skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was in high school I joined the Amateur Radio club, I built a radio from a kit that we purchased from a company called Heathkit, I talked to high school students in Vancouver Canada and Hawaii and Texas and Puerto Rico on that radio, for 'free' with no Internet. I say all that not to brag but to relate how it changed me. I went from a kid living in what was the small town of Las Vegas to talking to people all over the place with a piece of gear I built from parts. That changed my thinking permanently from "people could build something to do ..." to "I could build something to do ..."

I was truly sad that as my kids were growing up the world was actively conspiring to keep the knowledge about how things work away from them. In the US at least there is a tremendous amount of narrative that rides along on the 'don't try this at home' meme. Silly stuff like learning to build campfires and sharpen a pocket knife, and stuff like changing the timing of your vehicle's ignition. The problem with that is that kids believe it. They start believing its somebody else's job to invent the new things, to think outside the box, and to do stuff.

Into that sadness walked folks who said "You know, I'm going to make stuff you can tinker with." "I'm going to sell kits for people to make silly things and amazing things and I'm going to provide all the information they need to modify or improve or destroy them." They needed a word for people who did stuff like that. "Do-er" never caught on, "Hobbyist" was to generic, "Hacker" got sideswiped by the media, "Nerd" and "Geek" were epithets, so somebody started calling these folks "Makers" in the sense that they made things. And its wonderfully non-specific so people who "make" fabric are just as much makers and people who "make" technology gizmos.

Over the last 10 years the pendulum has swung back a bit and folks like Limor have helped that effort. That folks would embrace that and push back against those who would protect the status quo of not letting you know how things work, sometimes it requires a noisy and brash "movement."

People are much more motivated when they are told "No you can't know that" it seems.
There's this interesting narrative that develops from time to time in Hacker News. Maybe it's just observer bias, but I had never heard of requests for Python until I read an article on HN about scraping, which in turn got me interested in Python, and now a week later a major release of Requests happens with a top story on HN.
> studied it, understood it

So everything studied is instantly understood? People have no need to ask questions? Have mentors?

Sure, some people are looking to plug-and-play answers, but that will always be the case. You can't solve that by telling the kids to 'get off your lawn.'
Ryan Lanza will have to deal with negative repercussions for something he didn't do, but there are 28 other people who are far worse off than he is.
Meet Titan: The New Supercomputer King
So the free-loaders basically took $3 a pop from Wikimedia?

Not sure what your nag screen said, but an A/B against putting it in those terms might have been interesting.
Most people will balk at that though. They may not balk at a noisemaker kit, or a build-your-own-universal remote.
I also recommend checking out Backbone-Boilerplate for a good skeleton using RequireJS

https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone-boilerplate
Now we just need someone to invent a gimmick disintegrating envelope. Stuff multiple letters with fake stamps into it, and mail several letters for the price of one!
Quick and dirty intro to Fabric and AWS integration for automation
Wow - this was an incredible read. thank you!
Work from Home | Free Instant Sign Up
The World's First Cloud Based Work at Home Business.
Size is irrelevant, these are per-capita statistics.

If heterogeneity was a factor, surely homicide rates would be climbing in countries like Canada and Australia that have the highest immigration rates in the Developed world[1]. They are not.

Number of guns is precisely the factor at the heart of the issue.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migrat...
And what would happen in the original?

People have a tendency to believe what the comment says, even when the code says something completely different.

It's easy to say that you would update both the comment and the value at the same time. But I've seen mismatched comments in code all the time for even a contrived example like this. And then what do you believe? Is the comment right with an incorrect implementation, or is the implementation right with an incorrect comment?
Google releases code ALL THE TIME and you never notice.

This article is ridiculous.
If we had the time, I would. I would seriously love to. However, HN isn't the place for it and I would only want to discuss it with someone seriously educated in Christian theology and the scriptures.
I wouldn't feel too bad for someone who gets to retire in their 20s, after the settlement checks start rolling in. He could probably start his lifetime vacation now, by getting a loan against the anticipated proceeds.
When we built the net, we had great dreams about every person on the planet connecting to each other and all the information they might need to make their lives better.

What we're actually building is something more like a cross between a tavern, a opium den, and a public square. People hang out in various random emotional moods, all waiting for something to trigger them into acting like a mob.

I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it's real. We are creating a system for over-reacting in a big way. Sometime -- sometime soon - some innocent person is going to get killed by one of the internet mob phenomenons. It's a miracle it hasn't happened already.

The interesting question is: what happens then? Does the net somehow correct itself? Or do the swings get wilder and wilder, ending up in 2050 or so with little bits of the net attacking little other bits in widely strewn locations? (What would be the term for this? Internet gangs? New nation-states? Niche warfare?)
IAMA Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü, Sugar)
Gmail iOS app 2.0 is super pretty, but hard to use
The GOP has a tech gap, and will continue to have a tech gap
Exploring school rampage shootings: Research, theory, and policy (.PDF)
The case of the mistaken identity of Neda Soltani in 2009 during the Iranian protests is worth reading:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20267989

> The whole thing happened in a matter of 12 days. In less than two weeks I had gone from being a professor of English literature, leading a very normal life, to a person who had to flee her homeland.

All because somebody mistook her facebook profile for someone else's
I don't understand why law enforcement officials leak this stuff. Presumably they aren't benefitting financially (that would be highly illegal, and surely investigated?), and they aren't ever named publicly, so they don't even get fame out of it. So why risk your job like that?
Address the perceived necessity for weapons rather than the weapons themselves.

But how can you ever do that?

No matter how much the above prescriptions change the facts on the ground, there will still be criminals and mentally ill people who attack others. And you'll never change what's historically the biggest killer of all, the threat of governments, most especially including your own as the last century's history wrote in blood.

So I don't think you'll ever change my perception that I need weapons.

(I also "need" "weapons" to target shoot, but that gets a little complicated.)
Amazon's access to my entire purchasing history hasn't helped it produce a remotely enticing store on my Kindle device or the Android App.

The suggestions are incredible mediocre and the list is pretty much "Here's a few suggestions. Like them or lump them" with very little filtering or sorting.
Doesn't halving the search difficulty mean dropping 1 bit from the key length? So 256->255 rather than 256->128?
Not sure that's true. If someone gets crippled in a car accident and gets settlement money, "retiring" in their 20s is probably very small consolation.

Granted, Ryan Lanza is physically fine, but his mind and reputation will probably never be the same.
Walk faster. No, seriously. If you're taking a leisurely stroll, you're doing it wrong.

I traverse cities just about as fast as I possibly can without breaking into a jog. It definitely gets the heart rate up.
That's because you're an idiot. His mom is dead, he can't talk to his friends and his life is certainly in danger. His life is shattered, he can't buy a new one.
I thought that was the thrust of the article, explaining the reasons and practices behind devops / continuous deployment. It read as a good non-technical explanation.
> There a lot of things we need to have a “national discussion” about in America — gun laws and access to mental health care being the two most important . . . . We’ve decided that access to guns is more important than our safety, that more guns equals safety

Sounds to me like a man who has made up his mind.
HSBC fined 5 weeks profit for laundering billions for drug cartels over decades
Well you have a keyboard and can post to the Internet right? I'll be awaiting your essay.
Turns out there are people outside of the US using Gmail too.
I would be interested to see data from the Humble Bundles on pay-what-you-want pricing. They seem to have done things over the past few sales that have resulted in higher averages.
Your entire comment sounds as something like this "if you're not noteworthy because of something it's your fault". Quite rude.

I know plenty of immigrant's children in the US that are not "successful" and they tried hard to find a spot under the Sun and failed, they're not poor but are not much better than their parents, who are not rich either, things happened, sometimes that were under their direct control, some of them now basically blame themselves for that and not being rich, although this is something that affects the vast majority of middle class Americans that I knew.
That was my reaction as well, but after reading a bit more about it, it appears California taxes capital gains as regular income. This bill might as well have been called the "taking money from Facebook investors" bill... combined with the federal capital gains rate, most startup IPO beneficiaries are going to pay ~30%.
Of course his reputation will never be the same, that's why he gets to retire. I could shake off a lot of mental abuse in exchange for a 40+ year vacation.
He doesn't say that we need more gun control, though. He has described the situation as he sees it, but he hasn't prescribed an answer, aside from a "national discussion", which by it's nature involves an exchange of opinions, not an answer from on high.
How to tame a drone with your iPhone
Are you just interested in plugins, or are you curious about people selling themes as well?
How the NRA Defeats National Tragedies
I would assume cost of living would include things like sending your children to school and so on, or going out on a fun weekend. If it does not, then I am sorely mistaken as what "cost of living" is.

As for investing money back, I'd assume you would have some kind of an investment account (for future, retirement or even your child's college fund) that would provide the same returns no matter where you are.
They're making $200 off each phone after subsidy from the carriers -- consumers pay $0 on decent/good phones, or great phones on sale. GS3 was $0 recently, as was the Galaxy Nexus.

Only price-point they could compete on is unlocked, but that will be tough with the Nexus 4.
The reason you call Java annoying is exactly the one why Java code is so conducive to refactoring practices described in Clean Code: it mandates great verbosity.

Everything in Java is Big Deal, even something like a simple loop going through a collection and applying a one-liner to every element. In Java, you have to divide things aggressively for code to remain readable and maintainable. Otherwise it's way to easy to lose the big picture.

When methods are few lines tops, their names are descriptive, and you have explicit types of arguments and return values, it's no wonder you hardly ever need to comment anything.

Other languages can be very different in this regard. Take Python, ironically the language author's using in his examples.

Python is terse and expressive; does not specify types in code; has everything as first-order values; prefers short names due_to_naming_convention; and makes extracting code into functions a significantly bigger deal (everything is public, needs to have docstring, etc.). Those traits often need to be offset by a little more prose than you would put into code in other languages.

So while Clean Code certainly sounds convincing (I know I treated it almost like a revelation), it needs a little more perspective. Commenting practices are just one more tool that you need to match to the job - and language - at hand.
Great way to disrupt the postal system! It's a legal gray area, but you would only be against it if you're against innovation and new technology! I'll call it Stampr.
A Gaussian need not to have a 0 mean and a 1 variance.
Is there anyone who thinks that the weasel words of having a "national discussion" about guns could possibly mean anything other than "we need stricter gun laws"?
Creating a sane development environment with puppet and vagrant
App Downloads Are A False Metric
As a voracious reader and consumer of data and infographics, I've come across a growing trend that many companies, agencies and developers are using to measure the growth or impact that an app may have and they measure that by aggregate app downloads. This is fool's gold. Usage is ultimately what matters.
Before taking a crack at answering this for you, I'd like to know - how did you feel when you heard about the shooting? What was your reaction? Would you generally describe yourself as an empathic person?
Here's the 2010 list for that point (From taxfoundation.org):

http://imgur.com/3mFWw

California gets back $.78 for every dollar in federal tax that its citizens pay.

I was actually surprised that Michigan was on the 'under' side of the list but there were few other surprises.
Again, props on your keen eye for market opportunities.

In regards to being 'eco-friendly' - any suggestions for environmentally friendly plastisol/immulsion?

We've been screenprinting in house for a while (<10 shirt runs) - as we like the DIY ethos.
I think you're reading way to much into this. You probably shouldn't be making any technical decisions if you're going to take every bit of advice personally.
Having children prolongs life
Show HN: My bold attempt to become a millionaire while trying to solve a problem
Ask HN: Releasing code that violates a sites Terms of Service?
I have seen a few times where people have witheld their code out of fear that they are breaking a site's Terms of Service (e.g. [1] [2]). This seems to be mostly in an attempt to prevent site changes that would break their code, but I am more interested in any legal consequences. My first attempts at researching this topic have not really answered my questions. Are there any best practices or precedents w.r.t. releasing TOS breaking code?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906456
[2] http://tinysubversions.com/2012/11/amazon-random-shopper/
You scratch a journalist's back, they'll scratch yours when the time comes.

Plus, there's always accidental slip ups.
I'm surprised at those people too. Almost 20%. I would not have thought it to be such a high number.
I did mention that; anyway; nobody is asking to ban weapons for the military so what is your point?
I used to work in journalism. Half of the journalism empire is built upon looking out for people so they'll look out for you in the future.

It's a minor scene in The Insider, but at one point Al Pacino's real-life character, CBS producer Lowell Bergman, helps the FBI out by not investigating a story. Later, the person he helped at the FBI tips CBS off exclusively about the arrest of the Unibomber, and tells them where to be. I believe that story is at least somewhat based on reality, and I've seen similar ones play out constantly in the media.

"Thank you for the positive coverage on that embarrassing story for the department," and so on, and eventually cops become a fountain of leads.
I'm glad that I am not an Instagram user. Those changes would have made me stop using the service.
Your second assumption is correct, but I was commenting on the article. This is not the only one of this kind I have seen in these past 2 weeks - so it is a general "thing to do" around Christmas for many political commentators/activists who have apparently nothing interesting/new to say.
Consider me deluded, then. To me, it says "I think we need stricter gun controls, and I wish to discuss my desire with the nation as a whole in order to create a consensus about what we will do".
Data lockers promise to help people profit from their personal information
Early evidence from the French financial-transactions tax
This is known as the midpoint method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_method
"The problem is no-one knows how to use the parts unless they are assembled into kits."

You're making a big assumption. Not everybody has the time to design, source and test a complex system from the component level. (Nor do programmers drop down to the machine code level for every project.) Many kit builders have the background, but still must juggle other priorities in their life.

Ideally folks should learn what's going on at the component level. With the free resources available online, that's easier than in the past. But no one should be forced to go through Boylestad or NEET just to play with a LED.
How antitrust economists are getting better at spotting cartels
Nothing stops him from talking to his friends. Re his mom, I'm referring only to his loss of reputation. He's in danger from idiots; moving to a liberal area should help. He'll be able to afford some decent security in any case, like any multi-millionaire.
> Am I the only one, or are others also experiencing this issue as well with totally "flat" designs?

I was under the impression that this was the main gripe about flat interfaces. It sure seems pretty compelling to me. Flat may be pretty, but it is demonstrably less intuitive, less functional.

It seems to me that the people advocating flat interfaces have completely missed the point of form following function, having chosen a less usable interface for what are essentially aesthetic reasons.
Did you read the link I posted?

The idea is by having a spec, you're more likely to see where it needs to be patched upfront, before delivering poorly designed software to angry customers, so you spend less time re-working it later on.

> I've never, ever seen any group that can write a spec in isolation prior to writing code to demonstrate it, and have it come out well, its usually a disaster.

Can you elaborate? I'd be interested in hearing what they were building, who (in general terms) they were building it for, how they went about writing the specs, and what went wrong.

My experience has been completely different, and I'm curious as to why that is.

Edit: Of course you can't expect the customer to write the spec. Designing the software is your job. But that doesn't mean specs are broken; it just means asking your customers to write your specs for you is broken.
> comparing it with the orignal app is not valid anymore

Facebook could have done the same thing with their app too, so I don't see how this affects validity.
Interesting.

> "He's probably the worst off [sic] after this incident"

Is pretty clearly false, but I guess my tone was offensive?
To me, it doesn't mean go skydiving or spend all your money and go partying every day.

It means stop living in fear, and stop distracting yourself with bullshit.

Lots of people are afraid of the shame of failure, the shame of rejection, etc. If you really were going to die tomorrow, it would strip away all the fear that you have of living with this burden.

I've been through some health scares and believe me, there is nothing more sobering than being in an MRI machine looking for a brain tumor. All the day-to-day bullshit that many people worry about, like "Why didn't I get that promotion" or "I really want that car" gets stripped away pretty quick, and the things that really matter surface immediately.
Sort of off topic, but there are physical examples of "flat" design applied to objects. One notable example could be the Quad 33 preamp:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quad_33_Front.jpg
And that won't be changed by articles bemoaning consumerism and urging people to be virtuously frugal, while neglecting to mention potentially useful things like externality taxes.
This post would be more meaningful if you defined meaningful.

Certainly, engineers at large have a disgraceful record for enabling horrible technologies that are a detriment to society: surveillance, censorship, stacked financial systems, weaponry.

On the whole though, engineers are logical beasts. Perhaps you would have greater success convincing the HN community to spend their time on positive impact projects by researching and presenting compelling evidence that one or more areas they support are ultimately trivial and/or have a negative social impact.
Or you could just not get caught up in to the hype and do something useful like teaching your kids proper food health, deal with their mental health and teach drug harm minimisation strategies.
Early Facebook designs were nice. Maybe not the one displayed in the screenshot, but one or two iterations later with some tweaking, definitely.

Design is what really set them apart from MySpace. That, and semi-private college communities.
Politicians don't debate for the purpose of creating a consensus. They debate for the purpose of getting what they want.

Sometimes a consensus is a necessary prerequisite for getting what you want, but in politics it is never an end in itself.
Boxcar: A self-balancing distributed services protocol
I think you're missing the point of the game. Being given freedom doesn't exclude someone from the consequences. For example: life is "punch whom you want" and you're still a jerk for punching someone.
I've always found it interesting that we techies generally avoid reinventing the wheel in our work but feel compelled to reinvent it in matters of spiritually. We're not the first to experience these thoughts and feelings and certainly won't be the last.

I suspect much of the reason is that the users manuals and wikis that resulted from thousands of years of human wonderings have been so misunderstood and misappropriated for other purposes.

This post reminded me of the ancient Hebrew book of Koheleth, which was translated into the Greek Ecclesiastes. About a man who wondered about many of the same things Paul brought up. Like many of us, Koheleth tried all sort of strategies to find meaning and be happy: to be rich, to be learned, to have fun, etc.

In the end, all he could surmise was that each day was a gift and to make the most of it. Pretty good lesson, I think. Thanks, Paul, for the reminder.
Idioms
Idioms part 2
GRAIL Mission Goes Out With a Bang
Justin Bieber isn't exactly in my musical demographic, but wasn't he some sort of Internet-famous YouTube thing before he was real-world famous? Or is that just the usual puff piece fake backstory?
Loving what you do never bought groceries. So the actual answer has to be 'I have enough money from other sources to live on'.
That's mostly because they're harder to get rid of than Scottish currency. Only the major supermarkets seem to accept them.
So. Much. Clicking. Around.