httplib that provides connection pooling :)
Actually, you don't get those things for free on a native platform either. What we did in Fastbook has a lot of similarities to what the Facebook team had to build for themselves on top of Android:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...
WordPress' Pingback as an Attack Tool
> In fact, I use techniques designed to find out how much my students know and 'how they know it'. I teach fairly basic Maths, and different students learn the basics in different ways.

This sounds interesting. Could you talk more about it?
perhaps but the real prize for an authoritarian is just this kind of fear.
The referenced AskHN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4908815
> Tell me as early as possible
I would advise people not to always do this.

I work for a consulting company and am currently not doing any client work. I accepted a job offer 2 weeks ago, but didn't tell my company until this past Friday. When I put in my 2 week notice, my company informed me that I would only be needed for one week. They effectively stole a weeks worth of pay from me because I tried to give adequate notice.

Now I understand that since I was currently not with a client that I was costing the company money, so I see their point of view from a financial stand point. But the message the company said to me was that I shouldn't have given them advance notice, and should have told them the week of that I was quitting.

I would advise people to give 2 weeks notice and not a week more if they are not heavily involved in a critical project.

Posting under a throw away since my account has personal information and I don't wish to bad mouth my former company.
Ask HN: Pulling Google Analytics source information?
We are a global aviation company with offices in almost every country in the world. When a visitor makes an enquiry on our website an email is sent to all our brokers (globally) with the flight information - the brokers then decide who deals with this based on locations etc... I'd like to include the traffic source/location of the visit that caused the enquiry into the body of the email... is that possible? If you're a developer with a strong knowledge of GA then please let me know!
Of course native is more efficient - it takes fewer CPU cycles to get what you want done. Now you're right that as a result you might be more likely to include animations and effects etc which will drain more power, but that's a choice you can make.
It does surface to the lower-level user interfaces, as shown in the blog post's connection adapter example. For advanced users, these changes will mean the world.

The new code is also much easier to debug and pleasure to work with. Bugs will be significantly easier to fix :)
Ah, but have you ever worked a great job (at least one that was interesting work on a decent product) with bad people? That's the difference.
> What happens if the new version, while more elegant internally, has a new complex bug in it (such as a race condition, that only triggers once every billion requests)? Still worthwhile to fix up the inelegant code that was working correctly?

Then it's easier to find. All software has bugs, readability is one important part of fixing them.
Good point. I think any feedback that is constructive enough to share in an exit interview could / should have been shared while you worked there. You might have been able to reap the benefits yourself!
Well that's a different story then :)
Good job!
How music becomes popular
So how are things going in Syria?
Original thread: How do I leave a company?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4908815

Found with: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Alea...
Released: My Antwerp Open Data submissions
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4932755

Actual link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4908815
Here's a great interactive way to learn. Not associated in any way, just always thought it would have been a neat way to learn.

http://www.codecademy.com/
Thanks, thats great advise. I will put our address and phone number on the site.

The option to purchase the example designs is there, but I agree its a little clunky, I will look into improving it.

Was it the checkout that you found clunky or the process of placing an item in you basket?
Let us discuss facts and now weird hypotheticals. In the last hundred years, millions of people were killed when governemnts stripped the citizines of their weapons and subsequently murdered them.

To think it "can't happen here" is is not historically unsound - gernocide came frightengly close here in America, and it happened in 'civilised' socialist Germany and communist Russia. The diference that I can find, is we had an armed population tht would have revolted had our Japanese citizens been murdered. To think that we're just better people is hubris.
The Journey for Start-ups
Ask HN: What do you use for inventory tracking?
I am looking for a very simple web application to track my startup's inventory. For reference, we use Xero for accounting, Stripe / Square for payment processing, and Highrise for CRM. In a nutshell we are looking for something like those, but for tracking our physical goods.

We have a fairly simple operation - just a few suppliers, one warehouse, and a few SKUs; I've found, though that even from this starting point that there is significant complexity.

I've done a bit of looking and the only one I've found that seems close is Stitch (www.stitchlabs.com). What does this community use?
In my view, this is the strongest evidence that Matlab, SciPy, R, etc. haven't found the right abstraction level for numerical computing. The high-level language is supposed to be the abstraction, yet in these systems you continually need to break through that abstraction and code in C for performance and scale. That's not a very good abstraction. This problem is precisely what Travis Oliphant and his team are tackling with Numba and Blaze, but it remains to be seen if they can produce a better abstraction.

If you're willing to try another language altogether, Julia [http://julialang.org] is a general purpose language with enough performance and expressiveness to be an effective abstraction layer for numerical programming – you never have to dip into C for speed, scale or control. In developing the language, we haven't allowed ourselves to resort to C – instead, we've worked at making Julia itself fast enough to implement things like I/O, Dicts, Strings, BitArrays (packed 8 bits-per-byte boolean arrays), etc. – all in pure Julia code while getting C-like performance.
Instagram Will Share User Data With Facebook According To Its New Privacy Policy
California Should Be The Economic Model For America
We are on the same page here. One feature that we implement is the "non-sticky DOING state". Sorry for the name, we can't come up with anything for that one.

The feature works like this. When you mark a tasks as DOING that state will only last for 24hrs. After that the "worker" will be notified that the "Blimp robot" removed the DOING state. The idea is to approach the problem you are talking about. Many times projects become filled with stuff that nobody works on. I know this is a very simplistic approach but it's a start. We have a few cards up our sleeves.
From the employer's point of view:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4932329

Well, one employer anyway. YMMV, and other employers may feel differently.
Of course it's a matter of taste, but I think that some of the information that some people like to put in their prompts would work better somewhere else. For example, time of day and battery status. I use the dwm window manager, which lets you write a script whose output is displayed in a thin bar at the top of the screen.
I'm part of your buyer market here I believe, as I've just started receiving fortnightly deliveries of organic produce from a local box scheme and I spent a heck of a lot of time recently trying to find local lamb and beef and running into dead ends left, right, and centre.

That being said, first of all and completely off topic, I appreciate you're in Heslington (York alumnae and still living in the north east). Perhaps you could consider spelling out on the site if you are planning on being a middle man, or an information centre, or a facilitator.

Will you show information for local box schemes, local farm shops, markets, independent cafe's?

I'm quite interested in seeing what you're trying to do, since I've recently had such problems searching for box schemes in the North East.
Thats the plan, we have placed pinterest buttons on the site but should start 'pining' the stuff ourselves.
The 'Great Firewall of China' reinforced, prevents encryption
Win x 1000! I will definitely give Blimp a try!
I'd always understood that tidal forces were related to objects large enough to have a measurable differential in orbital period from one side of the object to the other.

In the ordinary universe this often plays out on small moons in a low orbit around very large planets such as Jupiter.

A definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force): "The term tidal force is used to describe the forces due to tidal acceleration." You can't have acceleration without an object being accelerated.

Not trying to split hairs here, but to try and establish if it's possible to have a force that's not acting on anything.
There's an important piece of that quote that's missing here, which is that those people are likely to change. If you're at a position because you like the people, you're probably making a mistake. You can have a personal relationship with those people regardless of where they end up going, and if you truly do like them, you should want them to go if that's the right choice for them.
"HTML5 will never be as capabable as native..."

I think its very possible to imagine a world where HTML5 can be just as good as native. It comes down to two things:

1) HTML5 needs more JavaScript APIs to access hardware like camera, contacts, etc. It's is not very difficult to imagine HTML6 (if you will) supporting this in much the same way that it supports geolocation today.

2) Improved JavaScript performance. It's common knowledge that the embedded web views on iOS are much less capable than Safari. There's no reason to think this would continue forever. Furthermore, better JavaScript performance makes things like image progressing, music recognition possible.

Right now, you are absolutely correct that HTML5 is not as capable as native. No argument there. But, this gap narrows as time goes on. I firmly believe the opposite of you; we will eventually see a time when web-based applications rival native apps in terms of power and functionality. You can already do some awesome image processing stuff using canvas and JavaScript.

This is only the beginning...
Show HN: Evolutionary Neural Net Checker AI
There are a few very high expectations of employees here.

(note: I'm not US based)

"Tell me as early as possible" - most of the time you'll get exactly the amount of time that is contractually obliged. If you want more, write it in the contract. Employees want their own flexibility and few people want to stick around after they have pretty much told their employer "I don't want to be here". Most employers don't like people hanging around either (they are likely to start encouraging others to leave too).

"Give honest feedback" - Its incredibly hard to phrase feedback (in a constructive way) without directly referring to people as the source (which nobody wants to do - burning bridges and all). If an employee finds a way to do this for you, it is pretty exceptional. If you are lucky, you might, after asking some pointed questions, get some short outbursts of "I don't like being managed by person X" or "company process Y pains me", and you'll have to do the hard work of figuring out what it means. Thats if you are lucky. Most of the time people will just rather not say anything at all.
But this argument makes no sense. When you go native, you have to write N number of apps for N number of platforms you want to support. The point is that making a great mobile app is hard no matter what stack you choose to use.

It's also a bit disingenuous to say you are forced to optimize every HTML5 app. The whole point of Sencha's blog post is to advertise the fact that they've abstracted away all those optimizations you need to do so that developers can focus on building cross platform HTML5 mobile apps.
I would just like to point out that this "ebook" is not really free because it is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND; meaning you cannot make derivative works from it. Eg: If you take the contents of the website and turn it into an epub manually you cannot legally distribute said epub.

In fact, the only way you could distribute the contents is by having an identical mirror to the site.
Show HN: The 300 Alliance (Indie iOS Devs Rejoice)
We're building a new kind of affiliate network where indie iOS developers can join in and help each other get more visibility for their Apps.
What we're doing different from existing networks:
1. It's targeted on Indie developers without money to spend on Ads - so it's free
2. The affiliate promotion will show up only once in a life time of a user
3. It will not take the user out of the App to download the affiliated apps
4. We're using an algorithm we're borrowing from recommender systems to show the users Apps they might actually like
If you're interested sign-in on our Launch Page - we expect to launch our first version in 4-6 weeks.

http://signup.300alliance.com/
Totally agree. Just like on the desktop, most gaming will probably still be done in native code.
I think the question is bigger than just what's being asked. Of course we all know that version control is vital. But has there been any formal study that documents how much?

There are a lot of common accepted practices that actually have weak scientific foundations. The waterfall method comes to mind. Asking for the basis of a practice is still useful, even if the answer is just "look around."
I will never tell my employer I'm quitting "as early as possible". I will them them only after I have the next job contract signed and I know my start date.

You're 100% correct here. Anything less than this is stupid.

And I will tell them at the last possible moment, so that when they escort me out of the office, as they VERY often do, I will minimize the disruption to my income.

Give 2 weeks. It's standard. It's to protect your reputation. If they relieve you of your notice and still pay you, fine. If they stop paying you as well, then they're idiots, because they're risking their reputation over a completely inconsequential sum of money.
This is great. I wish more business analysts had this mentality of "it's faster to learn it myself than wait for a developer." That's a quality to look for when hiring.
"You and I know, that when we started our businesses, we where hoping" - did an h sneak into your were?
The history section totally looks like Basecamp progress section!

Nice tool though!
Extensive Military Flights in the US
I second the recommendation of SEOP. It treats a wide array of topics with surprising depth and rigor.
"One day, you might even have a 100Gbps wireless link from your home to your ISP."

Probably not, there's far less spectrum reserved for civilian uses than for military per capita.
"better skyline" is hardly worth caring about

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. I may not always love my job, but the beauty of the mountains in the morning ride/drive in always makes me smile. The only other place that comes close is my previous residence, where the Sandias were glorious for the ride home (go ahead, look up the definition of "sandia" in Spanish and imagine the colors).

You're right, though: everyone does the evaluation of where to live (whether consciously or not), and everyone has different values. Me, I like being able to ride my bike to work and be able to go bouldering or climbing after work almost year round. "Better night life" is hardly worth caring about to me.
The Innovator’s Challenge
I agree with everything except being "friends."

As an employee I am not your friend. I'm leasing you time out of my life to get your work done. Being polite and amicable is part and parcel of ensuring that transaction goes smoothly but do not be mistaken: you're not getting an invitation to dinner and we're not going on a camping trip together. The deal is in the contract and my obligations end there.

More often than not I tend to go above and beyond the letter of the contract but I've worked for employers who take it personally when I chose not to. I don't have the time or patience for such petulant behaviour and let those bridges burn. My advice to employers is to not get personally invested in your employees; anything beyond the contract is a bonus and you should never expect it. The contract is the contract and as long as everyone is doing their part there's nothing more to it than that.
Simplify Your Life, Hide Your Bookmarks Bar
While this does scare me some, the following suggests that some fears are overblown: "C. difficile and MRSA aren’t rare bugs. Warriner noted that as much as five per cent of the population carries MRSA without showing symptoms."
Here's an interview Robert Scoble did with the guys from Sencha about their Facebook app: https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/ZtnZNrCfWv6
C# 8 will adopt features that CommonLisp had in 1985, but not yet those that APL had in 1965. And C# programmers will rejoice in how revolutionary that is.

Java will adopt features that C# adopted in 2013. And the Java people will explain that it takes time to get it right, and you shouldn't rush to do anything.

Microsoft will EOL PlatinumDusk, which was the end-all-be-all replacement for GoldenDawn (which itself was the end-all-be-all replacement for SilverLight). This is accompanied by WDE (Widnows Display Elements), which replaces WZR which replaced WPF.

And it will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. (Though, desktops will only account for 10% of web users or "webable device" sales).
In your case, it was wasted effort to give honest feedback but that one case isn't enough evidence to say "never".

There isn't a right and wrong answer here. Sometimes it's best to give honest feedback, sometimes it's best to lie or avoid the question. It all depends on the person asking for feedback and the company's culture. It's never a good idea to burn bridges and if giving honest feedback cannot happen without burning a bridge, avoid it.

Additionally, there are probably opportunities to reshape your criticisms in such a manner to not offend. Some people are naturally good at this and others are naturally terrible at it. If you're not good at it, it's a fantastic skill to work on.
I've never actually been able to get a confirmation one way or the other oh which of Google's native apps are "hybrid" apps and just how much of those apps is done in HTML5. The previous version of their gmail app seemed to employ a lot of HTML5 because you could see the main inbox list re-render occasionally. That app performed perfectly well for me. Unless we hear from Google officially about the new app we'll never know. It could be that it's full native, or it could be that they've perfected the HTML5 code to make it feel completely native. Who knows.
What's the best laptop for $250 or less?
I would prefer to have a windows 7 laptop, but 8 is acceptable. I'm not aware of many good retail deals and I have no real idea of what makes a good laptop either. I'm hoping that any one of you fine people knows what I should get.
Hi Sheri, Even though we are now 2 yrs old, we still consider us as starups and as startups go improvement is the key to survival. I wrote this post as a concerned employer who want to make sure that those who work with him are happy and if and when they go, they leave with a smile. I know it is hard to keep everyone happy but one must try.
The "developer interface" includes at least three different parts: the API calls, the calling sequence, and the validity of the results.

That last part is borderline. Some wouldn't call it part of the interface, but I do, because if there are problems then interface users end up wrapping the interface with another interface to work around those problems.

I therefore argue that the "more elegant but buggier" internals don't have the same interface, even if the API calls look the same.

As to why it should be more elegant? There are at least four parts here . How does the developer, or any interface user, review the code to see if there is a complex bug inside? That is, your scenario about the bug in the elegant code also applies to the inelegant. And how easy is it to carry out extensions to the project in the old code base vs. the new, even if those new features aren't yet implemented?

Third, the type of person who strives for an elegant interface also probably strives for elegant internals. Fourth, there are people who don't like closed boxes, and want to understand some of the insides of a package before they use it. If the insides don't look good, then they might be adverse to using it.

A term for the negative aspects of this tendency to clean up internal code is called "gold plating." A positive term is "technical debt", as in the inelegant code incurs a debt which must be paid off in the future by cleaning up the code.
Because the person who made the mistake is in the best position to understand how and why it happened. Responsibility and blame are entirely different things.
Why did Yishan Wong (PayPal, Facebook, reddit) invest in Balanced?
I'm going to be admittedly contrarian and claim Apple, along with their users, won. After all, they got turn-by-turn navigation from Google for free which supposedly Google was wanting to license to Apple for a considerable sum of money.
I like this, but I think there needs to be some additional security placed on it. It's pretty easy to make a computer tell you when an image is a perfectly straight advertisement and when it's a jumbled mess (or at least with enough accuracy to beat this captcha pretty frequently). You have to make the final image still only human readable. One way I can think of is to have the slider "twist" two images into each other, and there are two spots on the slider which reveal a clean image (one spot for each image). Text above the field says something like "Slide until you see the __________ image" and that way there would be additional human verification.

Just thinking out loud.