skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok. I'm not expecting distributed manufacturing to come over night or even in the near term. I'm aware that it requires crossing over a threshold before that happens.

However, I think it is worth developing these technologies with that in mind. The landscape may change faster than we think.

So I don't think it is "idealist" in the sense that, "well, in the real world, this just isn't practical or possible."
The virus statement was a rethorical question..
Unfortunately it is not a real problem that users face. It's a problem that a very small minority has and that inconveniences the majority. If that's what you set out to do in life..
Ars -
re #1, I am not saying make Grandma install Win/Lin/*os, but rather make it an option during the buying process.

I'm pricing new cars right now and the makers are doing these interactive build-your-car websites where you select every single accessory and option and watch the price go up or down accordingly. Admittedly, Dell has had such a service for years, but preinstalled Windows is usually non-negotiable. Just automate the OS install process (if it isn't already) and let the user shave the $80 off the price if he prefers a free OS rather than a paid OS.
Clickable link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simple-knot/id593421479?mt=8
The major characteristic of severe clinical depression is that it takes away enjoyment from all manner of activities that used to be enjoyable. People who haven't experienced it or who have never been close to someone in the depths of depression are unlikely to be able to comprehend it.
I like DFW's quote. I also like a point made by Nick Hornby in 'A long way down' that sometimes it is not because they don't want to live anymore, its because they want to live so much, but are being prevented from living by things beyond their control.
It sounds like you are referring to the guidelines for how long the measure should be for for optimal legibility. What I'm saying is that aside from legibility, the length of the measure also influences user behavior - a shorter measure nudges users to write shorter comments. Comment replies are indented by 20px per level, making the problem that much worse.

They could easily increase the measure and still stay within typographic guidelines.
It doesn't need to die for Intel to bleed.

Power users (developers, designers, etc) are such a small fraction of overall users we might as well be 0%.
Thief who broke into Steve Jobs' house is sentenced to seven years in jail
My name is Kabir, and I am looking for young, motivated, and passionate individuals to help me with my great startup idea. If you are willing to talk, shoot me an e-mail at; KabirKumar@me.com

Lets get to work!
We did. This is the first year they've offered this day off. Our clients are almost entirely in the public sector, so I'd imagine that our support lines would've been dead and our sales team without clients to sell to.
First off, I am happy that we both seem to agree on a qualitative fact: there is indeed a tradeoff between what statisticians call type I and type II errors. At one extreme, you can let everything through, advance technology rapidly, and suffer some side effects (type I bias). Or you can block everything, stop technology, and suffer no side effects (type II bias). If we agree on this qualitative point, the key is whether we are currently at a Pareto optimum. Is our current system optimizing the type I vs. type II tradeoff? I have a numerical scenario below which you can critique, but first to your points.

It's faster to run experiments on animals than people.

I'm not gainsaying the utility of animal models. I just think the goal needs to be to get to humans as soon as the safety data is in, because people are dying.

I think you are vastly overestimating what society has to
gain by deregulating medicine. You'll get a one-time gain
of 10 years of progress at the cost of an unknown number of
lives.

Well, the reason sulfalinamide/thalidomide were heavily covered in 1938/1962 respectively was that those were relatively rare events. So I would somewhat disagree that the number of lives would be unknown. But, ok, let's take as a given that some would die. On the other side of the ledger, we both agree that tens of millions of people each year are dying from cancer and heart disease. So let's consider two scenarios for a cure for condition X, which kills 1 million people per year.

In scenario I, we do it status quo and safe, with no deaths. Very generously, let us grant that a cure appears in 10 years. This is generous because a regulated market may never iterate upon the cure if it is radical/different (e.g. Barry Marshall and H. pylori).

In scenario II, we accelerate the cure in a deregulated market. The R&D phase takes 1 year and costs us 100 deaths from test pilots / early adopters; the scaling phase takes 2 years and costs us another 900 deaths from volunteers. These numbers are vastly in excess of any reasonable safety testing paradigm in a deregulated space (no one died in Banting & Best's experiments) and I cite them as extremely conservative upper bounds.

Ok. Then in scenario I, the status quo, you had

- 0 die from testing
- cure appears at end of 10 years
- 10 million people die over those 10 years
- 10 million deaths

In scenario II, you had

- 1000 die from testing over 3 years
- 3 million die from disease over those yeers
- cure appears in year 3
- no further deaths
- 3 million + 1000 total deaths

So scenario II saves ~7 million lives. Feel free to play with the numbers, but that's the kind of calculus I think we need to engage in, one that explicitly reckons with the cost of delay. In reality, the number of deaths attributable to R&D won't be close to 1000, though it won't be zero. But there is no reasonable scenario in which R&D actually consumes anything close to as many lives as the disease itself.
It depends a lot on where you are. You might find this HN discussion from a few hours ago interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091069
I have a folder called "Unused" that includes most of those except Newsstand because it itself is a folder and can't be put into one (or removed). I don't really want replacements for any of these, but it would be great to be able to dump them for good.
I think the best change in plea-bargaining is if a bargain was offered and rejected, then the prosecutor has to win on all counts, and get the full penalty asked for, or get nothing at all. It is very likely that not all 19 counts would have come back guilty, so in a case like this there would be incentive on the prosecution side to only push as far as is likely to be won. And, I think this has some merit in the same spirit as the double jeopardy section of the 5'th.
That is not actually true, because YouTube is quite CPU intensive. If you perform the experiment you just proposed, you will find YouTube has used a significant portion of the battery. But I see what you mean.

You could also try this: if Google Now is waking your phone up any significant portion of the time, it'll show up in the list as a low percentage app. You can click on it to see how much time it's keeping the CPU awake, keeping the screen on, using the GPS, etc. I believe Google Now processing is accounted to the Google Search app (because that is where all its output shows up). On my phone, which has Google Now enabled, it shows zero active time for GPS, screen awake, CPU, etc.
Any software that is desirable on its own will be sought out on its own. Plain and simple. There is no need to piggyback adobe PDF reader in any software that doesn't use PDFs because people who need a PDF reader will seek one out.

Any sort of parasitism is trying to circumvent this process by convincing others that they need software that isn't directly needed for the problem at hand or otherwise forcing people to install software. And that's the type of behavior styled as "questionable" in this discussion. Tactics like omitting a "no thanks", while perfectly legal, seem as questionable in many other contexts.
Congrats on your success. One piece of advice: you can further reduce the chance that you have blind spots due to your skipping of college (which you almost certainly do) by slicing off some time to go through Coursera classes, particularly ones that are a bit far afield and seem like a waste of time. People your age are so damn lucky :)

The thing about college is it forces exposure to stuff you'd never see otherwise. A lot of it is irreplaceable but more and more of it is thanks to sites like these.
I like the minimal look. I'll check it out.
Ask HN: Should I finish my B.S. in Computer Science?
Before I delve into the main question, let me give you a brief introduction of my background and experience.

As a teenager, I graduated from a technical high school with a degree in Information Technology, and it provided me with the technical foundations to become a programmer. In fact, I got a job at a software company at age 17 developing the company's web portal in Perl and some software in Delphi.

A year later I went to college to pursue a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and I was able to finish the first year before my life took a turn; I had to drop out of college and work full time to financially help my family. That was 10 years ago.

After dropping out of college I worked on several startup companies developing in several different languages, and year after year my experience grew from being just a programmer to being a sr. software engineer. This has been an incredible journey and I'm now 30 years old, and as I grow older I would like to eventually work for "corporate america".

I recently read on NPR that the average graduation time for a bachelor's degree for a full-time student has changed from 4 years to 6 years because of overcrowded classrooms and not enough teachers. And it seems that if I keep working full-time I will probably graduate way over the 6 years average.

Now that you understand a little bit of my background I ask you this: should I go back to college to finish my degree?
Very good idea about spending a week in each city. Considering that, thanks! :)
Off of top of my head: read email can be set back to "unread", email notifications (you've received an email from X) running on multiple clients such as it's open to interpretation whether email has been "delivered", client rules (move email from sender X to folder X), etc.
This is very true. I think a lot of this comes down to, no matter the technical expertise of the person, the fact that when you're very young, you lack some life experience and are in a different place with different needs than older professionals. That's not to say it makes them less legitimate or that they should be gone easier upon, but it definitely affects the advice. A 15 year old is thinking about college, a 45 year old is worries more about supporting his family, and those factors very much affect the situation.
Sure making a phone call or sending out a message is all that you need to do in an emergency. But that's not what the cell phone is for anymore. Back when batteries lasted 3-4 days on a charge they were there for when you needed them. Now people feel like they need them all the time. This isn't a failure of hardware or software. A mobile phone isn't a just a phone anymore, so how can we expect it to have the same battery life as something that is just a phone?
Thanks for the links buddy! I will check out the startups you mentioned and the job board looks interesting as well. Vamos a ver :)
I'd replace it because I don't use Siri and I would use Google Voice Search. Siri has gotten my directions, alerts and reminders wrong enough times that I don't use it at all. If it could replace Siri I think Google would expand things a bit to allow more Siri-like functionality, but even at the moment a very fast way to Google things is more useful to me than Siri.
Well, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with an engineer having the information if they're interested. It's often useful to have a larger picture. However, for the purposes of dealing with interruption, calling in an ally is basically the most efficient way to make it go away. (The caveat being that sometimes the interruption really is more important.)

I've also heard managers chewing out or giving educative talks to others in order to remind them that the correct person to make the request to is the manager, not the engineer.
> a $200 tablet can do everything she wants to do perfectly fine?

Show me one table at $200 that does everything a grandma would want.

> The main issue is that the vast majority simply don't need all that much computing power

That's just wild speculation that needs a reference, especially since the history of PC proves otherwise.
Excellent link! Will definitely help. Good to know that the meetings are in English, thanks :)
Don't Write Off Relational Databases For Big Data Just Yet
Ask HN: Did the iPhone make the world a better place?
Did it? If so, how?
I never really like these type of arguments. For example if I believe a doctor is acting unethically is it wrong for me to call him out because I don't have a medical license?

Sure, there may be factors here we don't understand here but I think now would be an excellent time to unveil whatever grand plan they have to head off the PR shitstorm this is in the process of creating.

As I have mentioned elsewhere YC have gained significant nerd-cred which has no doubt been beneficial to them. This seems to be largely because they appear as a company that has strong driving principles about the sort of changes they want to see in the world.
Hmm. That's very true. I wanna keep low on costs initially, so London might not be a good option for me right now.
The key distinction of "creation" vs "consumption" of computing and media.

For creators, PCs are indispensable. Like you, I couldn't fathom using an iPad to write code or prose.

However, consumers don't need the creative powers and capabilities of a PC. In this paradigm, phones and tablets are a simpler, more portable consumption terminal.

Creators, both business and otherwise, will need machines that let them design, code, write, and analyze. Consumers never needed these capabilities, and now that there are compelling devices that offer an arguably superior media consumption experience, creation machines will be put on the margin.

A significant minority of non-professional users of computing devices are consumers, rather than creators of content. But the defection of this significant minority is enough to impact the bottom line of companies like Intel.
Sorry. Have you see the source code of any part of the iOS system? No I don't think you have. Give me some reference to somewhere that the UI thread hangs. Not blocking the UI is taught to everyone who writes apps for the app store, so my assumption is that the guys who wrote the app store code know a little better than we do.
Indeed, FastSpring is the reseller, the merchant of record, so everything gets outsourced.
I get a kick out of Watts. Thanks.
There are things in life you can fast track via focus and age is not really a factor as much as ability and discipline. There are other things that just take time and living through things. A lot of what produces success is a combination of both.
If you build it, you will learn:
Scikit-learn 0.13: Nystroem method, hashing trick, faster random forests
It actually is an option from most sellers, it's just not really promoted, but if you look you can find it.

If it was easier to find people would remove windows thinking "why do I need this" - and then call tech support when the computer doesn't work.

A single tech support call eats all the profits of the sale.
5-10x classroom referral spike: epilepsy, ADHD, OCD. Cause = curriculum change?
I see where you're coming from and it makes sense in your case. The way I work I've never needed an exported pdf or screenshot twice. Our servers are redundant and if all of them would fail I'd just go home. ;) I'm often working home office anyway.
Check out the Intel "Next Unit of Computing" http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-...
Intel has made a tepid offering with their Next Unit of Computing. But it is only being sold as a bare bones kit and you will easily exceed the price point of a Mac Mini once your start adding the components to it.
They have always been us
Of course if you really cared you might do a search.

https://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+tron
I still remember this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494216
No prosecutor would ever offer a plea bargain in that situation. If they were 100% of a full conviction why would they bargain?
Stupidly simple == simply stupid
Matlab and PHP are very similar in their history. They weren't invented by programming language designers or compiler writers. The creators saw a problem and came up with a makeshift quick solution. Which sucked but was good enough to solve the problem.

Matlab was created to provide a simple way to make FORTRAN Libraries available to non-programmers. And it was quite successful at that. It was quickly picked up by engineers and all kinds of features were piled on top of it.

And the worst thing is that Matlab is a de-facto standard in many areas now. As a webprogrammer you can probably easily avoid PHP by using Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl or whatever. But in engineering many people only know Matlab. They don't care about anything else.
Wrong place, wrong time. Better to learn the trade by yourself!
Calling it "rage quitting" when someone is no longer interested in playing a game you want them to play is an intimidation tactic. It's really none of your business to tell someone what they must play and when and how.

In more civilized times it was called "conceding defeat" not "rage quitting."
Show HN: The top free PSDs on dribbble in one place
I had a blog post sitting in my drafts folder about Aaron Swartz and David Foster Wallace. It was waiting to make it perfect, but I don't think it ever will be. Thanks for this post, causing me to tidy it up and publish it.

Here it is, for those interested:

http://swapcase.net/post/41144052777/aaronsw-and-dfw
"Integration" may benefit Google at first. You have think of the possibilities though if that integration is available to any developer.

Google is good at a number of apps but not all.

On Android, a lot of core functionalities built by Google can be replaced with a third-party app. You can replace the keyboard, use a different Home screen or Launcher, another app to manage your Contacts or have a different dialer.

I think the current situation is worse since only Apple can integrate tightly with iOS. Apple did allow Facebook & Twitter some integration though.
I'm curious to know if there's an application process that's in the works or if it's going to stay entirely referral-based. Without the ability to interact with anyone or any content on the site, I can imagine this'd be a huge turnoff for designers who might not be in your particular clique.

As an aside, I just tried to register without a referral code and simply got a 404 error.
> I've also heard managers chewing out or giving educative talks to others in order to remind them that the correct person to make the request to is the manager, not the engineer.

Haha, funny you say this, since I also 'educate' others about this on a monthly basis (it's become much better compared to 12 months ago though, so credit to the customer facing teams who are generally reasonable people).
I agree. Kids post their age to get attention. They want experienced devs to take a look at their code/app/project. Lets help them! All you need to do is a upvote or comment.
Do you really think "almost all" designers use a specific model of a specific computer that shipped about six months ago? Hell, I consider myself a half-assed designer and won't upgrade to a retina MBP because a) the screens have issues b) the web has issues and c) most of the design software I use has issues.

Designing websites in a way that only works well on retina displays has to be one of the most ridiculous examples of the Silicon Valley bubble in recent memory.
Really? THAT is what he chose to complain about?

How about being notified that you missed a phone call? How much time with family and friends do we need to miss before Apple fixes this bullshit: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/will-apple-ever-fix-i...
I would agree with that. I get great battery life from my Nexus 4, around 3 to 4 days.
A vulnerability to suicidal provocation doesn't predetermine your fate any more than a vulnerability to sodium predetermines your death by heart disease.

Unfortunately, our ignorance of mental illness allows us to chalk deaths from suicide up to "personal choice", when a more complete understanding would allow people who suffer from depression to work with doctors to craft mitigations to the stimuli and circumstances that create suicidal impulses.

Instead, we're like "well, you can spend the week in an in-patient facility, or here are some pills and go try to figure it out on your own."
Memo to self:

Make mentoring site (hackernewsmentor.com)
Where old and weary can openly agree certain SLAs
With the young and enthusiastic

If more of us see it publically more of us will be encouraged to answer a months worth of questions on perl

As for me - I could have done with a mentor not for technical issues - but for the life and career choices I made badly twenty years ago - but I would only have take. Advice from someone whom I technically respected.
I don't really care about the cause & effect of his suicide. Everything I read about this case, from the supposed crime to the manner in which the prosecution handled it, is disturbing, both for the fact that they did and for the fact that they do it every single day. The system won't fix itself. I also fear it will get worse before it gets better.
I've always assumed the benefit is that you don't have to maintain a separate set of files for each window size... but it seems like, for all intents and purposes, you might as well be if you have to set up special cases for all sorts of window sizes, just in one document.
This is a fair solution, and I believe that gevent was the best solution IMO for python although I only gave it a cursory glance.

However, type checking is what ultimatley won out here along with Go's very C+Python love child feeling.
I'm pretty sure he's talking about Aaron helping with the RSS spec.
Review: What to expect from Mega's free 50GBs of cloud storage
You're more obnoxious than all the critics in this thread put together. Get off your high horse.

The reason all the "random nobodies" are questioning IM's business model is that they have deep-seated feelings about the scammy business and the evilness of Windows installers. They spent hours cleaning up mountains of crap from their relatives' and friends' computers. They understand how non-tech users feel helpless in the face of sneaky bullshit artists piling that crap onto their hard drives, and they feel enraged when they think about it, and for a good reason too.

So in fact, nobody who's in business of building installers that distribute crap toolbars deserves humility and circumspection. They might possibly be that rare exception, a flower blooming on a dunghill, but asking sharp questions to establish that is neither impolite nor inappropriate. It comes with the territory they've chosen to grow on.

Your moral indignation is as laughable as it is corrupt. Just as much of it would be appropriate defending an actual spammer - I can see you directing people to get off their soapboxes and telling them they don't get to judge the spammer's business until they earned $1 from a customer. A "completely different universe" indeed. Get a clue.
great idea. How do you "guarantee" installs?
Max Levchin in Founders at Work, iirc.
Just out of curiousity, what are your top 5 most readable programming languages that you've used?