skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must disagree.

Without the top navigation visible, removing the outer box is clearly a good idea. And splitting the bottom section instead of subsetting it looks better and is reasonable, but in my opinion is less usable.

Allow me to clarify. The original author took a widely-used technique from print media, that being the off-color box for parenthetical, tangential and optional content, and applied it to a web site. This affords the reader an impression as to the nature of the small box prior to reading it, which allows them to either specifically seek it out or ignore it when estimating information density and structure. The new design incorrectly presents the two last sections as related more concretely than the old design, diminishing the reader's capacity to characterize the information for absorption and rediscovery.
> Unfortunately, while a lawyer can certainly make a request to PayPal, their user agreements are loud and clear on the issue of freezing accounts. Essentially, you agree that they can close your account and hold your funds for any reason or no reason at all.

Every lawyer I have ever talked to formally or informally have said such things may be challengeable in court. That's why you want to talk to a lawyer.

> The freeze can last for up to 180 days from the date of your last chargeback, or from the date they froze the account, whichever is later.

Again quite true. If it is only 180 days though, that's one thing, but only to the point they are reasonable (again talk to a lawyer). If they hold onto it indefinitely that is theft.

> Good luck, and never use Paypal again. Use Bitcoins or Stripe.

Yep. Use anything else.
It's absurd. People are fetishizing someone who did nothing but kill himself. People need to get over his needless sacrifice and realize that the "onerous plea bargain" was merely six months in prison.

Or were we supposed to engage in a witchhunt against some prosecutor? I forget what we're supposed to do for "justice".
Aren’t people free to decide not to vaccinate?

Calling that a morally reprehensible decision (which it is) is not in any way problematic and has nothing to do with the government at all.
Post TPB-AFK: Media Evasive in coverage
Ask HN: Which plan should I offer as my free trial
Currently my SAAS App BugMuncher has one plan ($19 / Month), but I'm soon to be launching two more plans (http://bugmuncher.com/pricing.html - although the details and prices on that page aren't exactly what I'll be offering)

I was wondering what plan I should put people on when they start a free trial? My first thought was to put them on the top plan, to sort of give them a taste of everything BugMuncher has to offer, but I've noticed quite a few SAAS apps put people on the middle plan for a trial.
It seems turnjs.com is still using PayPal... At this point you should switch to another provider...
trololol?
"The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one", he said.
You're better off just remembering the key to begin with. I can remember the ones I used in high school, and there's lots of simple methods of increasing your retention of them. Simplest of all is using them regularly.
It's an unusual situation, royalties in most situations are the rule. And that's a good thing, right? Right?
This is the best security book I have ever read.
But that depends. I would suggest talking with an immigration lawyer. Surely the fact that such is non-tangible sales over the internet should allow some reasonable solution.

I have founded businesses with people from other countries and I have never had trouble with immigration laws provided that people weren't doing billable labor for customers in countries where they weren't supposed to.
I expect most of us would agree that a single function should ideally have exactly one main job and do it well.

Two functions are really doing the same job, and should probably therefore be combined into a single function, not when their behaviour is the same but when it should always be the same. As the article suggests, that determination is generally more about the software design or domain model than the mechanics of the current implementations.

Having said that, there is also a middle ground: create some sort of utility/helper function(s) to contain the code that is the same, coincidentally or otherwise, and then rewrite the two higher-level functions in terms of common helpers for now. If those higher-level functions need to diverge for good reasons later, at least it will be an active decision to separate the behaviours.

IME that sort of breakdown is unlikely to be beneficial with very short functions such as the examples here. There’s not enough commonality to justify the overheads of breaking everything up. However, in more realistic code, if you’ve got, say, 80% common operations between multiple cases, there are often some underlying concepts that can be extracted into their own functions. Those then become informatively named building blocks for the original functions.

Put another way, you might not want to consolidate the functions’ interfaces if they serve logically distinct purposes, but you can still consolidate some of their implementation details.
My mum would have probably lock me in a cupboard... Still would, actually. :(
> I would like to work more with actual mathematical proofs but I'm finding that tough to get into myself.

A professor at my CS dept. started using the Coq proof assistant[0] to teach some (functional) programming concepts and techniques. It has had a side effect of making the students more in to proofs.

Personally I think it's great - it shows that proving things is just programming.

I think the Software Foundations book[1] (or tuturial?) is a good place to start. There is also another good tutorial, but I can't remember its name. It's more about "getting work done" so I don't think it's as good as a starter.

[0]: http://coq.inria.fr/
[1]: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/
Its not surreal, just that people aren't moving on. Just solving the same problems over again using new toys; and often doing a poor job of it because they do not understand engineering fundamentals of their problem space.
Non equilibrium worlds
I'm not so sure I agree with this reasoning. I agree with asking questions about their business and strategy because such questions can lead to interesting conversations, but to outright refuse to do someone's project because you don't think it'll work is the epitome of arrogance.

Lots of people want BS projects and lots of people also only really learn through experience. That $10k project that is "obviously doomed to fail" might give them a fairly cheap education in business that will lead them to their next, more profitable project. Or, perhaps, they'll figure out they're not getting the results they want, ask why, and make the necessary changes to make it work with that $10k thing that's been built. Not everybody is irrational or unreasonable in the face of failure. (Also, that BS project might actually succeed too.)

Bear in mind that most businesses fail, and someone's first and second businesses are even more likely to fail. Trying to save someone from failing in this way is depriving them of the experience that they need to be successful later. It's akin to trying to stop a toddler from falling but also preventing them from learning to walk. Experience is a valuable teacher and we don't need to be out trying to save the world from failure. Failure is necessary.

One more example: if I go to my hair stylist and ask for it all to be shaved off, I'd hope that he'd tell me I wouldn't look good with a buzz cut. However, if I insisted, I'd also hope that he'd do it anyway.

Perhaps the only three good reasons that spring to mind for turning away a prospect are a lack of ability or willingness to pay, an inability to complete the project, and a severe personality conflict that's going to lead to lots of drama in the working relationship.
Why do you say he did nothing but kill himself?

He did a lot more than just that.

And does anyone think he killed himself because of facing 6 months of jail time?
Fortunately, all that was asked for was an existence proof.
Computer animation is just about the only thing I've used calculus for outside of school. So yeah, I hear you. :-)
No, but the rule of thumb was never to go into the forest when there was a storm with decent winds.
How to, politely, say "no" to clients and remain friendly afterwards is probably one of the more useful skills I've acquired in my career.

And "stupid" clients without an obvious business plan, etc. are not the sole reason to say "no". Much more common is the client who you can work with, but it's not the best option for you or the client. Because they're looking for the lowest price, not value received. Because they're looking at something that's only 60% in your sweet-spot, and isn't interested in the other 40% of your skill set. Because they don't have the budget for your current rates. And so on.
People going to jail for copyright infringement, which should really be a civil offense at best is pretty heinous in my books.

It's not apartheid but I find it (the punishment) really odd that it's acceptable in today's world.
Hmmm... I'm not sure we have reasonable evidence either way on this thing. At face value it is a seemingly artificial object where (reasonably) such a thing should not be, and (reasonably) you cannot honestly claim to know where in the universe aliens might come from.
What do you mean by "push" approach to DNS propagation?
looks pretty cool - will check it out
You mean, other than RFC 1996 and friends?
PayPal has a bad rep, but I think you're reading more arbitrary malice into the situation than is in evidence.

OP specifically reports that PayPal froze the account because he couldn't provide a necessary tax-reporting number. Getting the necessary number, and passing it to PayPal, may be all that is required. Talking to lawyers will just help the OP understand the situation... the lawyer may never need to communicate with PayPal at all.
I tend toward a similar pessimism.

Hawking has said that we need only look at the history of inter-species relationships on our planet (let alone race relationships) to get a hint of what exopolitics might look like. He goes on to mention that in terms of the search for alien life, we'd do best to keep our heads low.
Mostly agree. The customer is always (in their) right to be wrong. (As long as they pay for it.)

However one rule my Dad made sure to remember was that although someone deserves "a real beating" (obviously figuratively speaking here) you should always avoid being the tool used for that.
Not directly related - but it's something I come across so often when mentoring newbie devs that I thought I'd mention it in passing just in case anybody has this problem.

A pattern I sometimes see with newbies who understand the value of DRY is - as soon as they get to the point when they're about to repeat something or about to copy and paste - they stop themselves and start refactoring to remove the duplication they haven't typed into existence yet. They see adding the code that will produce the duplication as bad / waste.

Don't do that.

It's hard - because the code that they've not typed or copy/pasted doesn't exist or work yet. It's still in their head.

Make the duplication explicit first.

Type it out. Copy and paste. Change those two branches so they have exactly the same structure.

When you've done that - and everything is working and all tests pass - then refactor the heck out of it.

Much simpler, faster and less error prone.
Being branded a felon isn't a minor slap on the wrist in the US. It's a big deal.
For reference, there's also NeverWet[0] (I recall seeing their ad a few years ago) and MIT's ‘non-stick coating’ (has an HN thread[1]).

Apparently a few superhydrophobic coating solutions exist already. On the first sight it looks like Ultra Ever Dry beat everyone in getting their product to consumer market, though.

[0] http://www.neverwet.com/

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010762
Not sure if really on topic, but here goes.

YC alumni, what stage was your startup in when you applied for YC (idea, sketches, working prototype, launched product(s), etc) and did you make any radical changes to your product(s)?
Clark Griswold would be impressed.
Think of the building and infrastructure industry! Paint with this and via, trillions saved (and lots of jobs lost) over time
Read this Paul Graham's essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
This sounds a lot like Stockholm Syndrome :P
I still have a problem with twitter though. Every time I think of it I start thinking what a brilliant tool it could have been if they had focused on group internal messaging etc.

Obviously I'm not their target demographic ;-)
How would that work, would every authoritative nameserver keep a database of the IP addresses of all the clients that have requested records in the last week? And then hope those clients also run a name server on the same IP, so it can send some kind of DNS NOTIFY when the records change? What about my recursive DNS server on my LAN, which only has an RFC 1918 address? :)

Of course it'd be nice to push changes quickly, but I doubt there is any feasible way to coordinate that on the internet. The next best thing you can do is to lower your TTL in advance.
I'm no expert, but my in understanding a 'push' approach wouldn't work because there are so many different DNS servers (Every ISP and Hosting provider has them, plus third party providers, and internal corperate DNS servers) it wouldn't really be feasible to push changes to all of them instantly.

Really the TTL (Time To Live) should allow fairly quick DNS propagation. The problem with TTL is that you need know your change is coming in advance.

Eg: If your domain's TTL is currently 24 hours, you need to change it to something much shorter (say 5 minutes) at least 24 hours before the DNS change happens, as this will mean that every DNS server will know to update its record for your domain every 5 minutes before you actually make a DNS change.

The other problem is to 'improve' response times, some DNS servers (particularly ISPs) don't honour the TTL directive.
Wow, thanks for the info. I always liked proof based math more than the applied math. Linear Algebra is going to be a lot more interesting now.
It's too late for keeping our heads low. There's a sphere of EM radiation travelling at 3x10^8 m/s that started expanding out from Earth about the time that we turned on the first radio set. It announces our presence to anything capable listening.
Check out the website http://watch.tpbafk.tv/
Kind of looks like a drill bit to me
I love (sarcasm) how a supposedly technologically superior and enlightened species of non-earth intelligent beings would only be out to destroy or punish us, according to science fiction and a lot of people.
Very nice, well done.

Recreating the blank segments is misguided, it makes it harder to read the clock. They should just disappear if usability is a goal.
I don't know if I agree 100%. Sometimes the extra abstraction helps you solve the problem in the first place.

In my experience the OP is right. The worse problem is when you eliminate duplications in the wrong place or using the wrong abstraction, leading to brittle abstractions that break in the future.
I'm sure they can see from the pixels and from seeing quite a bit of shoops in their time ;)
Do you remember what happened when the europeans travelled around the world? 90% of populations died from new illnesses. They basically saw nothing ill in settling and displacing the remaining population.
Free, open, secure and convenient communications
A look into Custom Filters reference implementation
Exactly. I'd love to see this with sentiment analysis (ideally done by humans instead of support vector machines)

The data from people using Senti to rank movie sentiment has been interesting: https://senti.crowdflower.com
Göğüs Küçültme Ameliyatı
> Intel should provide the main code for UEFI

i am not sure what "main code" is supposed to mean (i am no native speaker). but there is a reference implementation by intel and according to matthew garret most real-world implementations are only slightly changed.
I also own every duck book he ever released. I grew up with his and Carl Barks' comics. I still enjoy them.

Btw, Don Rosa and Carl Barks are almost like national heroes in Finland where I grew up. When Carl Barks visited the country, there were people on the streets celebrating. Don Rosa's visits are also a big thing.
If the DOJ are pushing for 7 years, then "as many as 2 years" seems in direct contradiction to me.
Gen Y and the Growth Mindset
Don't think it would work, because taggers use knives to carve into thing half the time.
I guess this is what it might have felt like when people first saw plastics.
I was hoping for something better of HN thread, than emotional exclamations.
Oh, well. "You can't always get what you want".
That's a piece of advice I keep hearing all the time, but I think it can be dangerous.

Of course, you have to start small - there usually isn't a choice not to. But, I think it's best to have a product which can serve a huge market in its most basic form without adding more features.

There are very few examples of startups which start with a product with features highly specific to one group of users and then expand out successfully to a huge market. Most startups die or get stuck in a vertical.
Yeah - there are probably exceptions ;-)

However what I've seen happen on multiple occasions is somebody merrily driving along churning out code then suddenly hitting the "ohhh - duplication is bad" wall and halting as they feel their way around the duplication and abstract they may need (or may not - since they've not written the code yet).

Duplication is not a mortal sin. Having it sit there for a few hours while you work out the meat of the problem isn't going to kill any kittens.

And often the easiest way to fully grok the abstraction that you need is to make the duplication really, really obvious.
I think it would be better to call bitcoin for what it is: entertainment for grown ups.

Whether you use it get drugs, gamble, bet or speculate on some other place doesn't matter. It has become a game on its own right just like UO, WoW or EVE ... You can view it as game of a currency instead of currency of a game. It has intrinsic entertainment value, thus a commodity that can be priced in real currency.

Nobody bats an eye when a mmorpg makes millions in revenues, nobody bats an eye when a gamer builds a four grands rig. Why should we care about bitcoin replacing real money now or ever? It is not like governments will readily hand over monetary control to its citizens anyway.
I think both Intel [1] and Google [2] are working on some open source implementations of secure boot.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4O...

[2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4O...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI3O...
Evasi0n 1.2 Jailbreak Tool released Brings Fixes For Weather App Bug
Aaron isn't the first person whose life and untimely death has been a fillip to a cause.

Aaron's story today has 3 strands.

1) Depression and suicide, and the improvements in mental health that can be achieved

2) Judicial over reach and lawyers being bullies vs doing their jobs by going to the limits

3) The state of affairs with copy right law and the causes which Aaron himself fought for

Each strand has been taken up and defended, and of course not all of them can be done at once.

As far as I can tell, this topic is being taken up and handled better than it usually would be, when it would get spun into a political talking point without reflection on the events and their triggers.

I suspect that there are some sites and articles which lean to one angle or the other, but this must always be the case. Such is life.

Do note - the most recent article landing up on HN (the Slate article) has been a great example of Good Journalism, and it let the readers (largely) draw their own conclusions

Maybe there are other vastly biased articles, which I have missed.

----

The poster isn't quite accurate on how someone contemplating suicide thinks.

> There’s an obvious connection here. If we want to stop people from killing either each other or themselves, we shouldn’t martyrize people who distribute death, whether to self or others. Despite external pressures, Aaron Swartz holds the ultimate responsibility for what he did.

Someone who intends to see suicide through, is NOT looking for attention or to be made a Martyr.

I am pretty sure that this has been discussed on HN. Others have taken this view, and fortunately people with an understanding of the factors behind suicide have commented how this isn't how it works.

The line "Suicide is a cop out" comes to mind, and its dangerous impact on driving people away from help has been mentioned.

The Human body is a vast complicated machine which is designed to do everything in its power to survive.

When its pushed to a level of compromised programming to the extent that it actively plans to end itself, a comment like that utterly mis reads whats going on, and does vastly more harm than good.
Tools and Tips on how to Optimize Images for the Web
"Off of" is one of my pet peeves as well. Unfortunately, its usage is legitimate, if sometimes unpopular.

"Off of used to be standard in English; the MWDEU starts off with a Shakespearean usage [1592] and continues with Pepys [1668] and Bunyan [1678]. In the last century, they show it used by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Harry Truman, among others. So if it is making a comeback, it’s no harbinger of linguistic doom, just a return to form."

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/on-off-of/
I'm not saying the tesla couldn't be better or that they couldn't learn something from Sony. But part of the author's complain was that he had one reading in the evening and when the temperature dropped overnight his reading the next morning was drastically lower.

Also a while a digital camera does get to spend some time outdoors it spends most of it's life in fairly people comfortable environment.
Wear, tear and abrasions is what will certainly reduce the possible area of deployment.
Unless this materials happens to be very resistant to abrasions.
Very interesting technology, known since more than 10 years now and widespread in 2007-8 on the WWW.

I guess many applications will be found in every day life.
Top tips to get noticed by the startups you want to join
So a hypothetical scenario: a client says to me "I've got this great idea to compete with Facebook by using red navbars instead of blue". Should I refuse the job because their idea won't work?

I would clarify what I can and can't do for them: "I can build a working product that will scale to 10,000 concurrent users assuming you're prepared to pay $5K per month in hosting costs. I can't deliver millions of users, protection from patent infringements, etc."

Also, if I think the idea is going nowhere, I would be careful about being paid up front.

If their happy with my terms, I'm happy to receive their money.
Perspective switch: "It's an alien weird shiny object much larger than us, and it's mobile! It has arms and lets Hmm...we won't shoot it down, let's wait and see what it does next. I think it's looking at us directly now! On the side it reads, 'C U R I O S I T Y'"
Vote for Open Source FPS Warsow on Steam Greenlight
This is a bit arrogant and misguided. As another commenter pointed out, if you go to a hair dresser, you do get suggestions about what will look good on you, but the hair dresser won't refuse service if you go against the advice. As a developer, you can pick and choose your projects. If you don't want to work on ideas you think aren't good enough, cool; but don't make generalizations. Doing paid work for someone isn't the same as being a co-founder(as in investing or working for free).