skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, an overwhelming majority have expressed frustration at this title changing, but they insist on doing it routinely. I understand fixing editorialized titles, but they are not doing that. In most cases, they change it to a far more useless title.

Often the article title will have some implied context, and that is completely lost when it is posted to a general aggregation site like HN. This is just one of many cases where changing the title makes no sense at all.
This article reminds me of an essay by Edsger Dijkstra, EWD1036 [0], comparing digital vs analog processes, and how they lead us to think of discrete bugs vs continuous errors.

(I recall it as arguing against the naive tendency of considering machines as continuous devices).

Interestingly, Dijkstra also uses a musician as example, for the alternative view:

if the violinist slightly misplaces his finger, he plays slightly out of tune

[0] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036...
Criminal offence in the UK. (With theoretical 5 year sentence, not sure what you'd need to do to get that actual sentence though.)
Extending Rails
> Does ledger allow you to annotate things such as stock accounting method?

You can make annotations on transactions in various ways, but handling LIFO or FIFO or whatever is kind of out of scope. It's been discussed at length on the mailing list and the conclusion was that it would best be handled by an external system that loads your ledger data.
How Can Using Apps Make Your Life Easier?
Next time you title your thing "X Wars, the game" please provide an actual game to play, not an article. False advertising :(
but... download a copy of skyfall and watch fbi/cia/irs/statepolice and anyone else within 50 miles of your house come down on you like a ton of bricks.

slight exaggeration, right now, but it's certainly where hollywood would like to see things move.
If I had to summarize this blog post in one phrase it would be: work the problem not the person. The act of solving the problem changes the person.

The major exception to this is intent. When a person isn't interested in solving the problem this technique will be less effective. And since all pre-college education is compulsory there will always be a significant percentage of students in need of an attitude adjustment.
I feel like I see this article at least once a month.
When we say bug, I guess we just mean "avoidable issue" of a relatively modest importance, but that can have big impact, right?

Then, if you learn singing or violin, and you are "tone-deaf" or near tone-deaf, then it is not a bug, it is an inability to love and learn music, and no amount of patching will fix it for real, even if it could hide the problem under the carpet for a while, in the case of piano learning. (Because a "tone-deaf" could play piano relatively well, but probably won't be able to play violin.)

I would love to be convinced that "math-deaf" do not exists or is only very rare, but it simply do not match with my experience. To take an example: When I was young, and still now: I find the "open" and "closed" segment symbolised by ]----[ and [----] to be a very enlighting and powerful piece of mathematics. But when I tried to explain it to people who are not in love with math, I just get blank stares: they would understand it, be able to use it, but would never have tears in their eyes when trying to explain it to someone else. I think they just don't see the beauty of it.

Not seeing the beauty in math is not to be considered a defect or a bug. I'd say on the contrary: seeing beauty in math is borderline psycho and an anomaly, just like seeing music graphically or being haunted with stories (Balzac was). But it helps a lot for math studies, just as loving music will help learning music. And math studies are important for most scientific or engineering careers.

To wrap this up, it means that nature is not fair: some kids are gifted, some are not. In fact I do not see any reason for nature to be fair, and many events show enough it isn't (See Lisbon earthquake). The "bug theory" of the OP is trying to hide this fact, as is the "learning disability" movement.

Fairness is an invention of human beings.
Kenny Kellogg: Alex White and Moneyball for Music
The cost of Firefox switching to WebKit would be enormous, likely even infinite. Too much of Firefox and its extensions depend heavily on non-HTML features of Gecko.
You know, I wrote a really fast HTTP router using Redis pub/sub and a pool of single threaded nodejs processes running on seperate EC2 boxes and it worked great. I don't know why it is so hard to scale RoR when it is single-threaded.
"Only 50 such scans have ever been done."

"The aim the $40m programme is to map the entire human neural wiring system by scanning the brains of 1,200 Americans."
That's not being pedantic. That's mixing up "space" as in "the region of space above the heaven, for most part consisting of vast emptiness and occasional celestial bodies" and "space" as the "A continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied" and of course it's technical usage in physics.
And this is being pedantic for the hell of it :-)
That makes sense. Thank you for clearing it up for me. Sorry everyone for the off-topic post.
That's a great inventive to turn informer! It's perfectly logical, in a certain horrible kind of way.
Hi
Looks great, looking at the code, I'm trying to wrap my head around how you do your resource loading, the require call doesn't seem like RequireJS, and I found that the require method is defined in the bundle.js file. Are you using http://bundlejs.com?
A CPU/RAM/battery stats chart bar for tmux
CSS selectors - mobile
> [...] but they're worse when you're suing a megabank, because the suit impacts the broader economy.

I don't disagree with the factual correctness of this statement, but the implication is unsettling. Any kind of legal action from the government - from throwing someone in jail for possession of marijuana to suing banks over financial crimes - has negative economic consequences. If we send someone to jail for drug possession, we spend a lot of money investigating and prosecuting them, we pay to keep them locked up, we happily give up their productivity and any taxes they would have paid, and we reduce their long-term value to society by hanging a public arrest record on them. So, where do we stop using economic consequences as a reason for not enforcing laws?

I'm somewhat highly-compensated and I contribute a lot back to the economy, though consumption and taxes. Should the government prosecute me and someone who only earns minimum wage differently, since prosecuting me and throwing me in jail will have a substantially higher negative impact on the economy? Maybe I get 2 or 3 free misdemeanors per year, your average millionaire gets a free felony, and if you are on Fortune's top 100 list you get 3 free felonies?

I'm seeing more and more justification of not going after big companies and powerful executives due to the economic impact, and I think that is getting awfully close to codifying different legal systems for rich people and poor people. Certainly it already exists to a degree, but at least we sort of pretend that it is distasteful now.
I ended up forking this and adding a couple of changes for OSX. The memory statistics weren't being displayed correctly. I also added the time remaining until empty/fully charged.

For the interested: https://github.com/jh3/rainbarf
I am curious. What are your arguments?
> What can it be applied to in our daily lives?

I can only speak for myself but for me, the fact that math did not have any daily life application was one of the greatest reason to love it.

I despised physics even if I was fairly good at it. I considered physics was taking pure math virgin to a mud field and raped her there with "daily life" problems.
The drawback is that you are responsible for security vulnerabilities in the libraries you install.

That is a much larger problem than most people realize. It makes vulnerable dependencies fairly impossible to deal with.

If an OpenSSL bug comes out, I upgrade OpenSSL on all systems in my enterprise. Everything linked to it is automagically taken care of. If a vulnerable library is buried into jar files (or whatever equivalent in your language of choice), I'm screwed. You'll never find those, and there is no assurance that your systems are patched.

If I put on my developer or end-user hat, I totally agree with you. But for most software, this is dangerous.
> We are just talking about how oneday we might have the freedom to take such a decision for ourselves.

Unfortunately, watchdog groups like to argue that having that option is detrimental. They usually conflate it with claims of "ethnic eugenics". Btw, to a large extent today you already have the ability to make genetic modifications before insemination or embryo implantation. Screening too..
The real question to ask here is how much of this is connected to the grid? China's current 5 year plan is trying to build the wires to connect this wind. As of 2012, barely 10% of all built wind was even connected to the grid...
Let's not forget that Google, unlike Mozilla, is able to tell over a billion users "Download a faster, better browser now"
Well, I'd say any person with a bit of practical experience will understand that the way BBC (one of the most influential medias in the world) policies are set is not by hiring people and letting them work based on high morale criteria. I have myself worked for BBC, all the important decisions in the department I was with were run trough and ultimately dictated by some Lady, that was the boss of some media fairness committee. That committee was privately funded, completely outside of public control.

On the Internet politics in UK, just look at the laws the Parliament passes. All the traffic in UK is now logged by the providers and available to the government agencies. There are a few black lists. The government is spending a ton of money on the Cisco, IBM, Oracle systems also employed by China and Saudi Arabia.
My Most Embarrassing (And Effective) Productivity Technique
I don't know. I mean, in theory those that call themselves communists and act as flagbearers of communism would be communists. Just like those which call themselves capitalists and act like capitalists are capitalists whether or not that deviates from "pure, theoretical {communism|capitalism}". It's a distinction without a difference, in practice. It's like saying, well, priests who molested aren't really priests because priests aren't supposed to do that, according to any doctrine.
I like that I can buy btc there, but I immediately move my coins to blockchain after purchase - coinbase is improving but they are not nearly there yet
The counterargument is that, if you canvassed license fee payers, I bet more of them would care about seeing Madagascar without ads than about DRM issues. So should the BBC pursue what a small number of people loudly claim to be the 'public interest', or should they aim for what the public is interested in?

Thinking more strategically, the BBC needs some high profile popular things, including imported movies, to keep people on side. If they lose their popularity, it's only a matter of time before a politician wins votes by promising to slash the license fee.
Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
Pretty open ended question. Just trying to see what cool stuff is out there to play around with.
The fact that there are algebraic numbers inexpressible by roots still bugs me somewhat, but I'm not sure there's a suitably elementary explanation.
I'm still confused: since you're using NodeJS, I imagine your dynos are effectively handling a large amount of concurrent requests. This should in turn negate any impact of long-running requests, since they don't cause further requests to be queued in any way. So, where are requests (or responses) being queued (or lost) in your app? In Rabbit? Are you getting errors and slowness as streaks rather than isolated random events? Could it be due to spinup time of new backend workers, or something along those lines?
And this is exactly the problem with popular "simple" explanations of complex matters - people explain their prejudices ("banks rob the common man") instead of explaining what actually happened.
I never said I was slacking off. In fact I got more done than anyone else on the team. It just felt like I was there only to work.

I openly told everyone how I felt. That's when I decided I didn't want to be a professional programmer anymore. I talked to boss man and we mutually agreed that there was no way for me to be happy being a cog in the wheel.
Somewhat more generally, the space of interesting numbers you can write compactly with traditional notation ("4", "sqrt(2)", "log(7)"), combined with the ways you can compactly write a relation between two numbers (+, /, Ackermann's function), combined with allowing two or three or maybe four numbers (even before they start showing up multiple times as you show there), combined with the number of ways in which a result may be "interesting", results in an inevitable population of combinations of numbers and operations that have an "interesting" result that aren't "really" interesting, or perhaps rather, are only interesting because of the selection function being used ("looks interesting to a human").

You may enjoy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_coincidence .
I'm using browserify[1] -- it's a great system because I can write all my code node-style, write tests that run in pure node, and then wrap all my resources for the browser! Grunt is the actual tool that I use to manage the build (it also handles things like hashing, minifying, etc).

[1] https://github.com/substack/node-browserify
That has got to be some devilish tinnitus.
Something like TurnkeyLinux? http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
There is a huge difference based on ethnicity. The average IQ for Ashkenazi Jews is 125, while say the people from West European origin have around 100. That's the difference between somebody capable of doing good job in construction and someone capable of becoming a surgeon.
If you didn't know the facts it is excusable mistake, but if you knew the facts and still wrote something that is factually wrong - because "joe six-pack can't handle the truth" - then I can't see how you can consider you're doing anything but plain and simple deception. And when "joe six-pack" with discover it - and he will, eventually - you'd be surprised why he doesn't believe any word you say anymore. If you sacrifice the truth in order to further your goals, you're part of the problem.
A starting point:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/cybersecurity-bill-faq...
I've started a WhiteHouse.gov petition - Send the Execs to Jail, but Keep the bank running by hiring replacements. Show that people who do this are held accountable, even if the business is too big to fail.
http://wh.gov/dtmj
Exactly how would CISPA indemnify a company that hacked on its behalf? Obviously I'm asking because I think there is no way that it does.
I had the same issue - went to Apple and got a new one without warranty.
You can already do that with the DRM in Silverlight, say....
As far as I know, the one process per dyno is not a restriction that Heroku puts on the application, it is an architectural decision of the application.

Spawn up worker pool if you want > 1 req at a time.
Entrepreneurship Program for Texas Inmates
This is a peculiar essay. I think if you're going to debunk an old saying, you first have to have an appreciation for why existed in the first place. What was running through the mind of the person that originally came up with it.

So, before I reply to the essay, I'd like to share what I think "it's not what you know, it's who you know" is trying to say. I think similar to the old IBM quote, "nothing happens until a sale is made" – maybe something like "it's pretty hard to do something meaningful on your own."

Now, I agree the strongest form of these statement is no longer valid. Before the Internet, someone stranded in the middle of nowhere who knew a lot of math would have no way of knowing about the great areas she could apply her skill. These days that is less true, although I do think that being surrounded by other bright people facing similar problems (as the author is in the case of Harvard and the Theil fellowship) is probably better than just having an Internet connection.

For a more personal example, I be willing to bet that the vast majority of people reading this found their current profession via word-of-mouth. A friend, family member, or teacher showed you programming long before you were making connections via open application. (This is almost surely true in for OPs case).

Even in the case of open applications, who you know is still very important. Something like 80% of all hires come from networking.

So I think the point the author is trying to make is a very limited one: in markets that are dying for talent, talent can sometimes trump connections.

(Though with the big caveat that if you have very few connections you would almost certainly earn far more, and do far more good, if you spent some time making connections)

On second thought, maybe all the author is trying to say is that once you have connections, it feels like connections don't matter.
Ask HN: Python vs Ruby, syntactic sugar?
I have been using ruby for last couple of years and I can say that I am in love with this language because of its such a simple syntax. I have very limited exposure to python and would like to know from guys who have experience with both languages that what do they think about python's syntax?
Is syntax the only difference between these two language?
> Some product manager/project manager/engineering manager already broke things up into user stories. Those user stories were further broken down into tasks. The tasks were then evenly divided amongst all the engineers. Each engineer didn’t have much of a say in it. Some might call this slave work. It was the most unproductive time of my life.

This is one of the central dilemmas. To some people, it sucks -- they'd rather be programming rockstars, solving big problems in a way that's interesting to them.

But in most of the real world, when you've got various stakeholders, a big project, lots of programmers whose work needs to be coordinated, with standards, and you can't get bogged down in n-to-n communication, this is just how it often has to be. Face it, most work in this world is "slave work", if that's how you want to call it (although I think that sounds rather insulting, when you think about how an unfulfilling office job you're free to quit is a million times better than actual slave work).

And part of being a professional and mature programmer is realizing that, look, that's life. Sometimes you will get a job with a big say in how things are done, be super-independent, and it will be amazing. And sometimes you'll look back five years later and realize how it was a great learning experience for you, but you over-engineered it in a language or with a library that nobody could use afterwards, the whole system was replaced a year later, and you effectively wasted a lot of time and money of the company's.

But at the same time, sometimes you do need rockstar programmers, who are talented enough to be given free reign, and they'll produce amazing results, as long as you don't micromanage them, or even barely manage them at all. Different projets are different. And different employees are different, too.
Google asks journalists to tone down story of "massive" security flaw
Great work. Thanks for releasing .
Cappuccino (with Objective-J). One of those, 'so batsh#t crazy, it's brilliant' things. Note they are one of those that make a distinction between a library and framework.

http://280north.com
http://www.cappuccino-project.org
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2008/06/cocoa-on-the-web-280-no...
Define "cool"? Ease of use? Length of features list? What?
This guy's writing style and tone make me want to never do business with him.
I think it is easy to commit fraud because USA, even with myriads of regulations, is a relatively free state. If USA moved to be more of a police state, where you'd have to report every transaction to the authorities, and every "suspicious" action would have you explain yourself to men with guns, fraud would probably much harder. So would be the life of millions of people who are honest and lawful. It is very hard to be strict on fraud without causing trouble to regular activity, ask anyone who designed a security system.
Why do you think discovering genetic components to intelligence is extremely unlikely?

I expect it to be easier to find genetic components for intelligence than for other polygenetic traits like height -- the brain has fewer components influencing development.
Worlds Youngest? First Grader Codes Her Own Computer Game.
I'll gladly own up to the results of impure capitalism (e.g. the United States, Singapore, most of the West, especially the anglosphere) if web/academic communists own up to the results of impure Communism (e.g. the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba)
This seems to me like the server admin version of "build a website like Amazon."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222581

What's more likely, that everyone else in the world is too dumb to see this opportunity, or that perhaps you have underestimated how hard it is to do?
"Instead of taking a long lunch take a few minutes to talk to your boss and voice your concerns."

That sounds like a great way to get yourself labeled as "not a team player"
Async: https://github.com/caolan/async - it helps avoid callback hell. I use it in node.js.
Change is the only way forward. If the Western civilization refuses to accept the facts of life and change itself, it will become just an interesting topic in the history books.
Excellent idea - have government-selected people with no experience with the company run the company, with a promise that if anything happens in the huge company they are managing, they go to jail. Oh yes, and to make things easier send all the people who know what happens in the company to jail so they aren't accessible and have zero motivation to help. Now you only have to properly cap the pay for new management - to ensure you pay them less than a comparable job elsewhere - and you have a winning recipe. I can't imagine how this could go wrong.
Here are detailed descriptions with photographs of the rice cultivation method described in this amazing and interesting article.

http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/countries/bhutan/bhExtManual08...

http://www.worlp.com/images/casestudies/SRI-PHOTO_final%20FO...
Wrong, by about a standard deviation. The mean iq of the Ashkenazi is about 113, the average for a very good nurse or less than average accountant. Of course, that mean deviation is still statistically significant enough to show a disproportion of outliers of extrema of a normal distribution. Just get your numbers straight before making statements about the matter.
Roman Church admits the Pope's Guilt: Ratzinger to Evade Justice
I feel so bad for this guy.
There's a basic interactive + theory overview at http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jeh/Simjava/queueing/mm1_q/mm1...
(NB: via in-browser java applets, which most things have disabled by default just now)
How did I spell gouging wrong? :)
Ideas to make 1Password less frustrating
What are the implications of Techstars under-reporting the deaths of their startups? Not to knock 100K in notes (and the other benefits of being in a reputable accelerator) but these statistics vastly overstate the positive impact of Techstars.

As for Crunchbase, they could do a reasonably good job of catching the death of startups by running a check every six months for basic social media updates. While it might be premature to call a quiet startup dead, they could include a line to call a startup "inactive."
But this is also hacker news -- where people don't settle on normal work. They're bold enough seek out only meaningful work. Either by starting their own company or joining one where they can make a huge impact without the typical fluff.