skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have liked the article to pony up what the companies own 'non BS' metrics are. Seemed a little flat to 'call BS' on everyone else then not deliver the goods itself.
I eat corn tortillas -- even cheaper than bread!

Breakfast taco: fried egg on a corn tortilla cooked on open gas burned with tapatio hot sauce. I swear it tastes gourmet!
OMG, something similar to this has happened to me twice over the last few years! I came down with a real bad case of, I don't know, something; but I had a bad fever and was just in a dazed state of half-sleep. The last time I just remember that "I" kept trying to parse some XML and was getting some parsing exceptions. It was so weird the next day remembering back, it was literally like I was in a different state, not really myself. very strange.
I was initially underwhelmed, but on second thought, it turns out that crazy, huge system of machines, trucks and humans that routes letters and packages around the country is pretty amazing. Going to go with damilocampos on this one.
The most recent supreme court decision DC v Heller upheld the fact that second amendment rights are not unlimited.

> Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. Pp. 54–56.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller#...

this is considerably more limited than the restrictions on attending churches. w.r.t voting, you do need to register ahead of time and in some states you may even have to show a photo ID, though this is under debate.
This is interesting because, since it was a referendum vote, the people who passed it will likely not be affected by it, unless the average income in Calif. is much higher than I would assume.
In some states, non-active LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers) would be prevented by law from being armed, especially as private citizens on school property. H.R.218 is not widely accepted enough to provide for this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers_Safety...)

In my state many middle and high schools have assigned SROs (School Resource Officers / Deputies), whose primary role is not protection, but to work with students. The secondary benefit is the presence an armed, actively trained LEO who could respond to an active shooter.

While many would decry the costs of adding these SROs to every Elementary - High School, the cost would likely be insignificant (in terms of money and effect) to turning schools into secured facilities (with prison like barriers).

http://www.tricities.com/news/local/article_a66f42d4-4806-11...
I think it's actually valid, as the author then goes on to say; "From a logical viewpoint, we should be more concerned with gun crime in general. If gun crime is a significant problem, then gun control could be a solution to that problem."

He's not cherry picking stats to make the matter of gun crime appear less serious. He's addressing the impending tidal wave of emotion in response to the events in Newtown, which happened to be a mass shooting.
social-local-mobile apps are easy to comprehend.

Genuine innovation isn't always so.
Show HN: Your Entourage from others Point of View
Various Blog Magazine Website Layouts
Me as well, the red text made me think they had just lost massive amounts of money and I felt really bad. Then I realized after reading some comments I just needed to scroll down. It probably makes more sense to include those costs with the revenue.
Someone doesn't understand the second law of thermodynamics.
Hopefully no one even moderately unfamiliar with the language the code is written in needs to find out how to fix something that is broken. Citing breaking code by using some global that makes the comment no longer true? Sounds like an abuse of globals or someone not cleaning up the comments, not the comments themselves.

So many times I have had to repair code in languages I wasn't quite familiar in or that was simply using methods I hadn't learned yet. Those comments were life saving.

Comments describing intentions of code also allow for someone to come by later and quickly and concisely understand what the code was doing and where it was going.

I cannot think of a single instance where parsing 65 lines of a function definition was ever quicker than reading:

This method takes a foo object, applies HTML encoding, and returns an array of the original and the clean code.

In the same vein, saying that Unit Tests are a replacement for comments just brings me back to my original assertion: I already am looking for help understanding the code base, so I should look at more code elsewhere and parse another long list of assertions?

Bad comments are bad like bad code is bad, or like bad pie is bad. But comments, code and pie aren't bad.

Please don't stop commenting your code because you feel like you can be more clever with the language instead. Someone may be much more familiar with the language the comments are written in. They may may need to do something with what you wrote.

Whenever I read some new reason why comments aren't cool or why some programmer has decided they[1] can just be clever with the language, I can't help but think they just don't have enough experience to know why and how comments can be absolutely necessary and fantastic.

[1] not saying this is necessarily true in this case, it's just the impression I get.
Restclient as well from https://github.com/archiloque/rest-client
America has got to be the only country in the industrialized world where it seems reasonable to respond to mass shootings (and shootings in general) by suggesting that more people should have guns.

Here's a scatter plot of firearms per 100,000 and gun homocides per 100 for OECD countries:

http://i.imgur.com/ZAI3T.png

Needless to say, the dot in the top right corner is the USA>

Data is from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homi...

(Note: Mexico is excluded because its rate of gun violence is such a startling outlier that it squashes all the other values.)
Also there are the "Know your Customer" regulations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
A nice thing about requests is that you almost never have to go deep into it. Out of the box, it almost always just does what you want. That's harder than it sounds, as evidenced by the failure of the standard library's urllib and urllib2 modules.
Yes, CA has a reputation for poor public schools and for large class sizes. And yes, CA now has the highest, or among the highest both personal income tax and sale tax. Where does all this money go? Are other states able to do more with less?
They need to change their name with all this awesome contributingness to Humanity... well Wikipedia anyway.. I'm sure its helped us all at one point or another.
Key point: "to you". I imagine that if the $0 option wasn't included, many of those who chose it would simply not "buy" it at all. So at least they get some marketing benefit out of it. Of course this works better for those "pay what you want" digital goods, where there isn't much marginal cost to giving away a copy.
> Finally, I'm sorry to say this and I know it gets old, but the U.S. constitution identifies a right to keep and bear arms. Even if the arguments in favor of banning guns were convincing, you can't maintain respect for the constitution or the rule of law while enacting laws that violate the constitution.

Well, there are two things to unpack there.

First, the 2nd Amendment is one of the most vaguely-worded sections of the entire document. If we're relying on the Constitution alone, there's really nothing about it that's cut and dry. It's even so ambiguously worded that the Supreme Court has had to make a decision about what its syntactic structure should be considered to be. Worse, I've a relative who's actually known as an expert on whether one bit of ink is a comma or an ink blot. Meaning two things: One, even that's something that's ambiguous enough that learned people are capable of disagreeing about it, and two, the question is relevant enough to how the sentence should be interpreted that there's a demand for people to develop expertise on the question. That's how ambiguous and poorly-worded this particular piece of legislation is. With all that in mind, there's a strong argument to be made that one's interpretation of the 2nd Amendment's meaning has more to do with one's pre-existing opinions than it does to do with what the sentence actually says.

Second, there is a well-known process for creating laws that are specifically designed to go against what the current version of the Constitution says. Such laws even have a name. . . and that name happens to be the second word in its name. In light of that, to suggest that the 2nd Amendment means that it's impossible to enact legislation that alters the law to be other than what the 2nd Amendment says - or whether doing so would violate rule of law - is patently silly. Did the 21st Amendment violate rule of law?
Just a matter of time until the fb-style "Joe likes FoxNews" rage starts. Maybe it'll be a lot more hipster: "Azul likes GorillaNutz Gum". Actually, I think I'd start using it if it was that good...
thank you & happy holidays
My bad, I was referring to the base game. Since it was out of stock at the time I wish I could have sent it to a print-on-demand place for delivery, even if it cost more in the time being.
Please Rate My New Startup
I completely agree with this. "We'll check the facts later" is not how journalism should be done. Modern 'journalists' are just sensationalists.
Five Ways the Free Market is Doing a Good Job. On Us.
The article was really just a Wiki post so I doubt it was meant to do anything other than state the known facts. I can't speak for the OP as to the motive for submitting it to HN... so nothing is obvious to me in that regard. But my comment was attempting to explain its appropriateness as a counter to you thinking it inappropriate . That was all. And my point was made in my post with regard to it being a counter-point to the a current point being made that without guns, the 20 kids would be alive. This event simply serves as an example of other (non gun) ways that bad people have committed mass killings of kids at a school. It would have served as an example even if the numbers were the same or lower. The fact that it happens to be the highest body count was not significant to me. I agree that we don't need to keep resetting the bar for the next psycho to best.
I think the same thing about Google. We all have 'grep', don't we? Ooooh, look at the big company, running grep on 1,000,000 computers. Give me 1,000,000 computers and I'll run grep on them too! Don't any of you people remember Archie? Google is just Archie with a bunch of movement crap.
Well done! I've enjoyed putting together a few of the kits from Adafruit. My favorite (not the most technically challenging) is definitely the "tv-b-gone". Taking that thing into a bar in my college town has provided a lot of laughs. There maybe some room to be critical towards the fan fare of the maker movement, but all in all it's a positive step towards individuals becoming interested in science/technology.
The authors of the paper have chosen to use N=4 topology, or supersymmetry in 4 dimensions, to simplify modeling how black holes with multiple centers decay.

In these special cases the mock modular forms, described by Ramanujan on his death bed in 1920 before anyone was talking about black holes, provide a counting function to describe the black hole's world line in string theory. In other words, they can model what's happening inside the black hole.

Using the mock modular forms was attractive because it satisfies the desire to use the holography theories about black holes to model what happens to information as matter crosses the event horizon.

The authors further justify their choice by explaining how modular forms are already used to describe characteristics of black holes in string theory, such as its Fourier coefficients (component waves) and how they change as an object crosses the wall.

The difference between a mock modular form and a modular form is that a modular form is holomorphic is differentiable at all points in Real space at infinity. A mock modular form is meromorphic, it is differentiable at almost all points in Real space at infinity. The authors account for their counting function being meromorphic by introducing a 'shadow' factor.

Edit: in particular they are complex differentiable. Wikipedia has a nice image where you can see a meromorphic function conforming to space and then a few spots where it jumps (is not continuous). A holomorphic function would conform smoothly all over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meromorphic_function
The New Era of SEO: Content Strategy
Interesting aside, monbiot actually publishes (publically) all his earnings. So you can find out exactly how (not particularly) wealthy he is. He started a campaign to encourage other journalists / columnists to do the same.

Not many have, unsurprisingly..
DC v. Heller: "Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."
Just to add one thing to this wonderful reply: An employer who has at-will employees who can be fired for no cause and with no notice (as is usual for non-unionized employees in the U.S.) has a lot of nerve to demand even two weeks notice from an employee. If you want some number of weeks notice that an employee is leaving, then make it part of the employee's contract that they're entitled to be paid for that number of weeks after giving notice (and that they can collect legal fees from you to enforce this in court if necessary). Otherwise, it's really not in their best interest to give you this information.
You've got me beat by 3 years. I think I met her for the first time at Pumpcon. She's also one of the nicest people. I tell my daughter about her all the time (it's no use, she still wants to be an author instead of an engineer).
We'll be glad to hear your feedbacks.
> Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap.

Sounds like you're actually embarrassed that she succeeded where you did not.

> It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.

Like the iPad is "just" a big iPhone.

Most people who benefit from these sorts of products don't have a firm grasp of math and engineering to start with. Our education sucks in the US. Giving them a helping hand is a terrific way to swell the ranks of STEM professionals and introduce people to solving problems they would never have considered otherwise.

To shit on this is the most deplorable, counterproductive elitism.
Making that simple is not necessarily limited to prototype-based languages. Another (as good as) dead language of Apple's design, Dylan, is class-based, but has a 'each-subclass' modifier that makes a slot magically appear new in each subclass. You would have to design your polygon class for that, though; it is not something that triangle could magically add.
You have a valid point, and I readily recognize and appreciate the various personality types and interaction styles people have.

I am actually generally an introvert who has developed some people skills over the last ten years or so. I am not always a "people person;" I simply recognize the advantages and see what makes a company tick, or not, and I think personal interaction is one of the big reasons.

After all, a company is a group of people, and interaction between people is one of the key features of a growing business weather or not it is your personal preference.

I'm not saying that you can't do well without being a "people person" and I absolutely do not mean to project my preferences on others. My statements were observations based on a variety of people at several companies, and seem to be true for most cases. YMMV. In any case, these ideas are still good to think about and evaluate.
I mostly agree with you. Many UX professionals I have worked with are almost proud about the fact that they don't have hands on experience with software development or visual design. They are the worst of both worlds. That being said, I don't think that a UX designer should spend the average day working on the nuts and bolts of development. A structural architect builds models and then collaborates with someone with more expertise who is in charge of the real building process. The comparison isn't perfect, but I think that as our industry matures, it will more closely resemble that. UX architects need a better modeling tool.
Key qualities of a good unit test
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, ... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Yes, he's a political polemicist, hence shouldn't be on HN. I wouldn't want to see a Fox News columnist on here either. (I don't like extreme politics of any shade. Yes, he is extreme, even if you agree with him.)

A serious discussion of how tantalum's use in electronics is damaging to the people of Congo would be appropriate, this is not.
Only if you believe she is less influential than she used to be.
> Specs are a way of life where I work. I would hope that everyone would be good or learn to become good at writing useful precise specs.

I was honestly hoping this was a joke, but I don't think it was. By the time someone writes an accurate spec, the business need has already changed. Spec's don't work.
Sounds like the developers who wrote that code didn't know how to write comments. Here's some guidelines:

* Anything that duplicates the line they describe in prose should absolutely be removed. They're worthless and become out of date immediately.

* If you have logical "paragraphs" of code separated by newlines and comments summarizing the paragraph, that's a great indication that your parent method/function/whatever is in charge of doing too much. Turn the comments into names of new methods/functions and refactor accordingly.

* If the algorithm is sufficiently complicated, it definitely deserves a documentation block describing the "how"s and "what"s. But more often than not those comments are just a duplication, as specified in the first bullet point above. If you don't think any code ever deserves these sorts of comments: congratulations, you've never worked on anything non-trivial in your career. I suggest that you find more of a challenging project.

* Definitely leave a comment behind explaining the "why"s behind a particular block of code if its intentions are not immediately obvious.

* Definitely have headers of documenting comments for functions/classes/methods/parameters/etc. Is your first reply when someone asks "How do I learn to use Rails?" to say "Read the entire source code to Rails"? No, of course not. For the same reason, your reaction to "How do I use this block of code" should not be "Read the block of code." Abstractions and proper APIs people, come on. I should be able to glance at the docs above it along with the definition and know how to use it, what to pass to it, and what I might expect in terms of returns / side effects. Bonus points if you have a tool to auto-extract these into a static site that you host for your team.
The comments that he shows are pretty worthless. However, comments are often necessary to explain WHY we are doing something.

oven.setTemp(350) // 400 will burn them, 300 they will be mushy

fluxCapacitor.setOption(THRESHOLD, 1.21E9) // lower thresholds will prevent return from time travel. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_time_machine to review the physics
'Sup weldpond?

I first met her IRL at a Boston 2600 meeting too, at the Cambridgeside Galleria. IIRC she was being escorted around by Rogue Agent and Sarah Gordon.

Already knew her on irc +hack/#hack back from when she was 'lem0n', which Deth Veggie still calls her (he still calls me by one of my old handles too).

(I used a bunch of handles back then, on irc mostly gfm or geo)
Yes, and the Earth will recycle itself after the Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel.

You're completely ignoring time here. We may never get to recycle the landfill because the pollution will kill us before. Yes, the Earth will clean itself up in a thousand years, the plastics will decompose, and the Sun will refuel the Earth, but those things are irrelevant if humanity is dead by that time. If we want to keep rising the standard of living on the entire planet, we need to stop poisoning ourselves and trashing everything around us in such a stupid way.
You can start to use your commit log as the comments.
For most jobs maybe that's true, but many startups strive to be better than that and more than just job function and day-to-day.

Personally I find a business where people know each other fairly well and understand how each other operates is preferable over one where I am only considered for my "job function;" so I can relate. But perhaps I am just idealistic.
I have to say I've been impressed with Marissa Mayer: I think it's way too early to know how this will turn out, but it reminds me a bit of Jobs coming back to Apple...
If they start a nuclear reactor business then GE will really be in trouble!
>Where did you get this kind of nonsense and numbers?

HTML first showed up in 1990. It started its evolution away from "hyperlinked text" with the introduction of elements like forms in 1995. It has been around for 22 years, and for 17 of those it has been for far more than hyperlinked text.

> Oh, those scary stories of the days past. There is a name for them: FUD.

I'm glad to hear that you haven't yet been bitten by placing your eggs in a basket held by a single company. Please do some research before assuming that your experience can be relied upon.

Personally, I've been bitten repeatedly. Forgive me if your screams of "FUD!" elicit a chuckle.
I ordered mine on Dec. 1 through Amazon, and it shipped Dec. 12. I'm in Canada, so I drove across the border to pick it up from the depot I use on Dec. 14.

2 weeks isn't too bad, especially this time of year.

http://xitijpatel.com/2012/12/16/google-chromebook-and-ubunt...
Rubber Ducking T-shirt
7 Days since Launch. Even Faster Website Reviews.