skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zawinski's Law

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
WordPress 3.5 is the second major release for 2012 and is focused on improvements of existing features. I was waiting for some improvement in wordpress and here it is. Glad to see some really good features. thanks for sharing.
Thorium is kind of like diesel, it doesn't work well in a spark ignition engine. Thorium doesn't work very well in a solid fuel reactor. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs, pronounced "lifters") on the other hand work very nicely. All the "reasons" you mention apply to solid fuel reactors, not LFTRs. The man who invented both preferred the LFTR.
> It's not the gun. It never was the gun. It's the person.

this is such a bad argument. of course its true that the person is responsible, but that's not an argument against gun control.

we can't just lock up everyone that could possibly go on a shooting spree, but we sure can make it harder for a person to go on shooting sprees. make it harder for people to get guns!

> Guns exist, that can't be stopped any more than preventing alcohol from existing

great, but if access to guns was restricted, it would be harder for crazy people from going on shooting sprees.

nobody thinks that all access to guns can be eliminated, but its pretty reasonable to say that if it were hard to get guns, fewer shooting sprees would happen.

> guns are just tools, as are knives, and diesel fuel, and even explosives

this comparison is so clearly bad:

the tradeoffs for society are obvious in each of these cases. knives are pretty dangerous, but they don't really enable someone to rampage through an elementary school to kill 27 people. diesel fuel is pretty dangerous, but it's also really useful to society. i'm pretty sure we already have controls on who has access to explosives.
To collect intelligence about foreign nations so we are not taken by surprise.

It's relatively important.
That's actually not the way the real world works though. The primary "jerk" projects (mostly the kernel and Linux infrastructure) are dominated by submissions from paid, professional developers working on support for new features for their employers. These people are routinely coming from closed-source backgrounds, don't understand the project, don't write new feature with an eye to maintainability, and have an affirmative requirement from their managers to get their submissions accepted. As I mention, sadly, I'm in this set more often than not.

That's just not a recipe for fun. The "hair trigger rejection" filters are there because of all the junk that gets thrown at the maintainers. And either it makes them grumpy or is acceptable only to people who don't mind being rude. Either way, the "jerk" bit is a direct correlation.
Let's not resort to reductio ad absurdum arguments, please. There's plenty of rationale arguments that you could have made instead. No one's suggesting that people should be allowed to keep nuclear bombs in their homes, and your metaphor is untenable.
I guess HN really is going down hill. I wasn't trolling at all and genuinely had some thoughts on the topic, and I am downvoted with no comment.
It's especially good since storage can be overallocated. The odds that upon hearing the announcement everyone fills up the new space is slim, so adding 20% more storage doesn't add 20% more costs.
Why isn't Stallman donating more money? He makes a ton in speaking fees at various universities.
People have been telling me this when I express an interest in the interwebs, but as someone who only has a loose understanding of what a small project is, how can I pick such a thing?
Disk space is particularly cheap. It's probably almost a natural process as they swap out older failed drives with newer ones of the same price but higher capacity.

They've upgraded RAM in the past too, but they're still not offering great value on those terms compared to Hetzner or other German hosts. CPU performance isn't particularly impressive either. What Linode does have are great customer service, a good web interface, and good choice of datacenter locations.
You have not been trolled. I, too, laud him for the post, I just don't like Hacker News getting carried away and comparing him to Jesus incarnate. As for the appropriateness of the timing, I was responding to a comment that extrapolated from this blog post to reflect upon him as a person, so it's unfair to tell me "this isn't the time" but not the person I'm responding to.

It's also fairly condescending to assume based on my opinion that I've never experienced pain on Notch's level. Buddy, you have not experienced pain on my level.
Politicians funded by the NRA
I do this.

My very first programming class was Java and I had no experience prior.

I felt so alive writing every character and every line. I was too excited to read the paragraphs of description in the textbook because the code told most of the story anyway. I could look at it, read it and mostly understand it, then retype each character at a time and watch it work. Once it worked, I varied small things. Anything I could improve. Sometimes the goal was to make it as condensed as possible, sometimes it was to try to make it simpler to read, or to adapt a method for ints to also work on floats, or to add parameters making the code even more flexible. Kid in a candy store mentality fits perfect.

I did this for almost every example in the book, even ones we didn't cover in class, a few hundred in total.
Thorium has issues in a solid fuel reactor. The LFTR is the way to go.
While this is awesome, I am one of those guys who feel uncomfortable to store my raw password in a dotfile, not to mention I'm managing my dotfiles in Github, authentication in every run doesn't seem convenient either. I see that this happens in other places such as Github gists-terminal and some twitter-terminal clients. Is there any way we can store these credentials locally in a safer way like SSH keys?.
This entire article is garbage.

- It talks about "investors starting to panic" about Apple's future. The linked article has no such wording, nor does the USA Today articles that I saw.

- The title makes it seem like the iPhone 5 sales have been outperformed by iPhone 4S sales... No where in the article does it claim that, unless you mean the analyst that says "'Some of our Chinese sources do not expect the iPhone 5 to do as well as the iPhone 4S,' Millunovich wrote."
''The ability to have "pockets of imperative mutability"... connected by a "functional tissue," is not only clarifying, but works quite well in practice for building large and complex concurrent systems.''

That's always been a winning combination, and if you look for it you'll see that many examples of well-written code hold to the pattern: large swaths of code that are referentially transparent, with smaller chunks of imperative code piping them together.

This can be done in almost any language, but of course support from the toolchain is nice to have.
Nor do I. I've had lots of positive results on github, as puller and sender. The barrier to entry on github for sending a pull request is much higher than asking a "send me teh codez" question on Stack Overflow though. It's understandable that the more experienced contributers are burned out there. Rather than replying nastily maybe they should just leave the Eternal September that SO has become.
Wanting to sell guns is a given.

I was surprised(not shocked) to learn of the contest for one manufacturer to sell over a million guns in one year with the goal of increasing funding for lobbyists.

1.2 million guns is a lot of weapons to sell in a year.
> they buy guns to defend themselves

Or to hunt. Or for sport.
I would consider a basic chat application or a web-based text editor a small project.
The analogy would place blame on the manufacturer/seller of spoons, right? In which case, they would be blamed for everyone getting fat.
This also breaks, because comments are syntax.

proc some_proc {a b} {

} # some_proc
I think these two commentators (TillE and hodder) have put into words what I have been grappling for many weeks now. And I give can you a specific example.

I've been trying to learn about GUIs and cloud computing. For GUIs, for weeks now I've been saying I know how to program, but I have no idea how I can make something visual. I used Processing, and that was excellent, but then it turned out that it wasn't what I needed (there was no 'delete', so if I rendered a circle, I couldn't delete it). I also looked into Quartz Composer and I thought it was called ngraphics, but Google isn't showing anything called that. It was a Graphics Library for C++. I even installed a VM and Linux (I had to learn how to install a VM and Linux) to try some open-source software instead of trying to learn about GUIs, but that didn't suit my needs either.

So that's GUIs. The other one is cloud computing. I want, say a website and an app, and I want them to submit a form, then the server would do some calculations with these forms and then send back the calculations. I have nothing to say about this. I have no idea where to start. I don't know what this is called. I don't know what to Google.

But having these two people put into words what I have been grappling with is a huge relief. I think I will take a step back and re-evaluate my situation.
If I may add to this, I found it really helpful to comment out every line as I went. Even today, when I want to learn new languages or frameworks I pick a repo on github and copy the whole thing line for line, commenting as I go. I found that this helps a lot.
Friday Q&A 2012-12-14: Objective-C Pitfalls
It would appear that in this case, advertising it allowed the user to fix the problem. It's a trade-off, certainly.

It also means I've now heard of Cloud Flare.
A vital part of that is to ask questions that don't just regurgitate dictation, but to encourage risk taking. The more comfortable a student is with the possibility of being wrong, the more natural experimentation becomes. Always connect it back to progress toward something they are passionate about, whether they are technically inclined from the outset or not. This is why I like to skip "Hello World" type coding and fast-track them to making a tool that they actually want to use in their lives.
No one doubts that Amazon's customers love them and that Amazon is growing revenue at an incredible rate.

The question is when and if will this revenue growth translate into increasing margins? Revenue growth without profit has very little value (see Groupon) and the nature of their current businesses make it difficult to establish a competitive position where you can increase margins by charging a premium versus your competitors.

For reference - Wal-Mart has operating margins of 6x those of Amazon, has 8x as much revenue as Amazon yet is only valued at 2x that of Amazon. It would take Amazon almost 8 years of nearly 30% growth in revenue and profit margin to match Wal-Mart, a company which trades at a PE in the low teens.
The Right Day To Talk About Guns
I think one of the most important differentiation of a traditional company vs 'startup' company is the culture. And in order to understand the culture, you'd have to research each individual company, which this service doesn't seem to offer.

The students may be better served if there was a list of tags/terms for the all the companies so the students can go through them and check/tick the ones they want to apply to. Shotgun mass spam doesn't ensure a cultural fit.

(Should +100 (for how many people in the company) even be an option? Is a company still a startup at that point?)
When faced with 3 pricing choices, it seems consumers will choose the one in the middle. And it could also be a case of "overshooting" most consumers - i.e. most Apple customers are starting to think iPhone 4S level of hardware is "good enough".

This could mean that if Apple continues the current strategy, of making the "best" smartphones, they risk being relegated to under 10% market share again, as the smartphone market grows. Actually, they already are only at under 15% globally, and they've never really passed 18%.
Actually, since they have more money and are more established, I would argue that they do have the luxury of throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks. The reason we have companies in this country that are over 100 years old is because they were able to pivot long after they were established.
Sure, but then you need to take LSD to maintain that state. Once you remove that actor, the person rewires to think the way they did before.

That's my issue.
LFTRs are not all that difficult. It is a WHOLE lot simpler than a Traveling Wave reactor!
UC suspends new logo following public outcry
Show HN: Inventors Against Patents
Gloss - A minimalist CSS editor (beta)
My opinion, Apple's stock is being manipulated by traders and hedge funds. Spread bad news about a company, buy the stock at a lower price, wait for the Quarterly earnings, watch the stock price sky rocket.
New to Linux? Let's bootstrap the process
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
What did Einstein say about failure?
This seems like a business opportunity. You could create a third-party linode storage service, and proxy through nodes inside their network so that your clients don't have to pay for the bandwidth. You could just store the files on S3 but be able to offer competitive rates since you'd be getting a volume discount at amazon.
iawesome!thanks danielESC:wq
OSX has keychain which is designed for these scenarios.

http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2006/01/16/keychain...

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Secur...
Show HN: iPhone Google Reader App (Go RSS)
As an avid Google Reader user I was really disappointed with the reading experience on my iPhone.
I felt that the existing apps seemed to be more interested in adding features and cramming as much text into a small space
rather than improving the readability of my feed and helping me decide which articles interest me or not.

So I created my own https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/go-rss/id579197528?ls=1&mt=8

I have a finite number of Promo Codes. So if you are an iPhone user and a Google Reader fan and want to check it out, email feedback@gobits.ca and I'll send you one (as long as supplies last).

I would love to hear feedback about what you like or hate.

Features
* Add/Remove subscriptions
* Tagging articles
* Setting Article status as Read, Keep Unread, Starred, Shared

Sharing with:

* Email
* Facebook
* Twitter
* Google plus
* Google history
Exactly. This is a problem with no silver bullet. It is impossible to remove all guns/gun rights in America, and it is impossible to find all the crazies and lock them up. Not without violating some serious rights.

The best we can really do is tighten all of the bolts that we can see, and hope the leak slows down to an acceptable level. Improve gun ownership laws, improve our handling of the mentally ill, assist those experiencing crippling poverty, etc. Attack all the angles reasonably to get crime down to a reasonable level.

(And an acceptable level cannot be "no incidents". To accomplish that would require a police state. We must accept that once in a while horrific things will happen, and there was nothing that could reasonably be done to prevent it. i.e., shit happens.)
26 reported killed in Newtown, Conn., school shooting
Death Star construction petition gets 25,000 signatures
Don't do this please. It's the total opposite of what startups actually want applicants to do I guess... If I were a startup CEO, this would be a bad thing, but I'm not, so I don't know what the reality is.
Neither way is "the best way to learn code"; both are good ways, and they each guard against the other's harmful influence. Do both: when you want to copy code, retype it thoughtfully; also start a small project to do for yourself and jump in.
My personal view is that the belief in biological determinism is too widespread. Up until the mid-1800s, nurses were often men. Nightingale's views played a big role in making nursing a female dominated field, partially justified by saying that women are naturally nurturers. It's all too easy for people to argue that sex-based, race-based, etc. roles have a biological basis, when it's actually cultural determinism. And we know this because things have changed in timescales that aren't possible under a genetic basis. But it's easier to assume things are because they are than it is to change one self and the views of others.

In any case, I think this thread is nearing the end. I thank you for your participation and consideration.
Is there a generalization of Zawinski's Law postulating that "Every program should expand until it can read itself"?
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors were based on a design for an AIRCRAFT reactor! Talk about having to be SMALL! :)
Britain [not counting Northern Ireland] (about 1/6 the population of the US) and with really quite tight gun controls has had three murder sprees since 1987 that killed more than 10 people (all of which used guns). The worst of these (in 1987) led to a significant tightening of gun controls. Additional gun controls were also brought in after the 1996 attack on primary school in Scotland.

http://www.murderuk.com/mass_murderers.html

Other attacks have occurred at schools without guns including this one with a machete that resulted in injuries but no deaths: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/8/news....

I would suggest that perhaps there is also a societal issue in the US compared to Britain causing these things (in addition to the affect of the larger population) but the most important aspect may be the greater availability of firearms that gives opportunity to people that may not carry out the act if they need time and preparation AND it greatly increases the lethality of attacks that do take place.

Note this excludes terrorism where numerous incidents have had a bigger death toll but those planned coordinated attacks and I think a different category from the sort of incident today.
Probably some hesitation over the lightning connector is holding back some people upgrading to 5 instead opting for the 4s - it's cheaper, better than their 3 or 3gs, and existing accessories will still work.
Nothing is completely fool proof for anything. We're talking probabilities and it makes very much sense to try to decrease the probability of shootings.
Note to everyone thinking of consulting and doing this math:

The challenge is that when you bill $150/hr you are not billing 40 hour weeks.

By the way, this is exactly why you need to bill $150/hr (or better, a weekly or monthly rate). If you do 40 hour week math, you think you can bill < $100/hr. And then you are very hungry.
I had the same experience in the dance world. I was privileged enough to be able to train with national and world champions. At the lower end of that scale, people were incredibly full of themselves.

Work with somebody who's recognized world wide? She's the nicest person ever. (Even though I clearly wasn't as good as she'd have liked me to be ;)

It's inspiring to work with people who don't have anything to prove to you, but have more than enough to show you.
I've been working at home and travelling the world for over 5 years with our whole team completely distributed, managing over 30 people remotely for all of this time. I've seen it doesn't work for some people. If the person doesn't have a partner, is a bit too introverted, they can get into an anti-social pattern and not communicate enough, not get out of the house.

My experience is that this is the minority, maybe 5% maximum 10% of people. The majority love working from home and the benefits of greater flexibility and not having to travel to and from work each day more than compensate for any downside.
This is too specific for my taste. I'd say this instead:

Everyone should try new things. Being really good at one thing is awesome, but we learn the most from sucking at stuff. So find something you suck at and work at it and improve at it and learn from it. Cooking. Woodworking. Painting. Building a pizza oven in your backyard. Photography. Whatever--just pick something that makes you think "wow, that looks amazing--I would try to do that, but I'd have no idea where to begin," and then learn where to begin and do it.
The maps fiasco makes it clear that Apple is at a crossroads: They can

1. Open up the platform, or

2. Go down the same road that they went down in the 80s/90s, handing the bulk of the business over to an open platform.

I know which way I'm betting this turns out.
Isn't the energy storage problem what lightsail is trying to address? http://lightsailenergy.com
I will be borrowing this: "its syntax isn't just simple, it's simplistic"

I've lost hours to the syntax errors in comments before. Coupled with TCL's bad error messages it's maddening.

#syntax errors in comments are dumb

proc test {a b} {
} # test

% source tmp.tcl
wrong # args: should be "proc name args body"

How long does it take to find that one in a 1000 line file? It doesn't even give a file name or line number.
Darpa awards $20M to Nvidia to stretch sensor "Achilles Heel": Power
There are numerous counter examples. Chicago had a handgun ban, and held the record for handgun murders for many years while the ban was in place.
Setting up mutt for GMail these days is no harder than setting up vmail. This is a complete config file for mutt that will connect to your gmail account:

set folder=imaps://imap.gmail.com:993
set spoolfile=+INBOX
set imap_user='your_username@gmail.com'
set smtp_url = "smtp://your_username@smtp.gmail.com:587/"

If you don't want to enter your password every time, you can set it as imap_pass (for reading) and smtp_pass (for sending).
We might be able to do better. But ultimately we have to resign ourselves to the notion that it is fundamentally impossible to prevent all violent crime, even events such as these. This is true whether or not we could magically completely eliminate all guns on Earth.

Ultimately it's impossible to be knowledgeable of the bad intentions of every single warped individual on the planet. And some of those folks will have the capability of harming people, perhaps many people. Look at 9/11 as an example of how a handful of well trained and highly motivated individuals armed with only box cutters were able to take control of jumbo jets and ram them into buildings and kill thousands. That's an extreme example but it's worth remembering, because there are many, many examples of similar situations. Look at the unabomber, for example. A brilliant loner who was able to fashion bombs from household materials in a shack in the middle of nowhere and kill several people. Or look at all of the other bombers throughout history. You can't legislate away the ability to build bombs, they're already illegal, but anyone with enough knowledge and a little money can make them and kill people. The same goes for arson, which kills hundreds of people every year.

In my view the solution is not to try to disempower the entire populace by taking away guns and hoping that this disempowers the bad guys enough to make it that much harder for them to kill. I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others. I think it's also worth concentrating on social and cultural changes which make our society more accepting and hopefully make the creation of these violent individuals less common, but that's a much harder problem to tackle.
IT’s Dirty Little Secret: “We’re aware of ‘Shadow IT’, we just can’t stop it”
For investors, the enterprise is bringing sexy back
IPad Mini cannibalizing sales of iPad 4