skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I too used to be plagued by wishy-washy friends, and since waiting on finalization of plans can be a real pain, I decided to find some ways to deal with them.

The first thing I did was set up a google group for my friends. There are about 20 memebers in it and we share stuff between each other by email occasionally but also make plans.

The second thing I learned was never to entice people or make plans, but simply to announce plans. I'd email the group:

"I'm going hiking at Franconia Notch this weekend if anyone is interested. Leaving from my house around 10AM Saturday."

That's it. No waiting for replys, no waiting on people at all. If you want to come with me you'll be around at 10AM Saturday or you won't.

There's no frustration if its only me going, as I intended to go alone, and if anyone wants to come along then that's a pleasant surprise. But I won't base my activity schedule around waiting for them.

Surprisingly, since I started doing this, more people seem to come along. Motivation is contagious, I think, and it seems the thought of someone else already 100% committed to doing something makes it easier in the minds of others to commit themselves.

So make it easy for your friends. This way they don't feel guilty or obligated one way or the other, which is a huge relief for some personality types.

Later, I made a second google group for announcing house dinners, and now regularly 5-15 people show up every wednesday and we cook and eat together.
Stopping on the shoulder for such a trivial reason as giving an ETA is usually illegal and a bad idea anyways, so it shouldn't even be an option to be considered.
When New York City's murder rate peaked at 2,262 homicides in 1992 (versus 414 in 2012), who do you think was getting killed? It wasn't white people on the upper east side.
Yep, search online, join chat rooms, work on something else, or take a nap and return to the problem later.

If the bug ends up being that annoying that it takes that long, then I take a break to ensure my mind is clear and fresh, then I literally walk through everything step-by-step until I find the problem. If I don't see the issue with what I wrote, then I suspect a bug in the deeper layers or a lack of understanding of the deeper layers on my part, so I begin to isolate everything and do the equivalent of unit test each part to ensure it works as expected. Even if it's the most obvious thing I check it anyway.

Needless to say I sketch things out a bit beforehand (sometimes by writing throw away code), then I write the code little pieces at a time, then I immediately test each section of code I've written while it's fresh in my mind. This helps ensure that what I'm writing doesn't run away from me.

Sometimes I write large amounts of code just to get better at debugging when the amount of code written is large, and to beat myself into make less mistakes, and to improve my ability to hold more in memory without getting confused or losing track of what I'm doing. Sometimes just to prove to myself that I can do it. I just do it again and again until I beat myself into submission. After every mistake or failure to do things the way I expect I say, "No, it's possible. No, it's possible," then I start again.

Working at a 9-5 for sometime, especially at a large shitty company, is often enough to have the ability to do this beaten out of you by less capable or stuck-in-their-ways Engineers who insist on saying you have to do things this way or that way or you'll have problems. Eventually you may get sick of their stupidity and begin to act out to find ways to keep yourself sharp, to prevent being watered down, and to keep things moving.

Just remember it's possible to get better at cranking out line after line of code without making very many mistakes, and it's possible to adjust the way you write code in such a way that if errors are introduced they'll be blatant and easy to identify.
This article is good in concept, but has too much emotion-laden hyperbole for my taste.
But it didn't start out poor.
Can Grandpa Get His Startup On?
How Algorithms Changed The World
I did something similar for my money a while ago. Takes all the data and simply tells me "You will have X amount of money in 2 weeks."

Can't live without it anymore. Just wish there was a practical way to give something like this to everyone.
Personally, pandas was the library that converted me from R to python for general data work.
USA TIPS are inflation-adjusted according to a published standard (CPI-U). One can argue that the standard itself underestimates inflation (I would probably agree), but the securities really do adjust with measured inflation. If the inflation is understated, it's at least done in a defined way. So yes, I suppose the holder of the securities would still lose purchasing power, but not in a catastrophic way. TIPS are still a decent hedge against inflation.
Woz on what's wrong with the new Steve Jobs movie/clip
Sure, but the number of questions you have in the first 3 months of the language are bound to be more than the number of questions in the second set of 3 months, and far more than after you've used the language for 3 years. Granted most of the questions you have when you're "younger" won't require you to actually ask as you can find answers, but I'd be surprised if the number of questions asked by a user is relatively constant over the first several years of having learned a language.
Then you can skip the middleman and just automate the taking-action part.
Could you post some links to this? I haven't seen it and would be interested to read more.
I don't think most people actually understood what the author meant. He said that nothing should hold you back even if you are alone to do it.

He never said he doesn't like to go out with friends. He said we need to learn to do things on our own sometimes.
I was going for "the advantages of companionship", not "strange people don't help you".
A simple algorithm to determine if you're good at multitasking:

1) you aren't
Why you shouldn't wear a bow tie: You'll look like a tool.

Sorry - but in general any "wacky" clothing generally misfires drastically.
I dunno if R is that hot, but I think RStudio's Shiny (http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/) is on its way to making it hot. Best thing to come out in the R world in a long time. Besides being a great visualization tool for people who already use R, it might be something that makes programming easier to learn for kiddos (they can even learn some HTML + JS at the same time...) This almost brings R to a level where all the material taught in a freshman COMP101 class could be implemented in R (... as long as you don't even mention OOP)
Hah! I came here for this comment. My friends actually pick fun of me when I tell them I go to restaurants alone, but I thoroughly enjoy it. I'll usually bring in a notebook, a book, or something to do... and... take, my, time.

I'm on my own schedule when I eat alone. I can eat as slow as I want to, I can order as fast as I want and what I want, I don't have to think of things to talk about, etc. I absolutely love people watching as well, so when I want to take a break from my food or my work, I can sit back and look around the room and check people out.

I'm that guy. I love it.
Clone? No. Similar? Sure.

When Trello came out I had been working on ThetaBoard for a while. Both products draw heavily from some Kanban tools that have been around for years.

If Trello had been out earlier I might not have started my project. That being said, I'd argue that the UX/UI and aesthetics of the two apps are different. I'm going to be making some improvements this year that will differentiate a bit more. As long as people keep using it, I keep plugging away at it.
You might as well wear spats as well.
The HN title is misleading. It is still not enabled by default, it just got easier to manually switch on, so it wasn't "added". Still, this is good progress.
So apparently Apple is making good on its promise to look deeper down in the supply chain. While it sucks for the workers at the plant that they're probably going to lose their jobs (shitty work is [usually] better than no work), the jobs aren't actually going away. They're just being shifted to another factory that now has the knowledge that they too could be fired for what Westerners consider egregious working conditions.

This is great, and the outcome of putting a lot of vocal and consistent pressure on Apple to behave in a less inhumane fashion. It's yet another example that well organized and vocal campaigns can result in meaningful change. They do take a while, though.
Interesting related podcasts if you want to read more:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/16/148751661/the-frid...

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/t...

The Frontline episode 'The Warning' is related and also good:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/
Show HN: Hubot script to access IRC channel topic through HTTP
Lots of Bitcoin businesses are online services. If US businesses are banned from offering Bitcoin services, this will just bring more customers to services operated in other countries.
Woz getting it straight. He was there.
> Activate caching for static assets

A quick and dirty test in Firebug on one of my SSL sites seems to indicate that Firefox is serving SSL content from the cache already. Is this a Firefox thing or am I overlooking an Apache configuration I might have set?
This seems like spam, but I'll leave it to someone with more domain experience to flag, if so.
On Domestics, Exotics, and Sports Cars (An Aspirational Relationship Metaphor)
brash and intimidating communities is clearly a factor when factoring in how user friendly something is, and how easy it is to join a community. What one might not think of however, is how that effect gender equality for a community.

That for me is a interesting insight to draw (through studies would be nice to confirm it).
If you are looking for a book, "The Art of R Programming" is (by far) my favorite R book.

It explains a lot of the general principles behind the language, so you can figure out details for yourself (in comparison to, for instance, the R Cookbook, which has hundreds more pages of details and code samples for specific use cases).
I have their Ambient Orb (http://bit.ly/XFemSb) on my desk. It starts at red in the morning then fades to yellow to green as we get more registrations throughout the day.

Also, pre-Arduino we used a WebSwitch $199 (http://www.controlbyweb.com/webswitch/) to turn on/off a police siren when a certain goal was reached.
"Never brown in town."

i.e. do not wear brown shoes with a work suit. Unless your an italian or something.

I had a trader friend who rejected someone at interview by just writing "BROWN SHOES" across his c.v.
From the OP:

> They asked student volunteers whether they used cellphones while driving, and whether they were good at multitasking. Then they tested the students' multitasking ability by asking them to solve math problems while remembering random strings of letters.

> They found that the people who multitasked the most in real life — the impulsive risk-takers — were actually much worse at juggling tasks than people who rarely drove while phoning.

> Even worse, these demon multitaskers thought they were terrific at it, though the cold, hard data proved they weren't.

So a possible upshot is that it's possible that you can be more efficient when multi-tasking. It's just that the kinds of people who multi-task are often the kind of people who shouldn't be doing it (and thus bring down the efficiency scores of those who are able to hack it).
Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
Functional Eye for the Ruby Guy
Not all degree's are equal.

I can't imagine any engineer saying that they cannot pay off their student debt because they cannot find a well paying job.
Consider that the most formal/regal of outfits, the Tuxedo, requires the use of a bowtie. A white shirt with red bowtie is a classic, though there's plenty of different colors and styles to mix and match. A friend of mine instituted Bow Tie Tuesday at his job and i'm totally shopping for ties now.
I recommend suspenders.
I get this as well. While it's been a long time since I've dined out somewhere nice alone (somehow the awkwardness doesn't quite apply when you're somewhere mid-range at lunch time, or at stopping off at a bar for a burger and a beer and some along time), it's always felt a touch awkward.

I guess it's because food is powerfully social. Whether its the idea of breading bread with a stranger when you're travelling, or eating dinner with your family, or taking your other half to a nice restaurant, there's very strong social imperative when it comes to eating - and it's one which exists in pretty much every culture that I can think of.
What is one of them?

//edit//I have googled those. Good grief.
There seems to be a strain of thought, especially prevelant in the programming community, that really romanticizes acting alone. I really wonder if we should romanticize it.

I used to live like this - I would go to shows alone, eat out alone, go to movies alone. I'd go hiking by myself, I'd go on long bike rides by myself. At the time I didn't have the resources to go on trips by myself, but I would've done that, too.

And it wasn't like I was a pariah. I've always had friends and family around. I've never needed to be single. I just felt like I required this constant solitude, and because of that, enforced a certain distance in my relationships.

As I've gotten older and learned more of how to need other people, I'm kind of horrified at all of the lost opportunities. The friendships I didn't form.

I would really hate for young guys [who I assume comprise much of HN's readership] to read this and say "Yeah, I should go this world alone!" Sometimes this attitude may be called for, but more often than not it will not serve you well.
I think the lighthouse image for 'Good management', number 3 under 'What's important to programmers when evaluating a job opportunity', is spot on. Really conveys that good management should provide very clear direction.

On a side note, I'm not sure why jQuery is listed as a programming language.
The one thing you do lose is push notifications, although I suppose I could turn on SMS notifs.
Why is jquery counted as a language? Javascript is a language, jquery is a framework.
I love that the "secret" teaser trailer is hosted on apple.com http://www.computerchessmovie.com/secretteaser/secretteaser....
Part of the problem is San Francisco's (and Phoenix/Tampa/etc/etc) fascination with rail. They spend billions and billions of dollars to construct and maintain rail systems that simply don't attract that many riders. And of course since the fares don't come close to covering the cost of the rail, the cities are forced to suck that money away from other areas like buses (which are far cheaper and have the added benefit of being more flexible). So, cities like San Francisco end up with monstrous rail costs and a resulting inability to fund fundamentally better transportation, like buses.
Programming language...jquery...
Infecting servers with Rogue Apache modules and SSH backdoor
Exactly what I meant, yes. There are a lot of places Java has succeeded, but being a framework to write and run desktop applications for the mass-market end-user consumer (a task which it was once positioned to excel at) was not one of them.

And all it took was a little user-focus and design work. Never happened. Very shortsighted IMHO, but I also believe it was not possible at Sun or Oracle. Just not in their nature.
Are there phones you are unable to buy unlocked? I guess Android phones with carrier OS enhancements, but I didn't think those were widely desirable.
I disagree. I went travelling around the world on my own. In fact I was never alone because I was open to meeting new people and met a lot of people. Friends travelling in pairs tend not to make new friends so easily, until they get sick of each other. I made some amazing friends this way. I know lot of female friends think differently due to safety, and this is fair.
Heh :) Permissible by the regulations perhaps, but definitely not acceptable (at least not in the UK).
Detroit has the land area, housing stock, and general infrastructure for a peak population of 1,849,568. Only 713,777 people live there today. Consider for a minute that that's a very difficult problem.
yes yes yes!
I realized this long time ago.
Don't ask who joins. Announce you are going. They will follow.
If they don't, fine.
It makes it all so much easier.

Many people have just followed all their lives and that's what they like to do.
Eat at the bar. There's usually more going on and it's much less awkward. Even better is you won't need a reservation and the waiter isn't bummed that the table is half empty.
I'm that guy too. If you really want to throw people for a loop, bring a notebook to thoughtfully write in and snap pictures of your delicious food. I had no idea until after a few times doing this in Italy that everyone was assuming I was a travel writer / food critic. I literally had people at other tables ask me who I wrote for, and when I told them no one they didn't believe me and begged me to tell. It was awesome :)
Yes, high skilled people produce more than they consume but that's of course a good thing.

Look at it from the other way around. What would happen to the economy if 50% of high skilled people moved to a different country? It would be disastrous for the country. So AS and AD go down as a direct consequence of those people leaving, but AD will also go down as a consequence of the resulting recession/depression. Importing high skilled people has the opposite effect.

So yes, high skilled workers add to AS and to AD, and the ratio of AS to AD won't change much because of that. But the economy will still get a boost (another increase in AD).
The first tip for setting the cipher suite in Apache httpd is incomplete without:

SSLHonorCipherOrder On

Without it, the client's preference is used, which may be a slower cipher in your list. You'll want to revise your SSLCipherSuite directive and there's nothing wrong with specifying individual ciphers instead of aliases when using such a short list.

You'll also want to monitor the effects of the change. Before you do anything, make sure you're logging SSL information with something like this:

CustomLog /var/log/httpd/ssl_request_log "%t %h %{SSL_PROTOCOL}x %{SSL_CIPHER}x \"%r\" %b"

Collect some data for a few days, then update your cipher suite. In most cases, you'll probably want to see RC4-SHA (for now), since it's fast, widely supported and immune to BEAST attacks.
You make a fair point. I'm happy to accept that colloquially when someone says "better than average" they mean "better than the median" but it's when an article, such as this, uses strong language like "[it's a] statistical impossibility" that it irks me, because that's a definitive factual statement that's not true (or, at best, not well defined enough to be meaningful).

Statistics are so often abused that rigour is more than just a matter of pedantry. Perhaps if journalists stopped having such a loose relationship with statistics we'd all be better off.
Sneak Peak video of JAMR: iOS music creation & collaboration App
A brief video demonstration of our up and coming app Jamr.
You're right, it looks like this was changed in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531801
Yes, I'm a bit confused by what people are taking away from this post. There are advantages to doing things individually, and to doing things collaboratively, and I'm interested in the relationship between those. But I don't feel like I learned much from this article about either one. Is it just the self-help-book-esque "be yourself, don't let anyone hold you back" message?
I didn't visit New York until the early 1990's, so I'm not sure what it was like in the 1980's, but my understanding is that violent crime peaked in 1990.
Even if the person meant "median", the author's sentence is still ambiguous: It is definitely possible that 70% of _college students_ are "above median" at multitasking than the _general population_.
yes, blame the city's problems on the head of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. is this supposed to be journalism?
I should have mentioned in my comment what the comic did: It is anonymity + audience which is correlated, not anonymity alone.

Although your anecdote is just as anecdoty as the comic author's anecdote...
So, will any media outlet actually do the digging and find out which companies still do business with Guangdong Real Faith Pingzhou Electronics Co?
And git-annex assistant (http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/)
I tend to see SO questions as being rather simple, such as why doesn't this API work, or what's wrong with my Syntax or what does this stack trace mean.

When you are more advanced your questions become more architectural and harder to convey in text.

Perhaps that’s just me…
You know what's disgusting? This fucking bubble shit. Let's call a spade a spade. A bubble is when you're in a la la cloud of utopia. This wasn't that. I think there was about a zillion people (rough estimate) who knew where this was all heading.

It's disgusting because we don't get to say Aaron Swartz lived in a "freedom of information bubble".

Aaron Swartz downloaded some documents – was to be thrown in jail and eventually died by his own hand, perceivably because of the weight of the hammer being dropped down on him.

BUT...wreck the entire economy, cause thousands to lose their home, their job, their careers? NOTHING. What the fuck is going on?
I don't think I'd go full bow tie, but I'd conider one of these:
http://agreeordie.com/blog/musings/553-how-to-tie-a-necktie-...
Meet قلب, a programming language based on Arabic script
I can do two days at the gym, I can even socialize (I wonder if he he'd count 25% physical realm 75% internet realm relationships as healthy), but I don't know if I'll get out and do organic, open ended activities (frisbee, running with dog).

I'm definitely going to have to listen to more of this Robb Wolf, though. Thanks.
I do it all the time.

If you don't want to sit at a table, typically restaurants have a bar area where you can order food and it's not as strange to see people dining solo there. It's also socially acceptable to chat with other people at the bar.
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing the link to that extension. What makes you say Apple are waiting on this extension? I hadn't heard that before myself.
I am excellent at multi-tasking.

I have read and absorbed a great deal of both technical and non-technical literature whilst on the toilet.
The headline cracks me up. Has the implication that if you think you're terrible at it, you might be good.

And computer analogies are terrible here. My body is ridiculously good at multitasking in ways that I have learned through years of doing over and over. I never have to think about how to breath and walk, walk and talk, etc. Oddly, in some respects I'm terrible at talking and typing. Clearly something is going on with a shared resource. (Off topic, but there is a great Feynman video talking about the differences in how some people count in their heads leading to different people being able to do other things at the same time.)

None of this is to say I'm trying to argue for texting while driving. But to think that it is simply a matter of multitasking without some degree of training being involved seems disingenuous. When I first learned standard transmission, talking while driving was difficult to consider. Now, I can eat a taco in mild traffic.
The article didn't mention TLS-session caching. Sometimes keep-alive alone is not enough. Enabling session caching helped us to reduce nginx server CPU load by about 90%.

Add this in nginx.conf "http" configuration:

ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
ssl_session_timeout 10m;

This makes nginx store TLS-sessions in a cache for 10 minutes and tell the clients about it. Although some clients can still use a shorter duration.