skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like having the flexibility of being able to use Firebase's servers or my own, makes it easy to use for completely client-side apps, or alternatively you can throw it on top of a server-side application. Great work guys!
I've seen competitions like this before, but I've never had the time to commit to submitting anything. The rules and guidelines for this particular competition seem simple, straight-forward enough. I fear I, again, won't find the time to participate.

I will have to remember to check back in on this, to see what everyone came up with.
Are you seriously comparing a VW Golf to an BMW M5 or Tesla S?
I have submitted stuff from my blog before. It can be tough. I don't think I am likely to do it again. People frequently misread what was meant. Attempts to clarify get viewed as "argumentative". Submitting it yourself gets viewed by some people as "you are just looking for traffic, not really trying to add anything of value". Ugly remarks about you/your writing/your motives feel incredibly personal which makes it hard to not get defensive, which I really don't like doing.

I write to try to share information, not to try to tear other people down. I respond to try to clarify what I meant, not to try to cram my point of view down anyone's throat. I can kind of understand someone feeling that it is on topic, they want to share it and think other people here will be interested, but they don't want to duke it out. They said their peace and others are entitled to express their opinion about it, if they so wish.

I think I will go talk trash about HN on my blog my now, since no one from HN will ever read it. :-D
Plans are nothing, but planning is indispensable
"The big deal is that someone is profiting from my work without my consent and it isn't me."

You know you've just described all the popular free services[email,facebook,instagram, dropbox....and so on...].

It is amusing to see people get irate over something that is such OLD news.

Implicitly, your information and your privacy has been up for sale for years but when the reality is explicitly stated, some people get upset?
The whole point is that all of this is extremely uncommon.

To put this in context, there are about 10,000 people killed annually in the U.S. That's 27 people every single day like clockwork, in often more violent and horrific fashion--many of them teenagers and kids. I think the "active shooter" stat is something like ~100 annually.

So if you want to get worked up about something, get worked up about drunk drivers. Or the far more likely cause of your death: heart disease and cancer.

http://www.centurycouncil.org/drunk-driving/drunk-driving-fa...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate...
Finding and Fixing a Five Second Stall
English as a second language teacher here. Spend most of my time teaching lawyers and board members English. Cargo cult programmer (since 1980) and about to launch a website where I kill my inner cargo cultist and embrace the light of Knuth. My project for the next year is to see how my cargo cult side fares against my newly found inner Knuth as I tackle writing a web based system to schedule teachers at our school (150+) for lessons all around Prague at different companies. It's a race to see if copy/paste from open source to make an MVP wins against understanding the domain problem from a mathematical perspective and applying the correct algorithms hence making a robust, flexible system. From my initial research I think MVP will get done first, but will completely collapse under real world constraints, whereas Knuth will take 10 months to materialize anything, but that thing will be awesome.

But excuse me, I have to get back to reading pre-algebra for dummies (I spent a lot of my childhood travelling and never ever learnt any math, so Knuth is killing me)
Officer crowd-sources part of investigation to Reddit
Instagram, Sell My Photos—Please
What's really annoying is that most of the time you see this kind of comment there is no explanation why 10 was chosen.
No, you are talking about adding all of these operations per object in the game world.

It doesn't stop at gravity either. Virtually everything in the game world is moving via acceleration. If you were going to do this in a consistent manner you would need to do this for every single physics calculation for every single game world object.

You are correct that you would have to profile it to determine how much of an issue it would be but it sounds like potentially a lot of deadweight to add to the game. Especially since when games slow down it is often due to having a lot of objects in the gameworld simultaneously.
FORTRAN is the oldest language that is still used today. If you consider the Lisp dialects together as a single language, then Lisp would be a close second.

Scheme, for example, is a decade older than Common Lisp, but it's still commonly considered a Lisp (no pun intended).
The designer of IBM's Harvard Mark I said, "Don't worry about people trying to steal your ideas, if they're original, you will have to ram them down people's throats". I have had some minor success in Android apps ($30 a day), but I do not worry much about competition from giving advice for how people can make their apps more popular. Even if the competition is in my domain - I have an educational app too, but only for math - I do not see a spelling educational app as competition. It makes Android a healthy ecosystem - when Android had a smaller market share, I was more scared of iOS or possibly Windows Mobile overshadowing Android then I was over other Android developers. Also, a lot of this advice has been given by others already, including Google sometimes. Have a good, simple, relevant app icon. Have a descriptive app name. Have the app work for devices with different sizes and different densities. And so on. It sounds logical, but I see many people with low download numbers who do not follow this advice.

I started doing an Android spreadsheet which could handle Excel. I got XLS files working, but more modern XLSX files were tougher. I hit a brick wall and saw it would take, at a minimum, months of work, maybe even more than a year. So I open sourced what I had (a bare bones spreadsheet which could handle XLS), announced its existence and moved on. You would think I might have gotten some interest - a spreadsheet which can handle XLS, and with some work, XLSX. But I did not. As Paul Graham said in his essay on Viaweb, it was "running up a stairwell". The number of people who know Java is a certain size, the number who know the Android API are smaller, and the number with the skills to work on this advanced problem is quite small. I am sure if ABS author and Square employee Jake Wharton wanted to help me on it it could get done, as he is an expert Android programmer. But he is too busy building up Square and maintaining ABS and his other projects. If you choose a difficult task, you do not have to worry about competition in the way you do with low hanging fruit. I myself have had some success with more easibly attainable goals on Android to where I don't know if I myself would have the time to work on that spreadsheet nowadays, even with a capable partner. There are too many sure things that would generate money with a few weeks of work to devote time to a big project like that. Maybe when my apps generate even more revenue, and competition crowds out all the low hanging fruit will I go back to a more ambitious project like that. Worry about competition? It is as sure a guaranteed money maker as there can be with a few months of expert work, sitting on Github and interest is minimal.

Now I have learned a trick or two to get my apps noticed that I do not share with people, but 99% of what I know I can share with little fear. It requires some domain knowledge and some work, and those 2 things are a big enough barrier to get people from doing what I talk about any way.
Too bad they won't do a study of how useless the entire TSA is. It wouldn't be hard: just randomly choose a group of airports that are allowed to go back to the previous model of private inspectors hired by the airlines. For every year that goes by with the experimental group of airports having better financial results, better security, smoother operation, and fewer passenger hardships, a few more airports will win the lottery and be allowed into the experimental group. Eventually the TSA will be studied out of existence.
It's sad that we agree on this.
I've thought about this benefit too, but never had a nice way to describe it. Thanks.
I don't use Facebook as people usually use but I have some accounts for API tinkering and some groups I follow. None of them use anything near my real name, residency, photos or other real personal data. It's a bit odd to explain to people from some groups I meet in person why I don't use my real name on FB, but they usually understand. There is no way for them to find this out, since my aliases sounds naturally and the fake data also seems real.

This strategy also applies for any other social-web services.
I could not agree more. Great read.
I "want to do a project with it" and "want it to succeed" more than I "like it as a framework because I've done production projects with it"

Why? Since it's in the official typesafe stack (a company founded by Scala's creator to promote it and it's ecosystem commercially), based on concepts taken from RoR, has rapid deployment without the need to pay JRebel 100$ per developer, and is supporting both Scala and Java.

So I see it as "finally something good happening to those who wait".
It's the only way enterprises can start doing modern web development without giving up on their existing investment in the Java / Spring / Hibernate stack.
My view on it? I can't wait to get a work related project done with it.

Lift is also an interesting option (Scala only though), but you asked about Play. Lift has it's learning curve, but it's creator claims it is better than Play in almost any aspect, and many tend to agree, but I don't know enough to judge...
I'm so happy you posted that - otherwise I would not read down more than a couple first comments and would miss this!
What about the risk of your image being attached with a company/idea that disagree with your believes nor doesn't reflect your ideas?
You have no imagination, a better idea would be to sell the photos and all the data Facebook and Instagram have on you to Coke so in a couple of years when you're pumping gas a little camera recognizes your face and the gas pump says "Hi Imgabe! You like Coke! You can't fool us! Press yes to buy a Coke! Your mom's birthday is next Tuesday but since she's a diabetic would you like to buy her a Diet Coke? STOP TRYING TO HIDE YOUR FACE AND PRESS YES TO BUY YOUR DIABETIC MOM A DIET COKE IMGABE.

It's coming.
We Are Pop Up lets landlords rent out their empty space to temporary stores
Why wouldn't they implement a system where you can flag certain photos for promotion and receive a cut if that photo is used for promotion?

Why can Facebook only come up with monetization strategies that take advantage of its users?
Airlines are already optimizing for flight times - time in the air is fuel burn which is a major cost input for the business.

If your purpose is to save lives, and have some amount of money you're intent on spending to do so, there are many better opportunities to get better bang for your buck than either airport x-ray machines, or shortening flight times.

What really bothers me is that I think that politicians and TSA bureaucrats have placed an outsized symbolic value on air security via X-ray machine, and setting in place a policy which causes real harm in sicknesses that are essentially unlinkable to the machines. Without a detailed and critical look at the effects, there will be no obvious red flags that people are literally dying for symbolism.
"A large proportion of the comments I see should actually be function or method names for a more well factored version of the block of code that follows."

I share the same experience.
I believe that Google is sensible enough. But yes, you have a point.
Record Setting Kickstarter Product Won't Be Under The Tree This Year
> Add to that-- if this happens, I certainly won't be the first one it happens to and will almost certainly have an opportunity to delete my account when I start hearing about this happening in the wild. Even if I don't delete it, the chance of my crappy photos getting found/used out of the MANY BILLIONS on instagram also seems laughably small.

You don't understand the situation. When you delete your account, it won't delete the ads in circulation - there won't be anything you can do about that.

And your photo won't be used for a general Coke advertising campaign. It will be used to sell Coke to YOUR FRIENDS, on Facebook and elsewhere across the web. Everywhere your friends go on the intertubez, they'll see a picture of you drinking Coke, with the caption "Drink Coke, just like your good buddy Webwright does!" And that will stay as long as Coke feels like it.
[Firebase founder here] We did a ton of interviews with devs, and we found that authentication was one of the areas where developers wanted the most control / customization. We therefore opted for maximum flexibility here.
Don't forget that the story of gasoline begins with crude oil deep in the ground. This substance loses a lot of energy over time and distance between the ground and your tank.
CAPTCHA comes from "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". These tests don't fulfill that requirement.

Random guessing gives you 3%, which is worse than random guessing on either the MSFT or reCAPTCHA.

This is far worse though. A simple loop over the 30 positions, running the output through an OCR engine would give you nearly 100%.

FWIW, I wrote the paper and AFAIK was the first person to break reCAPTCHA. I worked on the original MSFT Passport/Hotmail CAPTCHA system and improved MySpace's CAPTCHA which took spammer registrations from ~1,000,000/day (automated) to a few thousand (manual) in late 2007.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...
FIFA Development Globe
Some more related project work done at Studio Nand: http://vimeo.com/53312218
word wizard app has not the Montessori keyword and it works pretty well !
These kinds of vehicles are abundant in China and much cheaper.

http://search8.taobao.com/search?q=%B5%E7%B6%AF+%C8%FD%C2%D6...

Most of these are under $2000. Like electric motorbikes, they can be rapidly charged on the road all over China.
How capitalism breaks the web
I came here to post almost exactly this. This happens regularly with the big sites - some idiot lawyer writes an overly cautious ToS change, everyone gets up in arms about it, the site writes an apology clarifying (and probably fires the lawyer).

It seems common sense to me if you just think it to the end: do you REALLY think taking a photo of me drinking Coke (against my will) would be good advertising? Or selling my photo as a stock photo without compensating me - that that would fly? Really? It seems absolutely obvious to me that Instagram has no interest whatsoever in doing what people are all afraid they'll be doing.
5 Crowdfunding Sites for Gamers
Simple carbs will be converted to sugar quicker than complex carbs, and quicker than protein or fat.

But if you eat calories - in any form - that you don't need then you're going to store those calories.

And you're incorrect when you say that diabetics are only concerned with carbs. Diabetics cannot eat as much fat as they like, and are warned to eat a "healthy diet".
I'm not sharecropping e-mail for Google by using GMail. Instagram users are now unpaid freelancers, and some of them don't like it.
Well the entire purpose of the TSA is security. And how do you evaluate security? The number of successful attacks on airports?

Hopefully both the test set and TSA set would have a result of zero. And even if they didn't, you can't say for sure that it was because of TSA presence. So the test would be inconclusive, and we'd end up keeping them around "just in case". After all, we haven't had another attack like September 11th, so the TSA must be working, right?
In prepaid and other live billing systems the cost to bill a data session is higher than the cost to bill a phone call. This is due to data sessions having longer hold times (months) compared to phone calls (3-5 minutes). Since a session has a cost to the charging and rating platforms (memory, CPU and therefore software licenses), the more people use data, the more expensive it is for the carrier.

As an aside, an SMS has the same cost structure as a phone call. They cost roughly the same on the signalling side, and roughly the same on the charging side.

How much data is used also adds cost to the charging system. The charging system will perform periodic writes to persist the money spent so far. While this write will typically be performed once per call, it is performed every X dollars or Y kb or Z min on the data side. If you don't, the carrier loses money when any machine in the network goes down, tearing down the session. With shorter periods between writes, they still "lose" a little money, it's just not several months worth of charges. This is more cost pressure (increasing writes per minute).

Historically, data was a minimal portion of a carrier's traffic. That meant that data would fit into the spare capacity of the voice and SMS charging system. Since data is now an appreciable portion of a carrier's traffic, they can't ignore it. Even worse, data usage is increasing faster than Moore's law (doubling every year instead of Moore at 18-24 months), which means that they can't buy newer hardware to solve the problem. They have to buy more hardware.

There are solutions. Getting to a cost/subscriber model instead of a cost/transaction one would be a great first start. The hard bit is convincing product managers and salespeople that their beloved architectures and protocols don't fit the new world.
I'm not an expert in this domain, but wouldn't the threading issues that have impeded Python (and the removal of the Python GIL) also impede Ruby in the same way? I've heard solutions like "freezing" and ownership transfer before, but they're always more complex than they seem.

Thanks
LA is actually pretty pleasant these days, because California has had very strict laws on fuel particulates for a while now. Also, a lot of people in California's coastal cities drive Priuses and similar cars which burn very little gas.
Why is it "messed up" if it makes advertising more engaging? Facebook essentially does what you describe, by showing your friends the posts/ads of pages you have liked.

I think it's just a spectrum where ads can become a service. What if Netflix could show me movies that friends have recently watched? Or TV ads rendered client-side to have personal details (adapting to the demographics)? What if I was emailed early about new concerts happening in my area, based on what I listen to on Spotify? And then was encouraged to post to FB when I bought tickets.

The last one is a real (Songkick) and is actually one my my favorite services. Though, is it an ad company? They certainly get a referral from Ticketmaster. What if they sold my preferences to Ticketmaster so they could know how to optimize a lineup with listener preferences?

What I'm getting at is that people seem really afraid of customization and personalization. Somehow it's "messed up" if ads capitalize on the network they have built; our reaction is that these free services are taking advantage us.

It's important to remember, if you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. This is why Google gives away a browser, why Facebook and Twitter remain free, and why Instagram was worth $1B. That number certainly didn't correspond to an iPhone app and a relatively simple backend tech stack -- it bought their growth, user engagement, and stickiness. And that's exactly what they're going to capitalize on to make back the investment.
This is what major version numbers are for.
Great work, the documentation as well as the tutorial are very easy to read and understand.
I didn't either, until I tried it. On one level, yes, it's java with type inference and lambdas and saves you typing. When you dig a little deeper in scala, things like case classes (immutability), pattern matching, for comprehension (monad syntax) suddenly fundamentally change the way you program.

Code becomes a lot more clear, explicit, and... fun. I recently talked to a dev who used Akka with java for a network server, and he ended up coding it in 'an object for each callback handler' style.

When I asked why he did it that way, he said nesting callbacks to sequence operations would get too ugly fast.

This is trivial in scala. The language flaws in java ended up dictating the architecture of his entire application, and for the worse IMO.
Rushed is really the same thing, even if the words "shareholder value" weren't in their minds at the time.
Feels weird. You shouldn't need to catch an exception when accessing an attribute.
There is also Lift, one of the early scala web frameworks, but after using it for over a year, I'd say stay away.
also, people experimented with removing the GIL in python and did not get any benefit from it. http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-remova... looks at some of the issues involved.
thanks ! I have to check SEO more precisely, I'm really not an expert..but you understand that losing #1 on "spelling" had a great impact
2013 Conferences to Look Forward To
Hey all,

Just wanted to create a list of technology/developer focused conferences I should be looking out for and planning to attend for 2013 (PyCon, RailsConf, CES, etc).
London Police To Set Up Special Copyright Crime Police Force
christ. you have all my sympathy. what happened was horrible. the social situation you face is a complete mess. the fractured sense of communities and cultures is a disaster. half the country doesn't trust the other half. and the halves aren't even well defined. there's no common faith and no common ground.

and into all that you have people making their facebook posts. framing their memes. writing their little propaganda articles. sending their links to hn. their own emotional cruise missile for the cause. all from one side or the other. all trying to find the right balance of words to appeal to one side and convert or humiliate or show or whatever the other.

from outside it looks ugly as fuck. i hope you guys get well soon.
Which is MS's separate OS for 64-bit?

I believe you'll find it to be Windows <insert version here> 64-bit Edition.

A quick googling suggests that Windows 7 retail copies have both 32-bit and 64-bit editions, but I'm guessing you still have to pick the right edition when you go to install it. And if you don't have a retail disc, then you probably only got one of the two architectures.

Compare this with Mac OS X, where there is no "32-bit edition" or "64-bit edition", there is just "Mac OS X". Everybody installs the same OS, and it transparently works for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. The only time when you really have to care is if you're installing a 3rd-party kext (kernel extension), as 32-bit kexts won't work on a 64-bit kernel, but that's pretty rare and any kext that's still being maintained today will support both architectures.
COBOL.

People still run production COBOL programs, today, that were written in the 60s and 70s. They may compile it with a version of COBOL that has support for features like object oriented programming. But the programs were written decades ago, and do not use those features.

I know one person who, 10 years ago, went back to work for the same company that she had worked at 30 years prior. Among other things she found a PL/I program that not only was around, but the last commit on was hers. She asked them, "I'm the last person to touch that, and I don't even know that language any more! Why are you still running it?" The answer was, "It never broke." (Sadly that company went bankrupt in the financial crisis, so her code is probably now dead.)

Code can live forever.
>double_x

Huh... yeah, no.