skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think most people have trouble visualizing effects of policy because the changes are not immediate and hence not discernible. So instead of trying to convince people why gun control can help reduce mass shootings, lets do the opposite. Let me try to convince you to legalize the use of bazookas, a portable antitank weapon. Do we feel safer in this new world? You need to draw a line in the sand for controlling the use of lethal weapons and I think that line starts with assault weapons - rifles that can mow down an entire room in a minute.

Another flawed argument is that these incidents are small anomalies which can't be controlled by regulatory changes. Yes, if you can categorically prove that this is just a blimp on the charts. Anecdotally it feels like this is spreading, increasing in frequency. At what point are you going to put your foot down and push for changes? Some social behaviors tend to be pretty viral, inspiring a new set of perpetrators. Lets treat this with caution and not bury it under the carpet of data & statistics.
>I always marvel in a service that could easily monetize their product or traffic but chooses instead to essentially beg for funds.

Describes Wikipedia word-for-word.
Tahzoo Unveils Top Predictions for 2013
Lint Center unveils National Security Scholarships
Actually, that's EXACTLY the case I had in mind. Obviously I couldn't put a 50 line function with weird data structures in my blog post, or it would be unreadable. But the point is that comments for that function are bad! They'll rot if you ever change the function or the assumptions at all. Instead, you should break the 50-line function up into smaller functions, and add assertions and test cases for all of those "magic-lik assumptions." Then get in the habit of reading tests first. Now your code-as-comments will never rot.
You've got the right attitude, and I think that is going to bode well for you. It didn't really come across in your original post.

Best of luck.
Proud of our four Irish entrants on the tech list. Go Ireland!
I give your troll-fu a -5. There are good propositions and bad propositions. The onus is on the voter to decide what, if anything they should be voting on. In a state as large and as diverse as California the prop system is both a huge benefit or danger. I think it's much like a democracy in general.... you get out of it what you put into it.
The taser and rubber bullet example was just an example. They could also have a cabinet with three M4s. The point is that it would be great if we could discuss defensive and offensive measures. There are many teachers who have concealed permits (and thus the FBI background check) who are forced to leave their weapon at home. Many of them would be perfectly capable of wielding a weapon and it would cost schools next to nothing. Again, just examples. It's great to see the point being discussed.
I believe this is because America was founded by violence, and the "I'll shoot you if you try to take what's mine" mentality that continues to this day.

It's not a peaceful place.
I could definitely make a drag-to-resize thing, but I opted against it in V1 for simplicity's sake. We do have a fullscreen mode though
No, this isn't true.
Hang on let me pause my Creative Labs Nomad and finish this call on my Palm Treo so I can respond to your comment; oh wait...

Just because something is first doesn't mean it is best. Limor took something cool and made it awesome, and you can be sure that in a generation or two someone else will take her work further.

I grew up hacking on Heathkits and reading Forrest Mimms books and just as Mimms did for me as a child, Adafruit's products turn a new generation on to the fun, creativity and power locked up in understanding electronics.

The fact of the matter is that DIY electronics was fading out by the 1990's in no small part due to the ever tightening noose of proprietary technology and planned obsolecense in consumer electronics. In this environment, Adafruit was able to make soldering sexy and fabrication fashionable; how could anyone find fault in that?
I agree. Less useful for you, more useful for someone who likes HAML, SASS and CoffeeScript.
It's going to get better, this whole thing is still very early. Two things we focus on at Klaviyo to make taking all the data you have more useful:

1. Come up with the questions first, then decide what data you need to answer them. It's so now easy to track every mouse movement of your users that a lot of people just track everything assuming they'll find something useful later. It doesn't usually work that way. More is not better, it's distracting. Even worse, people tend to pick the easiest things to track, which aren't the most useful. If you start from a question and backtrack, it might be more work, but you'll definitely get something useful out of it.

Coming up with question isn't always easy. We're trying an experiment to help people with questions via an analytics/engagement "Cookbook" (http://www.klaviyo.com/cookbook). You pick a question, fill in the variables and then we tell you what to track to answer it. We're still fleshing it out, but that's one idea we've got.

2. Don't look at analytics only in retrospect, use them actively. People don't make most decision at a single point in time, it's about building enough momentum to catalyze action. Because of that, you can do a lot more if you have a way to communicate with them and can effectively leverage what you know to build that momentum. Someone doesn't sign up? When they come back, can you show them content based on what they didn't do last time (e.g. viewed pricing page, but not feature tour...highlight the feature tour). Someone signs up and doesn't get completely set up? Are you sending them an email with instructions tailored to where they stopped and why they might have stopped there.

Related side note: I've gotten plenty of emails after signing up for something asking if I want "help." While it's a nice gesture, as more people send those emails, it gets old fast. Why can't you use what I've done so far to anticipate the questions I might have or give me reasons to get back on the horse?
"This method takes a foo object, applies HTML encoding, and returns an array of the original and the clean code." could be a 3-line unit test that's just as clear to read, but has the side effect of actually being true instead of maybe being true!

I would consider that comment just as bad as the ones in my examples, but maybe not quite as obviously so.
I think there are four key places where we've truly innovated over the last decade or so:

1) Solar power is vastly improved today and on a trend that follows Moore's Law

2) Cell phones can be found all over the globe (all thanks to innovations in tech)

3) Rechargeable batteries are lasting longer and making it easier to take complex machines into difficult areas

4) The ability to talk, tap, and rotate our phones/screens is a big innovation

It's pretty impressive to me. Some of these are incremental pieces that are built on top of decades of research. However that does not diminish the true innovation that led to Lithium-Ion batteries being so dominant today vs. 10 years ago.
What server monitoring do you use and what do you think of this one?
Hi guys,

Been working on this 102 days today, and I thought it's about the time we get some initial feedback.

So what do you think of our startup?

http://cloudiff.com/hack - then click on the DEMO

Primarily it's server monitoring, but the ambition is to become centralized cloud management (utilizing libcloud.apache.org and more)

Thanks for the Feedback!
The fear of lightning while in a thunderstorm is rational, the fear of a rogue shooter (outside of a war zone or extremely violent neighborhood) is not.

People's fear, by in large, is not rational. Many people would get into a car on a rainy Friday night with little hesitation or thought of risk, yet they are deliberately putting themselves in harms way.

What the author is trying to get across is that public policy should focus on things it can track its effectiveness on and things it can solve.

When choosing where to spend time and money, the odds are exactly what people should be focusing on.
The games in that list that are turn based include Dominion, Lords of Waterdeep, and Stone Age.

We stick to 1-hour games mostly because of the lunch hour restriction, if you're spacing the game out over a series of days it might be more interesting to play some of the longer games since it doesn't matter how long you take anyways.
I didn't realize this was a retroactive tax either, but does that really change anything? I mean, if you made a bunch of money in 2012, would you have decided to not earn that money simply because of a slightly higher tax burden? I keep hearing this argument that entrepreneurs would decide not to do such-and-such action that makes money if the taxes on that money were raised, but that's never made sense to me. I mean, they still make money. They make slightly less with the taxes raised, but that slightly less is still a vast improvement over the near-zero interest rate on just letting your money sit in a savings account.
The author does not draw a nexus between Christmas gifts and dead rhinos.

The article compares the environmental impact of what Anglo-European societies generally consider socially acceptable consumer consumption - frivolous holiday gifts - to what those same societies consider socially unacceptable consumption, powdered rhino horn.

The author is pointing out that there is a double standard which is convenient for us, and not for the other.

Being repulsed is not a reasoned argument.
The web app already has all my data on a server somewhere. And that web app is 99% of the time closed source. And the company can cut me off, change the TOS or sell my info to advertisers. Now THAT's a lockin.

While you identified the problem, the solution is a truly open mobile OS, not webapps.
just to clarify, I was not advocating prison like barriers. I don't know the name of the type glass that is not bullet proof, per se, but even when penetrated with a bullet it still would not allow entry. I've seen glass that has the criss-cross wires in it that is not bullet proof, but the wires make it very difficult to smash out/though. Obviously I don't know the specifics of exactly how he gained entry other than the reported "shot his way in". But if it had taken him 30-60 secs longer to get in... would some lives have been saved?
This is a trend I would expect too, but the data does not appear to support it. Gun control has actually become consistently less popular over the last two decades[1]. I actually don't have a clue why, as it seems to counter other various demographic/political trends.

[1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/files/2012/07...
For lack of a better way to decide what to pay I assumed that they did the analysis and thought $5 would be an appropriate amount after factoring in the people who'd pay more, less, or nothing.

I think it's a good anchor price and if I was feeling generous it's a low enough value where I'd pay double. At a minimum I'd pay their asking price because after getting many hours of fun out of the game with friends it's definitely worth at least that.
The Flat Design Aesthetic
Very impressive. Love the dark color scheme.

LESS/SASS possible? :)
Hardly. I put the kits together in my spare time in the interest of spreading knowledge. The designs were open and published in a magazine in the UK as well. I don't do it any more because I am too damn busy, but the moment I retire,

I'm not driving self esteem - I'm just well equipped to say that you can't start without knowing the basics. I actually spent nearly 8 years as an engineering mentor, teaching others so I spread my knowledge. I also sit and help people but to be honest sometimes it's hopeless as they just don't have the fundamentals and aren't interested.

My problem is that the fundamentals are completely wiped out by the whole Maker movement in favour of short-cutting and getting things done, regardless of how dangerous or stupid they are.
In a similar vein, a lot of internet bandwidth is filled with advertising.
http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/100806-armv7-or-armv6-...
A couple places. One is that we do have a large number of social programs that other states do not have. Second, we have the highest population of any state in the nation and that means a huge burden for instruction of students (We have enough people that we're like the 35th largest population in the world or something silly like that... meaning out of entire country populations).

Additionally, we pay out more than we get back from the nation-state. I don't have the exact numbers off-hand, but it's something like 75/100 per dollar or maybe even less now.
I can page turn on my Paperwhite by rolling my thumb just a little bit, and rolling it back. I keep it on the edge of the bezel while reading.

I used to think that a button would be better, but the buttons on my third gen kindle were terrible and my Paperwhite is fine without them.
Voting on propositions is a cause of California's sclerotic politics. The legislature is no longer capable of governing because its fiscal hands have been tied by the initiative process. If you think California is well governed then by all means keep signing the petitions and voting on the referendums.
Mixing commercial feeds in Facebook Timeline : A different approach
How I would have tried differently about mixing commercial feeds in Facebook timeline for accelerating revenue.
Comments are for why, code is for how.

Why is the counter < 5 or the balance >=0? Comments explain why your assertions are reality. Not every assertion is going to be as obvious as "balances have to be positive". If I had a dollar for every opaque assertion I blew up or ran into in code that had no explanation as to why something had to not be 0 or >1mil or null or whatever I would be a rich man.
Errr, you're ignoring the highest casualty mass murders, at least in the US, which were done by arson. Maybe not "fastest", but otherwise very "competitive" with firearms. I can't track a list down, but in a recent discussion someone mentioned counting something like 19 out of the top 20 mass murders in the US.
Not to mention that the weapons stored in the schools would be a tempting target for theft, or for commandeered use by a hostile intruder.

After all, how elaborate are the protections they are stored behind likely to be? Not very, when you consider that (1) if the weapons are ever needed they'll need to be able to be gotten to fast, and (2) the people responsible for storing them are going to be middle school administrators, not military quartermasters.
How do I contribute to open source projects?
Abdurrahman Önül - Kararmış Kalplerimiz
blekko doesn't compute PageRank, and we don't compute anything similar to it, either. It's highly gamed and less useful than you might think. (The academic equivalent of PageRank for research papers is highly gamed, too, by citation clubs...)

By the way, the original PageRank patent is owned and licensed by Stanford University, not by Google.
Why shouldn't automation be used to lay people off? Eliminating busywork jobs is a big deal -- how are we going to get to a post-scarcity society otherwise?
Look out for the change to the Request constructor that makes `url` no longer the first parameter. Rather poor backward compatibility there.
> Kidding aside, I think it'd be awesome to get cards like that -- and maybe the USPS thinks so too, which is maybe why they're letting them through. =)

haha, totally agree, I suspect that the canceled stamps are detected, probably automatically, but when a human gets involved, he thinks it's funny/cool/nostalgic ("why those are the same stamps my grandma used!"), and just laughs and passes them on...

Also, you know, Christmas... :]
More information on promoting facebook posts is here : http://www.facebook.com/help/promote
I really enjoyed the comical way you displayed the data. Very well done.
There are Zero/None/Nil Mass Shootings in Australia
Well, slowing a person down with a little harder to get through first barrier gives more time between first notice and first action. Some times just buying enough time to hide/flee can save lives.
You mean commercial products with suscpicious licensing ?
It's definitely a possibility! Actually, more like a probability. Just didn't want to build too much into V1
But i guess for last few days it has been disabled for Individual accounts.

Also facebook has "strangely" stopped showing "Why this ad" after facebook signout. !!
Of course a better comment could be written. I was using a short and concise comment to illustrate how you can gain a huge amount of understanding in a single line versus parsing a long function definition. Other comments here make suggestions for writing good comments.
How a greedy algorithm helped bank maximize profits
Solving the Global Software Crisis
Yes we should probably take action, but that doesn't mean banning guns or making tougher gun laws is necessarily the correct action. If you want to compare to other developed countries, Switzerland has a high gun ownership rate (about 45 guns per 100 people vs 88 per 100 for the US) yet their gun homicide rate is one-seventh what it is in the United States. So if it were just about guns one would think that Switzerland would have a lot more gun murders.

Gun deaths in the United States have been declining for the since the 90's in spite of loosening of gun laws. We need to be studying those factors so that we can craft better policy.

Don't get me wrong, clearly if less people have guns less people can shoot other people. But if you really want to improve society you've got to get at the root causes of violence rather than just attacking the tools.
Well let's get something clear here. Are you hating on prop-13 or something else? I don't think there are many people at this point that think prop-13 is/was a good idea, but look at it this way... we have the prop system, let's get our act together and get it changed (and use the good part of having it).
I'm not following. What is the good use case for remote working? The remote workers need to be on an isolated project?
Even Forbes outsources their vetting to YC ;)
Sorry but I have a degree in nuclear physics, working a full time job and can't even afford a car. Something tells me those people just had a lot of luck!
This is why we should maintain our own pypi repository. Your external dependency did nothing wrong.
If you fail to store it securely, it could be stolen and used against me.

If you fail to operate it properly, I could be struck by a bullet fired by you at somebody else.

2nd Amendment absolutists love talking about their rights, but spend precious little time talking about the responsibilities that come with them. Which are (or should be) significant, when the right you are talking about is the right to wield a lethal weapon.
I don't really think those ads are something they are pushing very hard. From what I have read online people have had limited success with them, the main game is still just to be listed on the marketplace.
I welcome the maker movement and I'm glad that what I did as a kid is now cool.

I got my start in engineering by reading the manuals of my father's HeathKit projects and by building a simple computer using a Z80 and a few other chips that I got through mail order and Radio Shack. Back then, having a personal computer was much less common and I could imagine building something roughly comparable to what was on the market (Altair, Apple II, C64,...). A generation before me tinkered with Ham Radio.

Today, HeathKit is out of business and Radio Shack sells overpriced consumer goods. Our electronics is now much more sophisticated and there exists a much wider gap between what one can do from on their own vs. commercial products. I think there was a dry period after the rise of PCs and before the maker movement, where there wasn't much opportunity for a hardware hobbyist. Limor and others like her are coming up with really interesting projects that are still relevant in today's world. I appreciate their re-imagination and invigoration of this hobby and hope to get my son interested when he's a bit older.
Yes, that's likely a good part of why this was voted in and why Prop 38[1], with its tax increases on anyone making 7,316 or more, wasn't.

[1] http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...

This is obviously not the first or last time this type of measure will be passed ;).
Broadcasters Demand Dish Stop Commercial Skipping
You can't say arming pilots and air-martials is the same as arming teachers and faculty. Arming a pilot who sits in a locked cockpit while they fly a plane for 3-12 hours, or a trained undercover officer is in a whole different league than arming teachers who interact with students for 7+ hours a day. Would you arm flight attendants?
The main benefit of comments that you seem to be missing is that they are in the right context. Unit tests, while useful and required, make for boring reading and are not right where you need them. If I need to open up a separate file and scroll through tons of other tests to find the unit test "docs" on a function, you've lost me already.
While your points may be entirely true, in my opinion they are no excuse for failing to make clear the retroactivity of the proposition.
My main reason for wanting to relocate to CA outside of work was the access to Napa, Tahoe, and Yosemite. Being able to do all three in a weekend if you started after work on Friday. I have no interest in rotting in a large house to pretend I'm a CEO.
The landscape in total may have changed, but in my opinion, it seems the theme of success stories hasn't changed that much... Groupon had humble beginnings, chatroullette was completely lacking in design, and reddit is seeing it's heyday as we speak. Their perceived lack of design didn't seem to preclude them from incredible/almost unparalleled growth (and all were in the last two years).
I really resonate with this rant, at the end of the day the 'metrics' that should make sense for investors in web type properties all involve the word 'revenue.' Like 'revenue per thousand pageviews' or 'revenue per customer' or 'net revenue.' Because without revenue the web site is essentially on a path to non-existence.

I like Fred Wilson's analysis [1] of different revenue models it puts this stuff in perspective. The old "drive traffic too then harvest it with AdSense" model is losing a lot of steam.

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/mba-mondays/
reminds me of a fight club quote:

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
So does the amount of resources available to potential rebels.

And you're making a classic mistake here. Revolutions don't succeed in the face of unified military opposition. In any country. The scenario in a successful US revolution would be a schism or complete mutiny of the armed forces.
Where did the author conclude there was no need to fix the current problem? My understanding of the article is that there is no clear answer to the problem, given that every potential solution has loads of potential side effects, some of them with the potential to outweigh the positives of the original solution. That doesn't mean it doesn't need to be fixed; just that the fix should be driven by rational thought and understanding rather than emotion.