skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We got a lot of angry feedback about the whitespace bot that was roaming GitHub for a while. We tried to sit back and let people deal with it themselves (e.g. send feedback/patches to the bot owner).

We're not opposed to bots or services. We encourage it, and use one ourselves. The key is making it opt-in so it doesn't bother people that don't want it.

Travis CI is a popular addon, but they don't have a bot that runs tests and tries to get you to setup their service. They just focus on providing a bad ass service that you _want_ to setup.

Edit: You 'opt' in to a bot one of two ways:

1. You add their GitHub Service to your repository (see the Service Hooks tab of your Repository Settings). This is how Travis CI started out.

2. You setup an OAuth token with the service. Travis does this now, and provides a single button to enable CI builds for one of my repositories.
Learn form engineers/scientists in other industries. When I started to learn how bridges were built my understanding of software became better.
That reminds me to the novel "Johnny got his gun". Highly recomended
Best Cropping Position
You can do that just fine with your fingers.
It only counts users who have linked their profiles to social networking sites, and have their age listed.
Hurricane Sandy alters utilities' calculus on upgrading electrical grid
VA = Virtual Assistant.
If it works for you for now then no real need to change it. A proper deployment tool usually makes it easier to deploy apps of different types and languages using a consistent set of tools.

What I do when working with SSH'ing to AWS instances is to give them a readable name (like nginx-1, nginx-2) tag, and then place those names as hostnames in my /etc/hosts, so I can then just run ssh nginx-1. I use a script around https://github.com/bjeanes/ghost to automate this.
Virtual Assistant, unless I am very mistaken.
I don't think that's right. I've been places in Colorado miles from "help" and still had cell reception.
I really miss the stylus input on the old NEC Versa Litepad tablet. Combined with its great handwriting recognition, I could actually do some serious editing of PDFs in Acrobat and writing in OneNote. Contrast that with an iPad (mini and maxi) and GoodReader, where it's slow and laborious to even mark up a PDF, and I've tried several different stylus products.
I loved and miss the stylus on my palm devices. Accurate, natural, and you can use your fingernail if you lose the stylus.

Touch always felt like a blunt instrument to me, and blind because my finger hides what my finger is touching.
There are other reasons for not switching as well. As an overweight smoker... I drink normal soft drinks rather than diet (sweetener) drinks partly because of vague things in the back of my head about them being carcinogens, but largely because I'm not a fan of their taste.

Regarding smoking - well I've cut down lately, I was smoking 20-30 a day and in November/December, with the exception of two trips abroad where I smoked fully, I cut down to about 20 cigarettes over the two months, due to a challenge from a friend's kid - I simply don't want to move to electronic cigarettes. I love smoking, if it wasn't unhealthy I'd do it forever. I don't love smoking an electronic cigarette, I don't even like it. I'd genuinely prefer to spend a day without nicotine than a day with electronic cigarettes, or nicotine gum/patches.
A Story That Makes You Take a New Grip on Yourself (1922)
If mice are so useful, why weren't steering wheels replaced in the car market?
The article is more concerned with "open development" than with "scientific software". Those interested in more specifically science-oriented advice might like the following, which is referenced in the OP: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.0530. For example, this one mentions version control and testing against data.
newrelic can be used for server monitoring, and they've got a nodejs probe in development http://try.newrelic.com/nodejs.html

Downside: expensive
a) You can always see the source output and it is easily readable.
b) CS really doesn't do anything magic in the output.

Give it more time, the gains for CS are worth any negatives you can conjure up. do ->, classes, simple for loops, equality, etc.
Why make the difference between the two? What's so special about tablets that they deserve restricted boot, but PC's do not? They're just all computers. What's worse is that in the future these computers will be a lot more popular than PC's ever were. That means more people will be restricted by default.

Most tablets and phones just happen to come with a different chip architecture, but there is nothing inherent to them that demands they should be restricted compared to the x86 alternatives.
As article says, I wouldn't want hundreds of them. Imagine uploading a simple website, only to have your issue tracker harassed by JSLint bots, HTML validators and pull requests correcting your indentation, replacing <b>s with <em>s etc.
This. This is the most valuable insight an entrepreneur looking to jump into home automation can derive directly from a customer. Thank you very much! I will keep these in mind when I design my HA systems. Cheers!
Absolutely, although Domains are a new feature in 0.8 and will need some time for maturity.
Yeah. I find it odd that despite Apple winning the world-championship in patent-trolling and is leading the fight for closed systems and walled gardens, FSF still decides to go after anyone but Apple.

Despite this tarnished image of a former tech-innovist, does the FSF really still feel it's impossible to fight the root evil here because of public perception?

Is it only picking on Microsoft because that is easier to amass support against?

We, as hackers and developers, should support this. We should fight closed systems. We should fight against the forces against general purpose computing (Cory Doctorow has a nice speach on this) and we should fight those who seek to criminalize writing code because somewhere some troll has a vague patent with no implementation covering your work.

So yes. Support the FSF on this. But also boycot those who are the chief offenders here. Every dollar spent in an Apple-store is money spent against the core of your profession. Stop spending money there. And throw away your iPhones and Macbooks. They are bad karma and software blood-money.
Is there some support for Maven, like generating Idea project from a pom file?
Not if you don't want your images compressed, eg if they are test cases for a face recognition algorithm or indeed for an image compression service. Not everyone is using github for the same stuff you know.
Banning Assault Weapons Does Virtually Nothing
Wow, a ban on assault weapons would help reduce gun-related homicides from mass shootings by 0.78%.
I did a quick test on some JSON data I use in my webapps; ~100k-1M blobs, mostly numbers. gzipped MessagePack data was just about the same size as gzipped JSON data. If you care about size on the wire over HTTP, then MessagePack may not be an improvement. It's amazing how well gzip compresses the stupid ASCII encoding of numbers in JSON.
It's not always helpful. Consider code with a similar purpose on github (transforming images, compressing them) with an accompanying image test suite, where modifying these images will break tests.
As a fat person I, to an extent, disagree with you.

Yes you're right about environmental changes, and that new changes could solve, or help solve, the problem. That doesn't mean that my fatness isn't related to me being weak-willed. I absolutely have the ability to lose weight and get fit, but I'm too lazy to do this. I know people who love food just as much as me, but they chose either not to eat everything that they want to, or to do extra exercise to make up for it, or both.

Maybe there are people out there for whom it isn't about weak will. I know genetics play at least some part, and obviously environment as well (if you grow up with parents who only feed you fast food for example). But I'm confident that for a lot of people, weight issues are about being weak-willed.
Completely agree with you. It's a good time to be a software developer! :D
When your nodejs instances are crashing several times an hour due to facebook randomly returning html instead of json and the 3rd party library crashing as a result, who has time for maturity? =)
Aren't you guys kind of ignoring his question? He didn't say that he's unhappy with his life and wants to quit his job, he said he doesn't want to be a programmer anymore and needs help figuring out what to do next. People spend a majority of their waking life at work, they should be doing something they enjoy.

I went through something similar a few years ago. I didn't get a computer science degree but fell into programming on my own because I picked it up easily, but I didn't want to spend the rest of my life being a programmer and I saw that I didn't identify with other programmers that loved their jobs. I've always done some design with programming, worked around a lot of designers, and eventually switched to becoming an interaction designer (which allows me to be analytical with my work but spend a limited amount of time in code).

If there's a way for you to try something else at your current job, don't be afraid to talk to your boss and your peers about it. I thought I would get a lot of flack for not wanting to do the job I was hired for, but everyone in my company was extremely supportive. If you're a good employee, you can be as good doing something else and people want to be supportive of that (and keep you, no matter what you do).
How do I opt in? I'm curious to see what will come up.
That article does not really disagree with Lustig's central thesis. That pull quote in particular is actually in accordance with what Lustig is advocating. The lecture focuses on the recent trend in the food industry of separating the fructose from the fiber in ways not found in nature.
Nice. I do the same thing but my returns aren't that high, maybe between 20% and 30%. I use Google Finance as well.

My strategy is simple: I look at the day's biggest losers and, if my research says it's an overreaction/emotional, I'll buy in the hopes of selling in the next week. Most of the trading comes around earnings time. I had a pretty good return with Groupon (I sold too early though), Verisign, MMR and a few others.

I found I was spending too much time checking the screen when I should have been working though, so I just bought about 100 shares of Apple when they dipped below $520/share recently and hope to sell early next year when they get back up to $625 or so, hopefully after Q1 earnings.

By the way, this isn't a passive strategy for me. I use stop and limit orders, but it takes a lot of time to keep track (at least for me, but I'm not very efficient), which gets especially difficult when I'm traveling and the market stateside doesn't open until 7pm (bleh).
Honestly? That sounds amazing (as long as there's a way to manage the noise).
The best of 2012 for designers
I wouldn't mind bots that fix spelling mistakes in comments or even actual bugs in code. But why not let github projects be configured to allow certain kinds of bots?
Typed languages add a ton of boiterplate to what would be simple operations. That slows you down, more than most people notice.

Now, that said, explicity typing makes it easier to catch a lot of mistakes, and helps you keeping you data consistent. It's very usefull... But slows you down.

As a conclusion, you want to explicitly type anything that is important, but also wants to keep the explictly typed data to a minimum. (What makes optional typing, like in Haskel very interesting.) And, in nearly all the applications all the important data (and very little unimportant data) goes to the DB.
Potentially, yes, but what if the idea catches on and you have swarms of overlapping bots submitting pull requests? And what about bots that are well-intended, but dubiously helpful?

You might log in one day and find that your repo has pull requests from fifteen image optimizing bots, thirty-eight prettifying bots for different languages, four .gitignore patching bots, seven <!DOCTYPE inserting bots, eight JS semicolon removers, nine JS semicolon inserters, twenty-four subtly broken MySQL query sanitizers, and seventy-nine bots fighting over the character encoding of the readme file.
Patio, Quick question. I have had some trouble getting my first consulting gig. Its not the meeting per se that gets them, I can get meetings with people. They say I lack experience. Should I do pro bono work, or should I lower my prices (I charge a lot because I like to dedicate my time to doing a fantastic job and giving customers (if I had any) exactly what they want (or what they think they want). How do you get the first gig/job?
Let me know if you're serious - I'd be game to chat on an ongoing basis if someone is going to do this right!
BSON v/s Msgpack
Estimating Sales Using Game Center Leaderboards - Data From Last Week's Launch
A very important breakthrough is missing in the list : Human Genome sequencing cost dropped to $1000 with processing time of only a day. Just 12 years ago it cost $3 billion dollars and 15 years of work.
Warby Parker Hiring "Computer Vision" Engineer - Could this be for Google Glass?
"Warby Parker is seeking a brilliant senior software engineer who will develop computer / machine vision applications that make our company succeed. You'll be working in a fast-paced, fun environment, and your work will be seen by millions of people."
I don't think his concern was wether or not it was doable for general use, just for exercise. It's very doable.
Coming to Canada for 6 months or 12 months to work? I think that is really easy; those visas are available at the border. All you need is a passport. If you want to stay longer, though, there's tons of red tape.

Boston -> Toronto here. It wasn't as easy as you might hope. My wife's employer paid for an attorney to manage the paperwork, which was pretty awesome. Total time to permanent residency: about 3 years. Since our residency was finalized within the last 6 months, the 3-year estimate is pretty current; I think this should be considered the lower-bound.

I can't imagine how it would work for a freelancer. In my case, I tagged along with my wife who had a formal offer of employment. If not for her employer, I don't think it would have been possible to get the work visas and ultimately get residency.
I agree FSF should fight against Apple, too, and even though they would make a lot of enemies because of it, I think making a lot of enemies this way and becoming that controversial is a lot better than being obscure, because in the same time they'd be gaining a lot of allies, too. I think FSF fighting against Apple's closed policies would ultimately make them more popular and help them.

That being said I don't really think that not naming Apple right now, which already has an established closed platform (therefore uphill battle), detracts from them trying to stop Windows 8 machines becoming as closed as iPads before they even get a chance to take off the ground. Better (and easier) to kill off a bad idea early on.
Love the rundown of how well you're doing!

Since HN comments are a haven for unsolicited advice, here's a few things from me:

$100 per email seems really high for mailchimp on a list of 5k. Looking at their pricing they have a monthly rate of $75 for list sizes between 5k-10k. That may be an easy expense cut for you.

Also, if you're looking at going to conferences to sell the high end membership to A/R, you may want to consider doing sales webinars. These have converted incredibly well for me personally and it seems it would be a great fit for this product as well.
>But show me one good example of a widely used Internet service that's owned by a public company that willingly cheated its users when it had the chance?

Do you know how many times Facebook has done this? Thanks for atleast demonstrating your ignorance, dude.

Are you affiliated to Instagram somehow? If yes, let's not waste both of our times (Atleast, I have none to lose to a troll)

Did you read my comment properly? The problem with you guys is you half-ass read everything before you comment. I mentioned I knew they WILL make money, but it's the average user's perception that they wouldn't do so. Either 1)You failed in your English classes or 2)You are mis-representing whatever I said, time and again.

>There's no deception. There's no unethical behavior.

Let's have it like this. I give you free canvas'es to paint on. And you create a dozen paintings. One fine day, you notice at the back of each canvas, there's a tiny print that says I have the right to sell these paintings as mine. I would love to see you not be upset about this.

When I gave you these free canvas'es, I never told you about these nor did these tiny prints exist. Of course your common sense must have told you there must be some catch. But this is too extreme of a catch. I gave such free canvas'es to a dozen people like you and they were just 'average users' who thought they are getting this canvas for free. And suddenly they realize I somehow sneakily printed in small letters that whatever the painting be on canvas is mine and I can fucking resell it under my name. The question is, if you knew of such a catch and if you were a passionate artist, would you have got these free canvas'es from me? If you say yes, then I can atleast confirm you are a troll arguing for fuck's sake.

>Take a step back and remove your bias. No ones out to get you.

It's not bias. That's the whole point. I feel so sorry for you though. I can send you some english books via FedEx for free (trust me, there are no catches here) so you can learn to understand english sentences in general.
Yeah, I thought parenting was easy too until I realized my kid is actually a human being with wants and needs. She's about to turn 9 and it's getting HARDER to be a good parent. The more I come to love my kid the more I recognize I'm a terrible parent. :)
"1) Yes. People who were proficient in Office 2003 needed special training to use Office 2007. There's a real cost to switching tools."
This is actually a strong argument for the futility of windows and office-oriented teaching. Why bother if the skills willl become obsolete in four years?
Rule 5: "Be Simple", is hiding a huge range of complexity, and I feel very underdoes this hugely complex issue.

I work on an C++ app, built with cmake with one dependency (boost). It still took me a day and a half to get it to build on Windows 8. I once spent two days trying to build a debian package before giving up.

Writing Scientific Software for distribution is a painful experience, with almost no gain for the developer unless you end up in the top 1% of 1% of programs.

I'm still going to do it, but let's not pretend it is easy, or a good idea.

Also, "Release Early, Release Often", and allowing users to identify problems in your code? I've found people, very reasonably, get very angry when they get wrong answers out of my program. We've had less than a handful of "wrong answer" bugs in releases, but that came from a huge testing undertaking.
I used to feel this way too, so I'm not trying to be coy, but really that's a property of a (some) Functor(s), not a Monad (except in that all Monads are also Functors).

Monad is just the pattern where you combine Functors. Some Functors can be pattern matched upon to "escape" their values. Functors like IO cannot. IO would still be (academically) useful if not for its Monad instance... you'd just only be allowed a single effect in the entire program!
>There is no "objective evil" any human could declare, it boils down to opinions; so I make up my own mind. Deal with that, not with strawmen.

People don't have to stand for anybody "making up his own mind", the same way that people don't have to respect your opinion if you believe in creationism for example. Even if you are in the majority, there is one correct way to look at the thing, and there are no two ways about it.

Especially since the words and notions we opt to use has consequences to what we perceive and how we treat other people. It's important to choose the correct ones, or the less wrong ones.

The notion of harm (and the common-sense ethical notion of good) are well understood. The notion of evil, OTOH, is theological bullshit, and only helps to obscure the matters at hand (by making it difficult to get to the actual reasoning and motivations of the person, for example).

>No, because that was in response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe

And Hitler's rise to power and actions was a response to the "treaty of Versailles", which was considered unfair, humiliating and suffocating the Germans. See how it works both ways?

And who said that killing civillians with nuclear bombs is an acceptable "response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe"?

>I am German, and I would laugh into the face of any German crying about Dresden.

You might, but millions of other people, German or not German, would not. Civillians are civillians and people killed by bombs are still people, whether German or not. And I'm talking as a citizen of a country that suffered much under German rule in WWII.

>You haven't been to a whole lot of historical museums dealing with the topic, have you? Or seen movies, that kind of thing?

Well, you guys have bombed my city, destroyed some of it's more important monuments, --and killed my grandmother's brother. I don't have to visit "a lot of historical museums". Which I have, plus read tons of books on the matter.

>No, that's just a strawman. Fact is, they didn't mind. In my books that's enough.

Well, fact is Truman didn't mind dropping two big bombs on civillians either. Or France didn't mind slaughtering 50.000 Algerians protesting to get their freedom back. Just two examples...
I'm Calling BS on the best interface is no interface
If I could make a suggestion for multimedia sequences like this, it would be to include some kind of progress indicator. When watching a video, it's always reassuring to be able to see how long the thing is, and how much of the way through it I am.

I didn't have that here, so I have no idea how long I should be prepared to sit and watch it.
The "skilled worker" immigration is the ticket for anybody trying to move from the US. However, to qualify for this, you will probably need an employer to sponsor it. This route also depends on credentialing, so academic transcripts and whatnot will be scrutinized.
That seems a pretty rare circumstance. I'm doubting a single pull request will cause that much bother, just deny it. Then hopefully the bot is smart enough to not resend, if it isn't then block the bot's user from communicating with you again.