skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't jump to conclusions that it is due to income. There are many other reasons why that might be the case, such as convenience. It's the Starbucks, Duane Reade, Chase, etc. model of retail -- put one every 2 blocks, sometimes on the same block across the street -- because people are lazy and will go somewhere convenient, even if it isn't in their best interests. If people were truly concerned about budget, they would cook at home and not pay McDonalds to cook their food. (http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/09/12/does-cooking-at-ho...)
Fantastic CSS techniques by Bennett Feely
The Tracks of Curiosity
This sounds insightful but really isn't. It's the Republicans who want the most change right now. It's change in a direction most of us disagree with, but it's far more radical than the Democratic agenda.

The reality is that if there's a tech advantage held by the Dems, it's the product of much simpler demographics; youth, urban, educated.
Imagine the words: "Ortiz has put DANGEROUS HACKERS behind bars!" spoken in dramatic politic ads speaker voice, with the words printed on the screen over a blurred image of jail bars.

That's easily the sort of thing that could be in a political ad. It says not only that she was a good prosecutor, but that she is probably technologically savy as well. I doubt they would bother referring to that particular incident by name (it is often best to be somewhat vague, to keep yourself a hard target to attack).

(This said, I also suspect the politics aspect is more about favors and less about advertising).
Someone actually did the math behind Carrie Bradshaw: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/carrie-bradshaws-budget-in-re...
URL shortener for app publishers
You mean study the case and the law.
Who knows she's not the "good cop",

We do: http://hcrenewal.blogspot.ca/2013/01/the-tragic-case-of-aaro...
Yeah, this is exactly right... I have to say Go changed my thinking about concurrency. But now I want to write a very small wrapper around pthreads that lets you write in the actor style. It just adds those "affordances".

Go is more or less the actors style, except with the (discouraged) possibility of sharing mutable state... even though for some reason it doesn't seem to be advertised as such.

The reason is that I don't think Go can cover what C + Python can. C gives you more low level control and Python is still shorter (and thus quicker). I like Go a lot but I would rather program in C + Python (like I do now) than C + Python + Go.

And then the other component to this is de-emphasizing the somewhat-horrible-for-concurrency Python/C API. The library I'm talking about would have channels, and you would have one end open in Python, and one end open in C. Python and C are running in different threads. Rather than the crazy subroutine/callback hell you have now with any nontrivial Python/C binding.

So basically I want to fix the C/Python interface, which is the only reason it is awkward to program in C + Python (the languages themselves are both great), rather than adding another language that overlaps highly with both of them.

The OS is written in C, so you've never going to get past C. If there was a whole world written in Go, that might be reasonable... but I don't believe in portability layers.
I tend to agree with the author, but there are indeed some things you can infer from the type of response you get. I have a friend who was doing a technical interview, and things seemed to be going weird. It seemed that the candidate knew the answers to most of his questions, but when pressured further he couldn't come up with alternative solutions. It was like those people who know the motions of math, but don't understand what it's for.

So he decided to ask one of these riddle questions: "How many hairs does a dog have?" and the candidate answered that it depended on the dog. So far so good. But then he started rambling: "Well, if it's a dog from the street, the dog might have scabies, and thus this dog has less hair.

Of course, this is a perfectly valid answer, but it is the failure of applying math/statistical thinking into his answer what was telling.

Now, I'm sure some people are thinking "that's anecdotical evidence" and it is, but what is the alternative if your intention is to hire mathematically inclined candidates?
Well, of course it's going to come as a big shock coming from Boston, because I don't consider Boston to be a "big city." I was born and raised in Los Angeles, I lived in San Francisco for a while, and now I live in New York City--Brooklyn, specifically. Much of what you said applies to New York, too.

I don't agree with the weather thing. I've been to Boston where it was 60 during the day and in the low 30s at night, and San Francisco will never, ever get as cold as Boston does during the winter. Hell, it doesn't even really snow in SF except for a few weird flukes in the past.

Rent, cost of living, etc. is the same in NYC, too, which is fast becoming a startup city.
You are essentially saying SF is bigger than Vancouver, which it is. Of course there is more of everything in SF.

Have you ever lived on the East Coast though? The differences between the actually "culture" is dramatic. It seems though that most of the people objecting to my comment only have experience on the west coast, and therefore see the differences in the cities instead of how - in reality - how similar they are, at least when compared to the eastern half of the continent.

BTW, here in Vancouver everyone I know has an iPhone, including me.
We use ClojureScript (and Clojure) at http://economi.co and I'm really enjoying it.

Maybe one of the most difficult things coming into it is trying to relate it to something like BackBone.

However generally speaking in Clojure the culture is more about libraries than frameworks.

C2 http://keminglabs.com/c2/ which on the outset looks just like a ClojureScript version of d3 is actually a great library to use instead of a traditional front end framework.

Check the example implementation of the class TodoMVC list here: https://github.com/lynaghk/todoFRP/tree/master/todo/c2

It's uses normal Clojure data structures within atoms as the data model (https://github.com/lynaghk/todoFRP/blob/master/todo/c2/src/c...) and uses C2 to automatically update the UI (https://github.com/lynaghk/todoFRP/blob/master/todo/c2/src/c...). Very elegant.

I'm just starting to explore this area myself, but have already found it useful for a few smaller parts of our site.
I don't have a source for this, but as an interviewer, simply thinking about what I can get from a riddle indicates it's probably true. I have a mental checklist of about fifteen items that I try to get answered when interviewing a candidate, and asking riddles would barely if at all help me answer any of them.

That's not to say they're worthless, but when I have an hour or so to interview a candidate, they're not an effective use of my time (and I imagine that most candidates would think it's a lousy use of their time, too) - I ask questions that can answer four or five items on my list, not one if I'm lucky.
What is the state of Rethink db? Is it fit for production use?

In the website it stated as 1.3.2 (which imply production ready) but I think I saw some comments a month ago from you that it's not fit for production use yet.

What about secondary indexes?

Are the machines in the screencast are very weak? a simple query (get 2 rows of the dota table) running ~100ms is really slow- is it because you're using the web interface?

RethinkDB seems cool and I really want to try it in my next pet project :)
The oil isn't going anywhere, what's the hurry? Why not wait until the fossil energy resources can be fully captured before extracting it, especially given that once it's used up there won't be anymore.
It's very harsh but I find fault with some of the adults who made him a "celebrity" in the first place. Here's a link to the (yes, harsh) piece I wrote about that.

It's significant, in my view, that Swartz "came to fame" right as the first "dot com" bubble was cresting. Hype was ridiculously excessive, back then. Looking back at what his celebrity "friends" were saying about him back then, it's painfully obvious that even back then his achievements (which were quite respectable) were greatly exaggerated and that the story he was a new prodigy was a myth self-servingly spread by a few powerful people trading in on the caché of having access to him. To the young boy.

It's horrifying to me, at least, to contemplate what that roller coaster ride did to his sense of self and his own understanding of his identity.

http://www.basiscraft.com/misc/2013/01/using-aaron-swartz.ht...
I never said the prosecutor could not be criticized.
Um, Apple also pays a dividend - 10x more than Microsoft actually, at $2.65 quarterly vs $0.23.

Whoa, totally didn't see the news that they had caved to pressure and gone the dividend route. It isn't actually 10x, however, as AAPL has approximately 1/10th the shares issues. Their dividends are very similar.

Regarding the P/E ratio, it isn't so big. Just a few months ago AAPL had a similar 15x P/E ratio.

that concept seems rather far fetched, no

Ask RIM. They owned the market, and one year everyone was talking about how much cash they had in reserves, and the next they were on life support. Apple has even less of a lock-in than RIM (enterprise blackberry messenger being how RIM hung in for a little while), though they've been trying to make their own platforms (Me, Facetime, Airplay, etc).

If the next version simply isn't a compelling enough upgrade for existing users, Apple will see very rapidly declining fortunes.
Are you sure that every article behind the JSTOR paywall was 100% publically funded? That's one question I've never heard the answer to.

Not to mention, let's say we're talking about stuff funded by the U.S. taxpayers... are you sure they would want those scientific articles to be freely available outside the U.S.? Similar questions apply to things funded by the U.K., France, etc.

Who gets to make that choice? In Aaron's world, he anointed himself Caesar and said that he gets to do so...
> It doesn't say anything about "prosecutors are seeking..."

Wrong. It's up to the prosecutor which charges are filed, which are dropped, which are pursued in court.

If they are taking those charges to trial, and they were in this case, it means they are seeking those penalties. Now, they may ask the judge for a lesser sentence ... everyone wants to appear merciful after you beat the guy down, but they most certainly were seeking them to begin with.

Also, this entire "judge decides" is absolute bullshit. And it smells like bullshit to anyone who has been in a court room.

Technically, even if you accept the plea bargain, after you stand in front of the judge and say "guilty" ... the judge can easily ignore your plea deal, accept your guilty plea, and sentence you to the maximum allowed. Now, that almost never happens, since that would undermine the whole system ... but it can, since it's up to the judge.

Judges, frequently, give deference to the prosecutor on sentencing matters, unless they feel the defendant deserves a break. That puts the onus on the prosecutor to act in a just manner, instead of saying "oh, it's up to the judge, don't look at me".
Chicago has a huge homeless problem.

http://www.chicagohomeless.org/faq-studies/
Are Secrets Experienced as Physical Burdens?
Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors.

The book covers 7 pages that gets you started down the road of understanding security. We provide you the stuff you have to know, and point you towards better resources.

Keep in mind we aren't professional security experts. If your site needs to be that secure, the best thing you can do is to hire the services of a carefully vetted security expert.
Well, first getting seed money is a small validation of your start-up idea and team that helps raising more capital in the future.

The idea of seed funding is to help you create a prototype that you can show to customers and determine what is the right product market fit for your company. Typically, this process will last six months or so (however, every company is different. Getting seed funding helps you quit your job, focus on building the company and set things up the right way, right from the start.

You can get seed funding from angels, super angels, friends and family, crowd funding, universities or seed stage VCs.
That would be awesome. I dream of something as easy as the old Commodores/Ataris. Bring home, plug into TV (HDMI these days), and start coding.
Why Facebook might put Blu-ray to use on big data
I think it is very rarely possible to blame anyone for the suicide of another. Aaron's death was tragic, but it was not the prosecutor's fault.

With that said, if this event is something that causes society to carefully evaluate things like outdated computer crime laws and the prosecutorial tactics used in this country than that may be a good thing both for the country as a whole and for his memory.
Um, one thing that is critical is time and place. You can do all of these things, but with content that isn't for the right people at the right time and it goes nowhere. It's like the idea of the tablet. 10 years ago the tech was too expensive. Idea was great, execution was not totally horrible, but at $1000+ who cares? At $200-500 with even better execution it's a phenomenon.
Those analogies aren't made equal.

There is nothing more equalizing than your ability to sell software to random strangers over the internet. It truly can be done from anywhere and potentially in a more efficient way than in SF.
I've lived in both Seattle and SF - the situations are quite different.

SF weather is nothing like Seattle weather. Sure, they lean towards the chilly side, but Seattle doesn't have the curious microclimates that SF has, which is actually a substantial deal in daily life.

Ditto rent and cost of living. Seattle isn't cheap cheap, but the cost of living as a proportion of the average software engineer's salary is night and day. Seattle is downright cheap compared to SF - I went from paying $2200 for a brand spanking new 2BR (doorman, gym, elevators, the works) to $2200 for a tiny studio built in the 20s. It's really night and day. Even as a well-paid engineer (say, $120K+) you constantly feel at least a little bit poor, whereas in Seattle a software engineer (say, $90K+) feels like they're swimming in a pool made of pure money. I've been in both situations personally.
I find it interesting that Boston often gets the rub of being a "small city". It certainly is when compared to New York or LA, but when looking at the metro area it's on par with San Francisco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistica...

Not that there's anything wrong with being a small city!
I guess so. There may well be some truth to the charge that the case was prosecuted aggressively because it was likely to earn a lot of press. But I think you're right. It seems very unlikely Aaron Swartz was the lynchpin of any grand political strategy.
> Is it fit for production use?

Not yet. We'll bump the release to 2.0 when it's ready for production.

> What about secondary indexes?

They're coming -- see https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/88

> Are the machines in the screencast are very weak?

No, the 100ms roundtrip includes the HTTP request over our admittedly very unsophisticated WiFi network.

Hope this helps!
I know some three of four people like that.
More people from RRHH should know this.
I'm sure they were there, but I managed not to be distracted by them, perhaps because the breadth and depth of the content caused me to skim somewhat (read quickly).
For some reason I only got to read the article after I null-routed r-login.wordpress.com.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the focus of the book, Django has session support so I doubt a book about Django would fully cover re-writing one of its components. Django used to only be able to store nothing in the session cookie other than the ID so that part can definitely happen (new in Django 1.4 are Cookie Based Sessions that used signed cookies to store data in cookies, but it's something you have to turn on).

This is all fully documented, if you're curious you should read it.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/http/sessions/

As for tying into OpenId or other similar systems, it's a piece of cake. There are numerous Django apps out there to accomplish it. I have used django-social-auth for a project and had no problems getting things running:

https://github.com/omab/django-social-auth
I completely agree with the thought process here, and changing the incentives.

Not sure why you seem so against her losing her position though. As much this is the sort of thing prosecutors do on a regular basis, they shouldn't be. Why is she more infallible than you or I. I don't think her losing her job will send a wave of change through the system, a lot more has to take place in order for any of that to come to fruition. As much as I think people are focusing on the wrong issue here, seeking retribution through ending her career. Her callous attitude toward the case and toward punishments in general has not helped. But even if all prosecutors act the same, this is just a case that opened a lot of eyes to it. Is there no grounds or merit in the thought of letting her go. If I fuck up at my job, I could be on the chopping block to. As much as letting her go will do very little in the grand scheme of things. Leaving her there and doing nothing would also send a message to other prosecutors and to the current angry mob of people.
Oh, I agree there. If it causes trouble in the future for her it will be because of how it turned out, not for how it failed to turn out.
there are definitely questions where you have to think of the right general algorithm and datastructure very quickly, and then spend your time refining it for the details of the problem, but i'd argue that that's not in the same "aha!" class as actual riddles.
Pricing, based on the amount of users, is good. Also nice that you have a free plan for the solo user. But I'm not sure if the user/project ratio is good (the amount of projects per user could be higher).
JavaScript Libraries for Charts and Graphs
How to Identify Your Product's Bottleneck
Boston Globe columnist: "Cyber-bullies" are criticizing Aaron Swartz' prosecutor
"Fadell explained that a key and yet often overlooked difference between Apple and other tech companies is that Apple ships 99% of the products that pass certain internal milestones."

Seems like an odd statement knowing Apple's history, I wonder if he means that Apple kills projects early, while other companies kill them late (sometimes even shipping them like the Microsoft Kin).
Yes, but when have you seen it happen the other way? Judge throws out the plea bargain and gives lesser sentence. I'd be shocked and amazed. Now reading about that case would require some popcorn.
Basic material needs:

Food. Water. Shelter. Air.

Existential needs:

Love, affection, contentment, happiness, connection.

Technology can address the basic needs and can never address existential needs.

Everything else are wants. Wants are endless since they attempt to address existential needs but never actually satisfy them. In that sense, Stross is correct. There will always be more wants than can be supported by any given population size of society; but needs can be supported.
Former and continuing student of Tealeaf here.

The mailing list idea was a great idea. It helps a lot and makes me feel more comfortable when someone of similar skill level is able to help tackle a tough problem.
They wouldn't as much as they are forced to now, especially if they were an independent country (which is the only fair comparison).

There's also efficiencies of density that you just don't get in Mississippi, but that also pays off as a redistribution within states from cities to the suburbs and countryside.
It's a really interesting investing scheme for Hmexx, but this is no co-founder partnership... The HN Proposition compelled me to write "Indecent proposals" for startup founders - http://www.vccafe.com/2013/01/17/indecent-proposal-for-start...
You might certainly have to scale back demands/expectations depending on the job market and how desirable your company is to work for.

I think it goes back to the classic "smart and gets things done". There will often be instances where you will have more evidence for one than the other.

So for example, someone with a good degree probably doesn't need to be asked riddle questions because they have already proved their raw mental aptitude so you're probably more interested in their understand of good programming practises etc.

OTOH, the guy without a degree who has a solid string of practical experience behind him as well as glowing references has proven he can "get things done". However perhaps his past jobs were mainly building CRUD php applications and this position requires some more complex theoretical knowledge that he does not posses.

How can you best test his aptitude for picking up that knowledge quickly if not with something that approximates an IQ test?
I answered my own question. Bought it, looks great. From the book:

"This book should work well with the Django 1.4 series, less so with Django 1.3, and so on."
It's funny you mention this. In 2005 they got an exemption from the Clean Water Act. Good luck proving they are the source of your contamination you have an exemption like this:

http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/class2/hydraulicfr...
I'll agree. It's much easier to build out apps for keyboard/mouse coming from Android's touch-based OS than the other way around.
The Dry Erase Marker Death Match of Doom
If that's the only thing asked during the interview then I might agree with you. It really never is, though, is it?

Seriously, do you really want to work with someone who's too uptight to answer a couple of harmless riddles during the course of the interview process that includes a host of different methods for transferring information?
Towards the end of the interview the interviewer told me, "your turn to ask me questions". I said, "I have this puzzle for you...". He turned pale for a moment and then laughed at the joke. I wasn't joking.
Can we just ban Bamboozled.ca? This guy writes a post on GW, submits it to HN (and probably other places) then a few days later DELETES to post on his blog, rewrites the post with few if any changes, then submits it again.
Who said both happen at the same time?
Isn't that a real thing though? I thought that slant drilling from Kuwait into a disputed region in Iraq was one of the claimed causes of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Nodej - node.js on the JVM
This is pretty much an advertisement and the article hardly has any original content. What is this article doing on HN? Raspberry Pi is a well funded start up and the false modesty is really transparent.
What comes across very clearly is that you talk like a tremendous asshole who I wouldn't want to supervise, let alone work under. Someone getting paid less than you doesn't entitle you to talk in this incredibly abusive way to them.

Get some perspective. Knowing some people doesn't make you a badass. You are a nothing who knows some people. Big deal. Lots of people know some people, including total idiots. Not knowing some people doesn't make your juniors garbage.

Anyone who wants to work with nice, cooperative people will avoid any shop which represents itself in this absolutely toxic way.