skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most interesting thing about iOS7 to me is how Apple will handle the issues around iCloud Documents and data portability between apps. I appreciate they are trying to move away from traditional file systems because I really believe there are better ways of doing things. The problem here is Apple's approach isn't exactly working. In a lot (most?) ways it's actually worse than dealing with a traditional file system. If they can't figure it out for iOS7 I think they need to admit defeat and try something different. A perfect example of this is creating a text document in TextEdit on your Mac. It's utterly useless on your iOS device. You can't access it at all. Sure they could release TextEdit for iOS but that does not solve the real problem or address the problems of portability of data between iOS apps. In my opinion iOS7 is their last shot to get this right. If they can't figure it out dust off iDisk and just go back to the basics. It's annoying to deal with file systems but it works at least.
I have attempted suicide 13 times, and decided I would not go for a 14th time.

This article is not accurate. When you are suicidal it is very hard to explain. You are miserable and in a lot of pain, you have negative racing thoughts about how terrible you are and what a horrible person you are etc and that the world would be better off without you, and you never really fit in, people just took advantage of you and abused and bullied you so you don't feel like you are connected to this world anymore, that the only way to end your suffering is to kill yourself. Logic, reason, and anything else no longer works for you, you can't think straight anymore and any thought just hurts you like a hot knife slicing into your brain. Every bad moment in your life plays out in your head, and each one just kills you inside a bit. You cannot even remember the good moments, you cannot recall that you have friends and family members who love you. You feel like nobody cares about you and everyone hates you and wants you to die.

I really don't know how I got out of it, except my attempts failed because I didn't do massive things like gunshot to the head or whatever, I did things that could be undone like overdose, etc. It was the only control I had at the time to survive, pick my way to die, and pick one that others can undo when they find me.

I got so sick working, that I developed schizoaffective disorder from the stress, and workplace bullies who abused me daily. I was a top-notch programmer, but now I am on disability trying to get my act together. Not being surrounded by sociopaths is helping me to heal up.
Majorly spotty. My own service is only sporadically able to share. First advertising.twitter.com went down, then API hooks seem to get shaky and looks like the site wobbled for a while and now might be down. Wasn't even able to retweet from status.twitter.com ...
> Imagine that the only reason that you didn't kill yourself in order to end this interminable torment is because you figured you'd fuck even that up and just end up a quadriplegic, and then be truly screwed, since you'd never be able to end your eternal misery then.

Oh man. This struck way too close to home, as it is was the biggest reason I didn't actually go through with suicide when I was at the darkest point in life. That feeling that you can't do anything right, even ending your already frail and delicate life: I don't know of many things more disheartening than that.

Your description of how it feels to be suicidal is very well written and probably the most accurate summary I have read in this regards.
Can't search for unknown unknowns
Tied to a propriety service? Why even use RSS?
Nice project! A few years ago I hacked together a python IMDB API to help me cheat err... 'practice' for a trivia game:

https://github.com/dpiers/pymdb

Last I checked it still worked, surprising since I was just scraping html. :)
That seems reasonable, and it's supported by IM claiming to be part of YC on one of their pages.

Still though, the response seems disproportionate. It's not like YC has recently developed a pattern of funding distasteful businesses (or teams); why did everyone automatically assume YC was behaving badly?

There still seems to be a problem in people jumping to conclusions before having enough information at hand. A lot of the comments on Aaron's case were symptomatic of this (the fallout too).

I'm not sure if this is a new problem here or not, but it seems to be getting a lot uglier recently.
Wow! The website is certainly improved.

ANTLR is pretty cool, and I've used it via Clojure for a few things. It was a lot more pleasant to work with than many other similar tools.

Here's a short interview about some of the new things:
http://www.antlr.org/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=29130...
Its still always better to go there; it was like this in Burma (before they opened up); and it is like this in North Korea. The more contact there is with the outside world, the quicker things will change.

A boycott only helps the people in power.

I have a feeling things will soon change in N Korea. Its not any specific information I have read, its just a collective pressure that weakens those regimes and those who support them.

Take Burma as an example - the leadership got sick of the failed state, the abysmal economy, the boycott against regime sons and daughters - an absolutely brillant plan whereby countries simply dont accept sons, daughters, and other family members of dictatorships; this hits where it hurts, on a personal level, when you might the the king in your country with $Bns stolen from the people in a bank account but your daughter cant go to school in Australia or fly to Paris. I wish more countries would participate.

Back to Burma, I followed that situation for years and it seemed completely hopeless. But then the Burmese leadership faced a situation: Either change and open to the west or get bought out by China. They didnt want China to come in and own the country so they opened up, and now all sorts of good things happen.

Russia is already uninterested in N Korea - maybe there is some strategic benefit but they wont go so far as to send money. And China, it seems like, wont need them much either anymore, seeing as they are now the worlds factory and they benefit from commerce much more than they ever could from confrontation. China might fall away as an ally and then N Korea is going to reform.
Maybe because I grew up with the original Tron but I found legacy in no way a perfect successor to the original.

Rather than spam HN here's why
http://blog.greggman.com/blog/tronlegacy/
Would you post the link here? I would be interesting in reading your specific arguments.

The only issue I really take with the "I'm 14 and check out my first [x]," is that some of them feel a little suspect. Hell, I stumbled upon one of the "I'm 15 and.." guys astroturfing his thread. He neglected to change accounts, and so he gave a glowing review about how great the game was, and how awesome the it is that he's doing this at his age... all from the same account he used to post the link. When I pointed this out to him, everything was quickly deleted.

Maybe I'm letting one bad apple spoil everything, but I feel that some percentage of the "I'm young, check out this really mediocre, yet ad supported thing I made" are in fact, just some older guy's weekend passive income experiment.
Gulag by Anna Applebaum is a good gulag history too.
The problem is that if you notice that they are bullshitting you on computers, it makes you wonder how much other stuff is bullshit too, that you might not have the expertise to recognize.
More importantly, have friends with whom it is completely OK to talk about how much you make, this will give you a good sense for the market.

( In America, there is a stupid tradition where people think the act of telling your coworker or friend how much you make is bad, this (put on tinfoil hat) just serves the man. )
Why We Built Postgression
I'm 16 and Things I've written have made the front page twice, both times without mentioning my age. As a teenager, it feels really good to make the front page or #1 with no "omg they're young" bonus points.

Granted, it is encouraging to get bonus up votes for being young and achieving something.
"the more important aspect of a db is ..."

No. To you it's that.

To me the ability to be able to easily recreate the state, any state the DB was in at any time is much more important.

A big part of my job consist in asking DBA a dump of the production DB to PREPROD or DEV environments so that I can try to recreate the state at which the shit hit the fan. And it's more than painful. And it's not my fault: I'm inheriting apps that I have to maintain/bugfix/enhance. And it's hell. Mutability hell.

One day CRUD DB shall be regarded as dumbly as languages in which any variable can be globally modified, from any thread. We'll look back at these CRUD DB and wonder how stupid we've been not to listen earlier to the ones advocating a saner world.

You really should listen to several of Rich Hickey's talk because his ideas are more than sound and comes from a lot of Real-World [TM] immense pain suffering.

All the time he says: "Have you ever ...? Not fun!" he's 100% on spot. He's language and DB are the most pragmatic things ever.

It's amazing.
Have you seen the new (last month) Gmail app for iOS? It's really quite nice https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gmail-email-from-google/id42...
"This demo only works in Google Chrome"

That's an instant bounce for me, and probably quite a large portion of their audience. With no idea what the product does, I've no reason to bookmark this for later.
We do this at my startup. We call that developer the Sheriff and he/she sends a photo to the company chat with a sheriff hat on Mondays. They aren't expected to get anything done that week (although they typically try to do their work) and just deal with any live site issues or questions from the rest of our rather small company. Sometimes they end up implementing lots of quick fixes that other employees ask for.
Almost incredible. Or is it uncredible? I always confuse the two.
Computer games keep me mentally active - BBC News
Hi there, so I'm one of the dudes that built this. Just saw in on HN, so figured I'd respond.

We built this to combat the pain of testing in multiple locations. Sure, it adds an extra second to the start of each test run, and sure, you have to talk to a public database server, but the benefits you get are:

- No database server needs to be running on your local machine, vagrant, jenkins instance, or travis CI instance. This means one test configuration and you can run the tests anywhere.

- No need to write scaffolding code to make testing work with vagrant, jenkins, etc., again--things just work.

It's certainly not suitable for everyone, but it fits my personal use case well, which is why I decided to build it ^^
Small point: the "a 5+ inch phone is easy to hold" thing can absolutely be true. I haven't tried a Note 2, but I had a Note 1 for a little while and it wasn't hard to hold at all.
Not everyone that commits suicide was depressed. /Rage Quit is arguably a type of suicide but there are plenty of others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%... Seppuku Many cultures have promoted it for one reason or another http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku http://rt.com/news/india-ritual-suicide-sati/ Some native american cultures had the idea of the elderly walking into the snow when they became burdensome.
> We're not these children's daddies though, are we? Did you run up to every adult expecting praise? Did they give it to you?

Praise was actually very helpful to me growing up. If I didn't get it, I probably wouldn't have bothered with many of the things that now make my life so interesting and amazing.

> This is a group of, by and large, professionals. They are going to look at it in a critical light. If you want critical feedback, this is the forum to show it to. If you want coddling and nothing but positive reinforcement, stick with your parents, teachers and friends.

So much wrong with this. For one, this is a free online message board where anyone can post. Who cares if there are professionals here or not. Most 14 year olds do not have the same quantity of knowledge or acquired skills that people with more experience have. It's important to evaluate someone's work in an appropriate context. Not to mention the fact that many children are more sensitive to feedback and criticism than adults and negative comments can severely hurt their development / self-esteem.
Is it unfair to point out that discrimination is evident if the proportion of women speakers at the conference is not equal to the proportion of female experts in the field? That the general population is a little over half women does not imply that every profession's demographics are 50/50. Before claiming that the true problem is that women are less likely to apply and therefore a system based on people applying of their own accord must be flawed, perhaps we should first take a look at the demographics of the field itself (and eventually we'll have to go all the way back to middle school, when girls with a talent for math or technical subjects seem to suddenly lose interest).
I haven't been able to get on Tweetdeck for a few hours.
My personal opinion is, it depends (how's that for a cop-out)

My take is as follows. You can have a restaurant with just a chef. You can have a trading company with just a trader. You can have a tech company with just a program. And you have have a CG animation company with just an animation.

That means that at each of those types of companies, the rest of the people are support staff for the company's main line of work.

At a trading company everyone not a trader is support staff for the traders. At an animation company everyone is support staff for the animators. etc...

That's reflected in your position at the company.

Now for the "it depends" part. If it doesn't bother you to be support staff because the stuff you do you enjoy or because being part of the team of someone making that kind of entertainment is enough reward then fine.

There's also always exceptions. For example there are programmers who have advanced the state of the art of CG while at those companies (the hair in Monsters Ink, The water in The Perfect Storm, the crowds in Lord of the Rings) etc.. so if you fancy yourself someone who can advance that state of the art you might find that appealing. On the other hand I suspect it's getting harder and harder to have a big contribution there.
That's the same approach Caltech took when it first started admitting women in 1970. Things get socially very awkward and uncomfortable for everybody when you have a school where almost all students live on campus and socialize primarily with fellow students, and the male/female distribution is severely unbalanced, and so getting more women was a priority.

Gender was not considered when deciding on an applicant, but they made quite an effort to get more qualified women to apply, and to get those who did and were offered admission to choose Caltech.

This isn't the fastest way to balance the population (when I was there, 10 years later, they were only up to 15-20% women, and are up to around 40% now), but it allowed them to keep their high standards.
Twitter Site Issue
> I don't doubt google created an amazing mobile OS, but I certainly don't see those phones on a day to day basis.

The iphone is certainly a very good product, and deservedly very popular, but keep in mind, that Android phones actually out-number it overall.

Maybe in your circle and/or location that's not the case, but around here a huge proportion of smartphones I see people using on the train or in cafes are not iphones.

It depends very much on where you are and the state of the local cellphone market. I'm in Japan, and the iphone somewhat took the local makers by surprise, but they've come back with a vengeance. The iphone still has a lot of cachet (as do other Apple products), and probably sells more than any other single smartphone—but there are a huge number of other smartphones available, and the iphone doesn't dominate the market to the same extent it seems to in the U.S.

[Over time I'd actually expect the iphone's market share to lessen here, as other makers hone their products for the market (something they're very good at), and the iphone's place as a status symbol slips.]
Dissecting a Con Man's Scheme
Definitely! Postgres.app is awesome, but this is kinda targeting a difference use case (I'm one of the postgression authors).

This is really meant so that you don't need to run PostgreSQL at all locally. It adds a small bit of overhead, but makes it much easier to run tests locally, on a remote server (Jenkins, Travis CI, etc.), and doesn't require any scaffolding code to create a db, etc. It just works :)
WTF is a "natural gender split"? This is a cultural problem, and that culture like to hide behind a supposed nature which in large parts really just is learned behaviour, resulting from that culture.
I am sorry but it seems really unfair to developers of other tech products when you say truly caring about products is rare. Opinionated and uncompromising - that I may agree to, yes that is rare. But when we see attempts in this direction, by anyone other than a few companies (don't want to name Apple because I fear I will be marked as a fanboy), the attempts are marked as anti-user, draconian and anti-competitive (may not be illegal yet). Examples: Twitter pulling off API (widespread criticism), Facebook and Google+ real name policies (I think Facebook doesn't really enforce it anymore and Google+ now supports pseudonyms), Windows secure boot, Chrome making it difficult to sideload extensions, Quora locking up its contents etc.

While we see all of these other attempts as largely evil, we consider Apple to be producing _pieces of art_ that are allows them to compromise on universal acceptability. We, however, don't give that leeway to virtually anything else.
I mostly agree with your sentiment, but,

> I think most people don't know that Datomic can be seen as a layer between your code/date and nearly any backend (including SQL: for example you can use PostgreSQL "behind" Datomic).

While this is true, it doesn't matter. That Datomic is backed with Postgres doesn't matter to me unless I can query it with all the same functionality as I do Posgtres. Which I can't. It's just a dumb store (like all the backends), so this is an meaningless feature except to people running operations.
Biggest roadblock to media success: Culture of journalistic hubris
Did you know that “con” is short for “confidence”?.
She went out of her way to convince a particular demographic group to make submissions. That is where the discrimination lies.

Let's put it this way: if I went around giving extra encouragement to white men to apply, and then proudly announced that I had a blind review process, would you deny that there was discrimination? What exactly is the difference?
I am not sure how to appropriately respond to your generous post, but at the very least I want to thank you for being willing to share such sensitive information with us.
My issue is fundamentally similar to my issue with Google or Facebook. Information and money are power. Apple is the richest company on the planet. I'm uncomfortable with Apple gaining more money and, therefore, more power.

Their actions have often been highly disconcerting. I'm surprised that I don't see more people who consider Apple to be dangerous.

I don't really have issues with Apple products. In my experience, they've been of fine quality.
Hi Titanous, you're definitely right--the focus of postgression isn't speed, just convenience.

Installing a database server locally to run unit tests is something that has always annoyed me. 99.99% of the time when I'm testing things, I'm at a computer, hooked up to the internet, working on things--and I'm usually not all that concerned about an extra second of overhead.

I think the real benefit to this is that you can use the same DB harness regardless of where you're testing: locally, Jenkins, Travis-CI, whatever. This way, you don't have to write any code to make databases, check credentials, whatever, it's just a thoughtless process.
I wasn't aware of the term at all (not a native speaker), and I mentioned Reddit as a way of apologizing for not adding anything other than "funny lol". :)
It's been done before. Germany hasn't had a smooth transition, and there are still problems, but it has been done.
Philips Hue: Setup and Teardown
I've thought about doing something like this, and tying it into a web based services so you can see what state everyone is in.

Might work on this some in the near future, but I am not sure if I want to commit to a Kickstarter ;-)
Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, says that getting the technical details right ends up coming through even for those who don't know about the field. Somehow, it just reads better. They went to extraordinary lengths on the episode "Dead Freight" and I while I don't know anything about the stuff in that episode (no spoiler here) I agree. All the little touches add up and make it dramatically more engaging.

Click Episode 505 for relevant making-of podcast:http://www.amctv.com/shows/breaking-bad/insider-podcast-seas...
How do I get Virtual Perspective on my phone? I see it was an Android app... I'd love to show it off to my iOS friends lol.
By default, Heroku allows roles on their shared database plans to view limited info about databases on the same machine. Stuff like name, type and owner are visible.

Here is a sample response when attempting to do anything with a database other than your own:

FATAL: permission denied for database "xxxxxxxxxxxx"
DETAIL: User does not have CONNECT privilege.
Previous connection kept
Yes, and the author make important improvements in the parsing algorithm.
>"Our technology choices reflect our values. People willing to yield some control to Apple for their needs are more likely to enjoy the benefits that Apple’s products bring by exerting that control. But people who don’t like being told what to do — people who believe they know what’s best for them, want full control over everything, and are willing to accept the resulting responsibilities — will be more comfortable with the alternatives."

This. A thousand times this.

Most people who know me consider me a rational guy. I'm the type that reads LessWrong, understands cognitive biases and knows who Kahneman & Tversky are.

But I find myself with a deep...dislike of Apple. I fully admit that their products are superb. I admire, and respect the fanaticism and detail that goes into their products. As someone who loves money, I respect a company that rose from the ashes to having 100+ billion dollars in the bank.

But the notion that some guy deep in the bowels of Cupertino knows what I want more than I do makes me recoil violently. I think it's the libertarian in me. I have an inherent distrust of, and contempt for institutions, particularly when they want to decide what's 'right' for me. And the, dare I say cultish (ate least to me) behaviour of many Macolytes only makes me more wary. It's like the recent article proclaiming Apples 'genius' in acquiring Bill Nguyen's team after the Color acquisition. It reminds me of the North Korea articles I've been reading today.

Note that you'll never see any posts on HN from me engaging in any flamewars about Apple, because as an individualist, I believe that my preferences are exactly that: my preferences. Others are allowed to have theirs. I do find the sycophancy by the usual suspects distasteful, though.

Kudos to Marco for a very insightful piece.
You only have to tell them once. I've asked my coworkers if they see me with my headphones on and I'm not obviously dicking around to send me an instant message or email when I'm free I'll hit them back. All other times I'm fair game.