skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) The legal brief matters a lot since there's no due process and this is all conducted in the executive branch in secret

2) Some headings and introductions don't constrain the scope of the legal logic.

3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUUdg3K8Q9g
I DON'T agree with this conclusion.

You can easily just test both (with Neither as your control) and survey your users to find out which group is more satisfied with your UI.

When it comes to what customers want or will like, what you "think" is almost always wrong, so stop thinking and start testing.
Boy Tries To Win Back Ex-Girlfriend On Valentine’s Day By Building Her An App
Vertu chooses Android over Windows for luxury handset
Ok, maybe that's what they mean. There's no reasoning they make which would assure that this can't happen on US soil.
They dont think it be like it is but it do
No one wants to be using the same app for 10 years.

VIM and Emacs users everywhere disagree ;)
From what I understand, he didn't take the six months due to (a) not wanting to be branded a felon for life, and (b) fear of being raped.
Amazon Route 53 Introduces DNS Failover
At the end of the day, it is a trade-off: do I stick with a current framework full of security holes, indicative of poor design and keep the daily patch cycle fingers-crossed, or do I draw a line, migrate to a less magic less shiny but more secure better engineered framework and focus my time on building my apps instead of spending it all on patching.
Tough call.
Reminds me very strongly of a simpler (and in my opinion more elegant) notation that I have been using for a long time:

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/collaboration_made_simple_wi...
OK, I'm going to pitch in:

The button should be called "My Settings" (or just "Settings") because it's a command I'm shouting at the program. Compare with "Save"/"Open"/"Like". I want to open MY settings. If the settings can't be loaded the program should tell me: "There was an error loading your settings", because the program is talking to me. The documentation could tell me the following: "To open your settings, click the My Settings button". So yes, I favor the conversation pattern. Just pretend you're talking to a human or to a computer with speech recognition.
Can you translate those 11 words into German?
Trying to teach someone non-technical how to use Git, even at the simplest of levels, is very, very difficult. I tried once for a project a friend and I were working on, and eventually gave up -- the learning curve was just too high for something he probably wouldn't use ever again.

This, however, would have been almost perfect: not too complicated, easy-to-teach, and portable.
I would definitely welcome a Vim plugin with syntax highlighting.

Just to totally overcomplicate it, some method of going through the changes one-by-one and accepting or rejecting them, à la Word's `Track Changes' feature, would be the icing on the plugin's cake.
He's humble.

If you read what he wrote (not just this quote), it is clear that he has a better grasp of OO than most OO practitioners and language designers.

And especially since OO is not well defined (see pg's quote of Jon Rees' characterization), most OO people can, and often do, claim everyone who uses a different OO definition than they do has no experience.
I'm not sure I understand that point correctly. The Republic of Ireland isn't part of the United Kingdom.
For the people arguing over how long skeumorphism has been around in software design, all based on different thresholds of levels of "realism": Any graphical interface you can think of has skeuomorphic properties to some extent. Even a bare terminal window is (even if for purely practical reasons) analogous to the strip of paper pushing out of old printer terminals.

The bare concept of a buttons, mouse pointers and icons are all analogous to physical objects, which makes sense from a usability perspective since people mostly relate to new things metaphorically.

The idea of shaded and highlighted buttons on a leather textured surface, however, makes no particular sense from a material or metaphorical perspective. I recognize it as an aesthetic choice more than anything, and an ugly one to boot.
Alt Text: Chinese Hackers Are Responsible for Everything Wrong With My Life
I had the misfortune of working for a firm where there were lots of actuaries.

Every day the team leader would ask a junior to run his pricing model for a structured product.

The junior would duly press F9 and the macro would commence, with the screen flashing away like a strobe light.

24 hours later the macro would stop and the boss would return to find out the answer, which was usually wrong by an order of magnitude.
If you want to do any sort of stock analysis, quantmod is really great as it bundles a number of other related packages with financial application together:
http://www.quantmod.com/.

If you have to deal with directed graphs, iGraph http://igraph.sourceforge.net/.

Related Blog Posts

http://www.r-chart.com/2010/06/stock-analysis-using-r.html

http://www.r-chart.com/2010/06/analyze-twitter-data-using-r....
Is this a design problem with the Tesla? With my petrol car I know when the car is completely filled with fuel. It is obvious in Tesla?

Pure speculation. This could be a UI problem. The journalist thought the car was charged and ready to go but it wasn't.
> But please don't extrapolate your humble experience to the entire industry and don't tell people working on large complicated (real) projects how they must write code, because they have some experience you don't have.

Don't take this the wrong way, I mostly agree with your points regarding the missing "professional culture" among us programmers, just yesterday I sent an email out to our internal list urging my coworkers not to use one-letter variables anymore and explaining to them why that is bad, but when it comes to web projects somehow not being "real" programming I'm afraid you're wrong.

It is true, some momentum was lost when the "open-data" mantra that was flying in the air around 2004-2005 gave way to today's walled gardens and one-page AJAXy apps, but there are still interesting things happening on the web.
> - Why do I need a class for streaming JSON - Python's got a perfectly good `yield` for returning tokens in such situations.

See the msgpack-cli example at the bottom. Say you have a function that returns a generator for tokens in Python. You would need another function that builds objects out of them. How do you customize how objects are being built? A class makes that simpler because each of the methods are extension points you can override.

But yeah, a token stream would be much appreciated.

> - Why would I ever design the JSON library to be extendable at the tokenizer level?

For instance if you want to skip past objects. That's what we're doing for instance for unwanted input data. That implicitly also prevents hash collision DOS attacks because we never build hash tables for things that we don't want. It also gets rid of the suspension of execution when a garbage collector runs and cleans up a nested structure. I can make you tons of examples where the "build a tree, reject a tree" approach destroys an evented Python server.

> - The 2GB JSON example is just weird. If you care about such use cases, you a) most likely have a limit on data size at webserver level, b) use proper formats for handling that size of data (I really doubt there's no better data representation once you get to GB sizes).

Try using a streaming JSON API like Twitter's firehose. Most people just give up and use XML because there is SAX or if they go with JSON they newline delimit it because most libraries are horrible or useless for parsing streamed JSON.
Most modern newspapers wouldn't last 5 minutes without large advertisers. This fact should not be underestimated.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. H.L. Menken.

A fair number of people can't put it together. The fact that we've extracted and re-released to the atmosphere a significant fraction of the hydrocarbons which have been sequestered via biological activity over a ~260 million year period, within a century, seems to escape a lot of folks.

As does the distinction between energy sources and energy media. And while technically fossil fuels are themselves a medium for sunlight, humans don't have to drive that particular conversion.

Besides, pedantism is one of the rare pleasures of old age.
Oh believe me, I know the mindset. It annoys the hell out of me.

As soon as someone mentions (for instance) hypothetical longevity treatments, some talking head pops up to tell you how it needs to be regulated and probably put on hold while we consider the societal ramifications and how fair it all is and really, philosophically aren't we all 'supposed' to live a certain length of time and that gives meaning to our lives?

And mostly I just want to punch them in the face until they shut up, because people that think like that will be the reason I can't get robot parts and live forever :)

So I can understand if you think it's important to frame the debate in a particular way, though I don't really make the distinction myself between your two categories of things.
> You can do the same with python's msgpack as the C# version

You can't. The unpacker in msgpack for Python only reads full objects. The C# version lets me go into and out of streaming at will and even skip past objects without reading them into memory. The only thing the Python version of msgpack can do with the unpacker is buffering up bytes internally until an object is ready. That object however could still expand into a 10GB blob of data which I would then have to postprocess.
It's called Fost-adopt in our state. When a child is taken from a home they have to put them somewhere. If you let them know you want to adopt then they will give you children with a very high chance of never being able to return to the parents. Instead of paying for adoption you get paid. Up to about $1,500/mo pre-adoption.
More details can be found in my blog post at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/create-a-backup-website-u... .
I don't know what point you're trying to make here but it's lost on me. Are you trying to imply that it's a good idea for North Korea to have nuclear weapons? That it avoids misery in some way? That's pathological.

Go read my other posts in this thread. If I had one wish it would be that the DPRK regime would step down so that the rest of the world would have the "opportunity" to dig the North Korean people out of the positively savage hell-hole they are living in right now. The best case scenario is that that happens and then it costs tens of billions of dollars to fix North Korea and put them on a level of, oh, say Yemen or Bangladesh, let alone South Korea. For that I'll be happy to see an increase in my taxes.

In the meantime millions of North Korean citizens are living in a stalinist police state, many of them a hair's breadth away from conditions of starvation. Oh, and their country is under the tyranny of a megalomaniac who is happy to continue the traditions of squandering his nation's few resources to build weapons to terrorize the rest of the world (to add to the long list of efforts in the same vein using everything from terrorism, such as when they downed Korean Air Flight 858, to espionage to exporting missile technology) rather than try to dig his country out of brutal, crushing poverty.

If there was a way to get rid of the North Korean regime without causing millions of civilian deaths on the Korean peninsula I'd probably be supportive of it, even if it meant an otherwise horrifying number of civilian deaths. Every year an unknown number of North Koreans are killed by the regime, perhaps as many as tens of thousands. Some estimates are that as many as 1.5 million North Koreans were killed in gulags during Kim Il Sung's reign. This is one of those rare cases where bringing up the Nazis and Hitler does not "Godwinize" the thread and is instead a fully apt and sobering point of comparison. A holocaust of North Koreans has happened, and the only reason it hasn't received the attention it deserves is because the country is very closed off and people are more concerned about what horrible thing to the world outside of North Korea the regime is likely to do next.
GBP... The price of a Domino's pizza hasn't changed in the last 6 month's in my area. With this site the price could feasibly change several times in a single day.
Almost every new technology is more expensive at first, may be difficult to deploy and requires additional effort to be made interoperable with existing stuff, so what exactly is your point? BTC solves some hard problems in an interesting way, that this comes at a price is a no-brainer.
Google renames Circles icon on Google+ to ‘Find people’
Zombie Alert Goes To Air On US Television
ShowHN: a minimal Torrent search-engine experiment (it scrapes trackers for you)
People don't talk about this anymore for some reason, but I think both Jack and Armin are really just approaching API design in 2 different ways - top-down and bottom-up. The problem is, most people stick with the same approach through out and end up ignoring that programmers are mere mortals too, and they have human needs.

Expanding on Armin's dichotomy, top-down designs like Python's open() or jquery plugins start with giving 70-80% of users APIs that are as simple as possible for their most frequent use cases while shielding them from the sausages underneath.

Bottom-up designs like Java's standard library or POSIX start with LEGO building blocks that solve the most fundamental pieces of largely academic computer science problems and just give them out to their end users and expect them to be able to assemble Tower Defense by solving this LEGO puzzle first.

The problem with sticking entirely to their 2 approaches is that you end up either ignoring power users or making healthy adults with normal IQs feel stupid. There is no reason you can't serve 100% of your user base by incrementally evolving your API approaches and provide 2 sets of APIs within the same library, with the top-down easy one shielding the bottom-up sausage factory that takes care of the meat grinding for you. Most API designers don't realize this and won't ever go there. Extremists and egoists with lots of opinions will spending hundreds of man years to promote their One True Way of doing things. They'll say things like "no leaky abstractions!" or "these enterprise people are just making things too complicated to create jobs!", when the simple truth is probably just that they don't understand how people think.

Make your libraries easy to do things that are easy, but make hard things possible too.
Hi thanks, I realised only after I posted it!
Bitcoins can be used to purchase marijuana, Bitcoins can be used to buy Dominos Pizza ... coincidence ... I don't think so.
Creator here. It's obviously a scratch-my-on-itch weekend project. I'm curious to know what you think about it, and what you would improve. Thanks!
Bonus Biogroup to grow artificial bones
I think the point is that it's not really a currency if nobody can print a menu with it as the denomination that is valid for even a month. MSFT or AAPL isn't a currency either. Sure, you can use it to buy money, but there's a reason no one even tries to accept it for a pizza.

To be a currency, I do believe you should be able to print it on price tags that change no more often than weekly!
You know you're a startup person when you read that, remember your own similar experiences in your startup, and then realise how much you miss it all.
The new plans are quite affordable, esp for startups like ours...
You can get a free wheel off with a rock and a nail, and break a chain with a rock and a knife. I've done both when stuck in the middle of nowhere without the appropriate tools.

And at a push, you can make one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukudu

Bikes can be improvised.
Does this feature use EBS to store the state?
OP here:

The current news is that they have actually started building a production center.

I don't know anything about this field, but the potential is exciting.

The link (in Hebrew): http://www.calcalist.co.il/markets/articles/0,7340,L-3595334...
At some point soonish I intend to have a go at loading dynamic libraries in bare metal on the Raspberry Pi. I'll be on the lookout for stuff like this for .so's. Suggestions welcome.
I wholeheartedly agree. The turbo encabulator has been stuck at a local minima for far too long. They need to embrace modern gimble thermoplyonics and just release version 4.0 already.
For a scientific study you are absolutely correct, however, this is a business and in business you only deal with the self-selecting group that would use your service. The better question would be what percentage of the market would actually use this service, especially knowing that it has and over 99% success rate. In my experience women often want a fast divorce and men want a cheap one so if she can provide that she has a winning business proposition.
Show HN: your personal, self-built productivity tool
Care to share a screenshot and the 'killer feature' of any of your personal, self-built productivity tools? eg. I made my own calendar and money-tracker last year - there are no other users, it makes no money, I have no plans to make it public, but it holds my life together :)

http://i.imgur.com/h2keJDg.png
GREAT BECAUSE... it tells me how much I'm going to get paid this month.

Absolutely no ulterior motive here (ie. I'm not canvassing opinions for a productivity app startup or anything), just interested.
Would love to read some case studies around it... URLs?
Can it also cover the electricity used in mining?
Now this is excellent! The other one is slower than using pen, but this one is faster AND better!

Until now, when I had to proofread text, I would take screenshots, put it on a tablet and then write on it with pen. Or use Microsoft Word review features.

But now I'm going to use this. You just changed my life.
A mod fixed the blogspam, so it now directs to the original article.
Version control is useful, though, if you want to have an proofreader work on an incomplete draft while the author is adding content.
I think "perverse incentives" covers it pretty well. Reporters who care more about truth than narrative are filtered out of most media outlets due to the basic economic forces involved. Season 5 of The Wire elucidates it better than I ever could (and of course, the series was crafted by a former journalist).
Are you suggesting they allow spammers? Every time I remove a spammer post I submit it to /r/ReportTheSpammers, and they get killed almost immediately. What else can they do outside of that? Not allow new users to vote and comments?

The best they can do is make spammers be unclear on if they're having any effect or not, by obscuring votes, or by secretly banning them without them realizing.

It's a tough problem to get right, especially without making the experience worse for everybody else. I think they've found a happy medium.
> So, I guess the question I ask as someone who doesn't write a ton of python code is: Is that true?

I don't think it is. His objections to the json library API can be addressed without introducing a single class.

He seems to want access to the internal implementation of converting bytes into a single Python object. That is probably just an internal function that can just be exposed. If he wants to override it from the top level, the library could permit that by just adding the function as a default parameter.

He wants it to deal with streaming. Python generators can help with this. The library could be refactored into implementing a json.load_stream function instead, which takes a string generator and returns some kind of object stream generator. The original json.loads function could be replaced with a wrapper around it for backwards compatibility and for API users who don't want the additional complexity.

None of this involves writing classes. A generator could be seen as a type of class instance, and one can implement a generator with classes, but generators have a well known and simple API which eliminates the need to define a new API, as the traditional writing of classes would do.

It seems to me that the writer has little experience of not using classes, so wants to solve every problem he has with a class. The API problems he want to address are genuine, but he's blind to any solution that doesn't use classes.
I have been a regular user of Google Reader and love it... However, I've noticed in the last couple of months that every now and then, there are some hitches - either new feeds are not shown or the site suddenly slows down like anything... On doing some quick search Google, I realise it's not just me.. Time to move to other service I guess...
Regarding the iPhone's role in all this: in the early 2000s, Apple's OS X HIG used to make the distinction somewhat clear when to use the "more" skeumorphic/realist brushed metal style and when to stick to the core Aqua interface with its realist textures, yet abstract meaning. The developer was supposed to ask herself/himself the question that this post is invoking as well: is this specific interaction more easily understood if it maps to a physical object? They used QuickTime as an example, since it related to a real world object: a VHS deck/DVD player.

Then Apple started breaking with its own HIG. The Finder was the prime example, once it adopted brushed metal.

The main shift, however, came not with the iPhone but two years earlier: Dashboard widgets were encouraged to have extreme visual richness, independent of whether there was a real world equivalent or not. Take the Weather widget, for instance. Previous to the slight adjustments in iOS6, the Weather app spoke the exact same visual language as the 2005 widget. You even got the grey linen when you flipped widgets to get to their settings.

Of course, iOS devices were the factor with enough impact to proliferate this style into so many designers' visual language, but this distinction in the timeline slightly takes apart the nice logic behind Apple's decision to push this type of design. Mobile devices had less to do with it than Apple's desire to create a wow factor in their UI. The touch target argument doesn't apply to widgets, neither does the "device becomes the software" point, and of course Apple was completely fine with having 100% inconsistent, heavily colored, heavily textured interfaces be on screen side-by-side, since that was the whole point of putting these widgets together on a Dashboard: they all came and went at once.

Now, I am actually not saying this to criticize the style. In my opinion, it showed guts, curiosity, and showmanship. And it worked.
Nor do I want to attack the article - lots of great points in there. However, I thought it would be interesting to underline the typical Apple manner in which this stuff came to be.

(Of course, if anyone really wanted to stick to their guns, they could point out that Cupertino was already working on the iPhone at the time Dashboard came around. Maybe they were just giving the style a test run with full knowledge of its role in their future. The timelines only overlap sparsely from all we can tell, but it's possible. Still. That doesn't invalidate the wow-focus its implementation in Dashboard implies.)
Will future civil servants temper their actions because they don't want to find their names in the middle of another shitstorm like this?

I would agree with this statement if you changed it to read 'temper their actions against well connected individuals'. I'm still unsure if this is a net gain.
No. For that we have HOAs.
It's interesting although I do wonder how we can get the masses to learn and start using something like this. I know it looks trivial to you and I but don't under estimate how not tech-savvy most people are.