skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not trying to disagree with you about the crappiness of this student's education, or how sad it is that he counted with his fingers, but computation != mathematics.

I HATE the fact that American schools force students to do rote computation over and over again, with very little focus on the concepts behind the computations. I hated "math" until my 6th grade homeroom (not math) teacher took the initiative of writing high school level algebra word problems on the board, and not telling us how to solve them until after we attempted them. "A train going from St. Louis is headed toward L.A., and another train from L.A. is headed to St. Louis. they are going 40 mph, when will they pass each other" etc.

Suddenly, when the computation becomes a tool to satisfy an end, rather than the end itself, math becomes interesting.
Show HN: Identifying the DNS server used to fulfill a HTTP request
This is a nice resource.

I scraped the basic info and put it up on Google Docs for anyone who wants the raw data:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmdQMmlwPBAndHF...

(Note: I took the liberty of adding Wolfram|Alpha Pro, which I work on)
My heart grew a little warm with the last paragraph of John Carmack's comment:

"The major evolution that is still going on for me is towards a more functional programming style, which involves unlearning a lot of old habits, and backing away from some OOP directions."
Curious to see if others have their own suggestions. We've noticed that if we not pretty vigilant about it, the creep factor sets in and suddenly there are lots of weird things happening around micro-features.
Former? I think you need to revise that :-P

I'd take a guess that they have a certain client who doesn't mind them making a subset of information public.

Probably one who sees value in showing that they know: you know: they know. Because then you must ask yourself, how long did they know? Could they have been falsifying information?

Alternatively, they may be trying to get into a very lucrative sector ;-)
This is a link-bait title, and a surprisingly poor guide to the professional literature on the subject of evolutionary influences on human mating behavior. First of all, "Darwinians" is the wrong category to use to name the scientists who think about evolutionary influences on human behavior. All competent psychologists, biologists (whether zoologists or botanists or specialists of some other kind), medical doctors, and other scholars of human behavior are "Darwinians" in the sense of knowing that species Homo sapiens originated by a process of macroevolution from earlier living things.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

As Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/10/2/l_102_01.html
and the "modern synthesis"

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/history/modsynth.shtml
combining Darwinian evolution from common descent including a mechanism of natural selection and Mendelian inheritance of discrete units of heredity is the standard point of view among all people who have a current scientific understanding of biology.

It is rather what is properly called "evolutionary psychology" (which at its core

http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/busslab/pdffil...

is much more recent than Darwin's thought) that is actually controversial at the moment, with some very Darwinian biologists not liking evolutionary psychology well at all

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/10/ep-the-fundame...

while other biologists who are friends of those biologists like evolutionary psychology as an attempt to explain human behavior.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/is-evolut...

Charles Darwin made few assertions about "dating" in the current sense and hardly any settled assertions about human behavior, even in his book-length treatments of the subject, but raised a lot of questions. Some of the answers are still tentative and debated, and the overall approach of what fans call "evolutionary psychology" is controversial, but that evolution happened and had something to do with the current human condition is not controversial at all among scientists.
It's also algorithmicly identical to the way people are taught to multiply in American schools now, except it introduces a geometric isomorphism that makes it easier for people to understand what's going on.
People who habitually rationalize self-serving behavior should feel guilty. That's what guilt is for.
> gives you a lot more to start with.

I realize there are differences in opinion, but I started programming seriously about 6 or 7 years ago, and I started with ruby/Rails.

For me the scaffolding generated too much to easily digest. And separating everything into models/controllers/views is fantastic for a production app, but almost incomprehensible for a newbie. Veteren developers still argue about whether something should go in a model/controller or some other layer, how is a newb supposed to handle it?

In addition you can build sinatra apps without even talking about hooking up a database.

If you're trying to jump in on the deep end and build an MVP, rails is probably the way to go. However, if I really wanted to teach someone to understand what they were doing without being intimated, I'd start with sinatra.
Coming from a web development background with experience using MVC in Java and Python, I found Michael's Rails Tutorial was basically all I needed to get started, even though I only came to Rails around the time of 3.0. I'm personally really happy to have skipped over ERB entirely and gone straight to HAML. But if I were teaching a web dev newbie, I might use ERB, since it still looks like HTML. Better to keep a few things familiar while someone is learning.

Perhaps Michael's book fills this space, but there may be an opportunity to write an e-book on the Prime Stack, or at least fill in some things the Rails Tutorial leaves out.
I noticed the same thing wrt recent activity. I'd like discovery to be front and center, and be able to scroll through a list rather than 2 at a time in the right column, and having to click each time. Continuous scroll would be optimal.
Maybe it's just me, but your site design doesn't really inspire confidence, which is probably hurting conversions.

- The top navigation is left-justified, but "Peer to peer local camera gear" on the next line (also in the header) is centered.

- Right below your call to action "Find a lens", you have very distracting social sharing buttons that should probably be in the header or footer.

- The line spacing on the titles of your featured equipment is huge. The pictures down there being different sizes also bothers me, and they seem cramped in that frame (they look better on the rent page, so maybe just give them a little bit more padding).
A startup founders' story slam
Korean 27″ Apple IPS displays and a Macbook Pro
Great article.
I've just recently started exploring distributed systems (specifically with Riak Core/Erlang) and I hit upon a solution to a problem I've been working on (I think) while reading.
Website for Learning and Teaching Tamil
WOW, the design of this site is phenomenal. Beautiful UI/UX.
It would be nice to have a library for adding server/s to an upstream on the fly. Something like:

nginx addserver upstream-name 127.0.0.1:8025

EDIT: Added upstream name
There's no presumption of innocence in the military justice system. It's not common law, and military courts are heavily biased in the prosecution's favor.
Another approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_method_multiplication

Of course it's all multiplication, and all essentially the same thing. I find the grid method the least notation-focused of at least these three, and so I think more accessible to assimilation. Maybe I'm biased, I didn't learn multiplication this way but found myself naturally doing it like this in my head and then was pleasantly surprised to find it had a name. It's also amenable to estimation.
The critique I was hoping to get was more aligned with the technical and UX aspects (design, usability, etc), of which I've seen numerous high quality examples (and discussions of) demonstrated by the HN community.
Has anyone here come across any particularly good books or other resources on functional style programming in C++? Especially ones that have been updated for C++11s new functional features.
"I am a full const nazi nowadays, and I chide any programmer that doesn’t const every variable and parameter that can be."

Immutability...one less thing to worry about.
PG: It could be instructive to be able to compare your new version with what is currently available.
Eh, one example isn't much for statistics. Looking at the average for 1, 2, and 3 digit numbers (ie, [0,9] * [0,9], [0,99] * [0,99], ...), using the sentence "<x> times <y> is <x*y>":

English, 1 digits: 6.5 syllables; English, 2 digits: 14.9 syllables; English, 3 digits: 25.4 syllables.

I'll let other people figure out the numbers for their own languages, but I'm guessing most languages will have similar lengths. Numbers tend to be short in any language.
This reminds me of https://menshn.com/ (which was put together by a UK MP), however it seems better executed.

The front page doesn't really state this but from what I can see it's effectively a forum mixed with twitter and limited to certain subjects.
Are there private groups yet? In order to compete with FB Groups, you would really need private groups.
It does not benefit anyone that he revealed his identity

Actually, it might. From the original comment: "I won't post anonymously in case anyone wants to contact me" which means that if someone is struggling with a similar addiction, or wants to learn more about it, they can contact him and benefit from the additional information or context.

It might impact him negatively, but it might help others. That's what I mean by saying he's brave.
A little off-topic:

Asking how to learn design seems to be common here, yet no one here has taken the time to seize this opportunity and actually build something that aids developers to learn how to design for the web.
if you are the maker of http://makermatch.herokuapp.com may I say nice one - great to see spaghetti hitting walls - may it stick :-)
Can we survive technology?
Sorry for being negative, but the slogan made me close the tab in horror. The page took a while to load and I couldn't figure out what it did, but was curious. Then slogan loaded and I closed it in a hurry. "New way to talk to each other" is NOT a good slogan.

Great domain name, though.
I know about putty of course, the problem is that I feel I have to ask people if it's ok if I install mysterious hacker software on their computer. Maybe I just need to get over that.
Any news on this? I'm interested in attending too.
All changes are picked up by CI and pushed to the S3 bucket for rememberaaronsw.com automatically. Pull-request away.
Show HN: I made a commit time histogram of 504,015 github repositories
The Zen of GitHub by Kyle Neath
Well, that's not strictly true. I know at least a couple of folks from that era who would pilfer a bank account in a heartbeat, given the opportunity (they tended to be active 'carders'). They were, however, treated with disdain by 99% of the 'exploratory' hackers I knew.

The catalyst for me getting out of the black hat side (other than aging out of the 'being bad is fun' stage) was getting into a massive system from which I could have easily pilfered millions. Thoughts of everything from "set up Swiss bank account, fill up" to "offer to 'consult' with the company in question to fix the holes" went through my head. In the end, I just said "game over, I won," stopped cracking systems, and put up the Phoenix Project BBS as a center of learning. Which lasted until the Secret Service showed up at my door in 1990...
I am not arguing that your mother reached the wrong conclusion for that particular phrasing, I am arguing that I am unimpressed with the importance of what your mother thinks in response to any wording at all.

As you know, what you omit is just as important as what you include. Now yes, if I say "JSTOR had no continued beef with Aaron", a lawyer would (correctly) respond that this hardly matters since they are not the ones expected to press charges. Does the fact that this is then legally irrelevant make it irrelevant to a member of the general public who is forming an ethical, rather than legal, opinion? Hardly.

Similarly, the response you will get from, say, your mother to "evading electronic attempts to stop him" is different from the response you will hear from many people who actually know and understand exactly what that entailed. Why do you think that is? Blind loyalty to someone they probably never met?

Then there is the issue of "accessing a restricted closet at MIT"/"breaks into a restricted closet at MIT". Pretty damning, even to me. Sounds like there was certainly a crime happening here. Is it important that we point out that trespassing charges were dropped? I am inclined to think so.

Merits of all of these points aside, the point is that you can be factual and make a layman think whatever you want. What they conclude in response to any particular wording is entirely irrelevant.

There is a reason trials involve a lot more than just having the prosecution explain the situation to their mother.
Six early-stage startups tackle bus bookings, group travel, and photo sharing
Mind Controlled Glass Tilter
except its not dishonest. one of the charges was wire fraud. from the article:

> Wire Fraud. The Wire Fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. 1343, prohibits a scheme to gain “property” by false pretenses. This strikes me as a pretty strong charge here. The false pretenses are provided by the false identification and spoofing of Swartz’ IP address and MAC address. Swartz was trying to trick JSTOR into giving him access to their database after they had specifically tried their best to ban him from doing so. And the “property” was the contents of the JSTOR database itself.

do people on HN even read the articles anymore?
I think the design is gorgeous and find the general idea very interesting. Good luck for 2013
"Obvious Corp's Branch now open to public"
Great article. Even if you're not a C/C++ programmer.
Out of curiosity, did you see/find my previous comment ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3738542

?
What the fuck? This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while.

Even if someone is incorrect, I think they deserve a more respectful and constructive response than that. We can do better than that here.
I think the point is that you can ease in to that with PHP - you can be as dynamic or not as you want. Many (many!) people started with PHP just to add a contact form to a site, or make a dynamic copyright date in a footer (or just to do common footers with include()). Rails/Grails/Play/CF/etc assume you want to do a lot more, and force you to do things their way - integrating a tech in to an existing site is really problematic outside of PHP, because most other webdev tech is 'full stack'.
Ask HN: Should I go to a "Hackathon" if I cannot code very well?
If so, why, and what sort of things would I learn?
How Forking Perl 5 Could Work
there are only 2 problems in computer science.

0. naming things

1. cache invalidation

2. off-by-one errors
Dell Is In Talks To Go Private
Faux Intimacy and the web in 2013
I think it was a good choice to include PostgreSQL even though you can make an app DB-agnostic with rails. It's one of the defining differences between the stacks. I would really like to switch to PostgreSQL on a project I'm working on for future development even though MySQL is working fine now, and this makes me feel more confident about bringing it up to my team.
Is Java the root of all evil and can you really live without it in the browser?
YC-Backed Photo-Sharing Service PicPlum Loses One Co-Founder
The author seems to like the minimalistic comments. I wonder if the team looked back what their thoughts would be. I can barely look at code I wrote a year ago and not ask what the hell I was thinking, but in my mind it was absolutely clear at the time. I guess an impartial third party reading it and understanding it is a strong testimonial.
The Great American Signature Fades Away
Well its actually a better story than that.

Compiler is installed in c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework folder. You get c# and vb.net compilers in there. This is by default.

SSH is not really the windows way of doing things. Windows 7 pro and above have an RDP server built in though and you can remotely connect powershell to other machines using WinRM.

There is a thing called powershell ISE installed which is a terminal multiplexer, scripting IDE and debugger. the version with windows 8 (and a download for windows 7) has syntax highlighting and completion built in.

So actually, the windows equivalents are already there.

And no you don't need to install visual studio (which the pro edition of 2012 takes only 20 mins to install on my 5 year old ThinkPad).
Well, he's dead. How can the charges remain if the defendant is dead?
There is such a thing as the 'common good', and I believe it could be successfully argued that harming JSTOR while improving the situation of everybody but JSTOR is an examplary case to show positive intent rather than a malicious one. JSTOR is a non-profit entity that has significant amounts of funds revolving through it and that is technically tasked with making material available, but that in actual fact makes it scarce.

Any attempts to break such a situation and to improve the status quo for the common good is not malicious by definition, it is beneficial by definition.

I see how you favor a much more literal interpretation of the word 'intent' here, but I'm talking about it the way a human would talk about it, and not some kind of legal AI. After all, we're all human first and our intent derives from our humanity and if there is a corporate interest that is harmed over a humanitarian one than I for one don't see too much harm there.

We're not talking about someone attempting to wreck the entertainment industry, we're talking about someone attempting to enable a large number of people to gain access to knowledge. Equating that with malicious intent because some faceless corporation might no longer have as much access to the gravy train is difficult for me to understand.
If only all companies were this considerate of their users!

The first item on this list, auto-login links in email, is something I wrote about in the summer of 2011 and when I submitted it to HN it hit the top item in minutes. This is a definite user pain point!

https://eeqj.com/20110614/please-dont-do-this/

I was on the phone with United the other day and stuck in their IVR. I said "agent", and it said to me:

"I think you want to speak with an agent. If you answer just a few more questions, I'll be able to help you. Let's try again..." and repeated the same menu prompts. Saying "agent" a second time actually gives an agent.

Don't get me wrong, I get the expense of processing users with live agents versus an IVR, and I understand their volume. Adding a second confirmation probably saves them a zillion dollars annually.

It also makes them dicks. It confirms that it knows what I want, and then does the opposite. Few things are more disrespectful.

Huge props to Zapier for identifying ways of doing the opposite - showing your users that you appreciate and care for them and their finite time and attention.
Interview: World’s Most Innovative Bank on Using RabbitMQ
For me it is a language decision and not a framework decision. And I love Python more. Also in general I think languages and frameworks backed by a community instead of single company are better in the long run.
My attitude (and that of most of my contemporaries) was that hacking government computers (in our own country at least) was a Damn Stupid idea.

A corporation will make an ROI decision about pursuing someone. Is it worth their time and money and hassle to pursue, or should they just change the admin password to something other than "secret123" and forget about it.

The government, on the other hand, has whole branches of people with nothing better to do than follow up on this kind of thing, and they aren't motivated by 'profit.'
I'll also try to address sandGordon's question.

Like superfeeder, I have "backend" services, but I also have client-facing services.

I value how Node.js handles slow clients. It also services some more 'utility' use
cases for me, such as reverse proxies, etc.

JRuby and Scala cover IO bound processing for me over the Web.

JRuby covers the majority of the backend services.

I use Scala coupled with Storm, and I could have used JRuby here too, but you can also use JRuby with Hadoop and you typically don't. Since this
use case actually required the optimization (I wasn't prematurely optimizing), I went as bare metal as possible (ruled Java out, yes). Previously, this service was a Node.js service and got rewritten into Scala+Storm.

I don't use Akka because I didn't feel it was needed yet. Old school threaded workers with JRuby works fine so far.

I know that Scala is supposed to be a multi-layered solution and it can handle all of this.

However, Ruby and Node brings the ecosystem Scala doesn't have (I'm not moved by the "but Java has a million Jars out there" argument, already integrating with them with JRuby).

And in general Ruby makes me happy (SBT makes me very very angry and sad, for comparison - yet Scala is OK), that simple.
"A new way to talk to each other" isn't appropriate grammar. The site's slogan is "talking" to multiple people at the same time, as if I was asked by a group of my friends "what's Branch?"

Slogans should generally talk to a single person since 99% of the time a person is sitting in front of their computer using the site. A better slogan would be "A new way to communicate with friends and family" or something along those lines.
The expectation of politeness is a meaningful social norm, not just a personal opinion.

Also, politeness and civility isn't the same as false amiability. You can (and should) give firm rebuttals in a civil way. There's nothing false about it.
I'm keeping track of a list of vulnerable gems here: https://gist.github.com/4532291
First, I believe that "every millisecond counts" is a good principle in web design. There is enough latency that we can't avoid, which is why we should avoid latency wherever it is possible. Considering this, 45K is a big deal indeed.

Second, just some hours ago, I read that the mere execution (not the download!) of jQuery takes about a second on an iPhone 3G. These devices and similarly weak ones are still out there, which is easy to forget if you test only on the latest hardware.

Lastly, keep in mind that bandwidth isn't always ideal. Consider mobile: In rural areas, 3G isn't always available. When I'm on the train, loading the slim HN itself often is not an issue, while many other pages simply time out. In developing countries, bandwidths are often very low, too. 56kbps still is a realistic bandwidth. And downloading 45K on a 56kbps connection takes almost 7s.
To the curious: It's a messageboard with some nice UX elements and a few twists (you have to ask or be invited in order to post to threads).

Annoying, though, that not only do you have to fork over your Twitter credentials (and your entire graph over there), but then the site subsequently asks you to confirm an email address.

I thought OAuth & OpenID style logins were supposed to help cut down on friction, not add more?
* Most of the monitors come with Korean power bricks which operate at 110-240V... If you live in a european country that runs on 250V – you need to make sure you buy a proper power pick. Do not fry your monitor!*

Huh? It's a US/European auto switching power brick (not sure where he got 250V from)
I love these guides. Even as an experienced front-end web developer, I always learn something new and insightful as well as design patterns I can improve on. Bookmarked.

Thank you for your contribution.