skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd also point out, that my main motivation in writing this was to provoke discussion (a few links provided, though probably wish there was more). I honestly figured this was the best way to accomplish it in a centrally located comment area. though I do take your critique to heart.
Me. See my other comment in this thread.

I've recently started exploring the Legal Informatics field. The problems in it are huge and typically involving adding some structure to lots and lots of unstructured text.

Also, Peter, if you do end up reading this, great work on the stuff you do :) Big fan here!
In their paper, Coleman and de Luccia noted:

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

The second special case ... applies if we are now living in the debris of a false vacuum ... This case presents us with less interesting physics and with fewer occasions for rhetorical excess than the preceding one.

S. Coleman and F. De Luccia (1980). "Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay". Physical Review D21: 3305.
While I fully agree with your point -- This response rubs me the wrong way too -- when it comes to cars bad PR can be way more damaging than with phones.

Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes#Unintended_accelerat... (referenced by someone higher up in the thread). One TV show with a car that had been tampered with caused a massive amount of lost sales for Audi, to the point where they considered pulling out of the US market entirely. Sales didn't bounce back for a full 15 years.

I can definitely see why someone in the auto industry would be extremely touchy about things they think were written by journalists in bad faith.
Usually I would agree. But as long as it's open source and you can install it yourself on any nexus device. Then you can solve that yourself.
One of the threads I was following on twitter last week was an exchange between a Microsoft architect and a unit tester. The tester was complaining about the lack of interfaces around a lot of the .net classes, especially in new features. The Microsofty countered with the increased risk of people rolling their own implementation of critical functionality and the increased demand on support that would produce.

It's a poor excuse, in my opinion. We have the choice to treat software the same way that people treat hardware products. Give notice that you will not be supported if you do things that are outside intended use. With appliances, this is called 'voiding the warranty.'

The problem is that we have not developed a culture which accepts those sorts of agreements yet. The closest I've seen (and I've been tracking the testability issue for frameworks and libraries for years) is the Eclipse notion of soft-final.

They used comments to indicate that you should not subclass particular classes. They could have marked them final but they chose not to in order to support their internal development. But, the message was clear: "if you subclass this, and a future version breaks you, it is your problem not ours."

The fact of the matter is that language-based protection mechanisms are too coarse. They are an attempt to solve a social problem (what people are allowed to do) with technology and there's no way to get it right consistently. Better to leave it in the social sphere.
Yes, but they must be actual technologists. I don't want to hear from start-up business people.
Agreed. This blog post is at least as disingenuous as the original article that Musk called "faked."
I generally agree with your response. My only slight irritation is with how you wrote out the Python code. It looks a bit...uglier? and more verbose than it needs to be, especially compared to the others. This looks better to me:

from commands import getoutput
if getoutput('which bash') == '/bin/bash':
do_stuff()

Although if your goal is to determine if e.g. bash is located in /bin, then I would do:

bash:

if [ -e '/bin/bash' ];
then
do_stuff
fi

(I don't know Ruby.)

Python:

import os.path
if os.path.exists('/bin/bash'):
do_stuff()

I know I'm just splitting hairs. :)
> The internet is brimming with exceptional writing, and yet, the good content makes up a tiny fraction of the whole,

Sturgeon's law - 90% of everything is crap.
I wonder how it compares to BigQuery: https://developers.google.com/bigquery/docs/pricing
I don't see why you'd drop to such an inefficient encoding (especially when dealing with URLs) instead of just using url-safe base64; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#URL_applications
Boy, I love linkbait fucking titles. Lambos are not "cars" they are highly refined, intricately tuned instruments.
They're activity trackers. You start them to your wrist/pants and turn it on. Then it tracks the steps you've taken, calories burned, stairs climbed, your sleep pattern. Some even have hearth rate monitoring.
The point is that it's active 24/7 not just during workouts. These gadgets are part of the quantifiable self movement.
Because by enabling comments, you're committing to monitoring the blog on a regular basis to combat spam.
No.

HN already has an equivalent in "Show HN". Show HN has the advantage of having some code / stack / tech / something to be discussed.
I have reworded the title and some parts of text to refocus on subject matter and remove the concept of death as that would require a separate piece.

Excuse this submission's misleading title, as i'll be resubmitting with new edits/title.

Thanks!
Ouch! Sorry about that. I'll look into it.
San Diego Hacker News Meetup 38 (Fri 2/22)
Wasn't this posted a couple weeks ago?
I agree with you main point, but not the last bit.

The "public" don't worship Musk and don't want to take the NYT down. The small group who like Musk do, but a whole bunch of public don't. This forum is very pro Musk, but also intelligently critical, while very much wanting to support him. The frustration here with Musk is very obvious. But that is only a small part of the pie as it were.

See, I have one foot in the hacker/geek/tech world, and one foot in the motor world. The motor world laughs at electric cars and Musk is the main "green hippy idiot" who makes great claims that fail, from their POV. Its worse, they feel threatened by Musk and his electric cars, as he threatens the big sexy V8 and the manly roar of man mobiles. And I can see that too. But any way they can attack him, they will. And these guys are the ones he needs to eventually convince.

Thats a lot of writing for such a small point!!!!
Anyone interested in SQL queries on Hadoop should be checking out Cloudera Impala. It's open source.
Python Trademark Filer Ignorant Of Python?
And with your clever repartee, no one will be able to contradict you.

Sarcasm aside, your comment is useless. I think that there is still significant ambiguity in the sentence as written as you parent comment does. It is only saved by the fact that after the "and" is "two onlookers", allowing the reader to make logical sense of the sentence, but it still holds ambiguity.
It makes me sad the NYT story brought on extra heat. As a journalist, it stinks when collateral damage like such happens in the name of "truth" or some other subjective good. Good reminder to be careful what you say to the press.
This is great. I miss the pooping dog though. :)
Major Chinese Internet hacking base exposed
You're also missing the "speed up to escape the yeti" binding. ;)
I'm frustrated at how frequently gwern is assumed to be male. If you aren't sure of someone's gender, please use gender-neutral pronouns. So many of her articles have been posted to HN lately, yet I've only seen masculine pronouns used to refer to her.
Lots of great work going on here: http://codeforamerica.org
The Times review had some details that were incorrect, but getting them right wouldn't have made it any more favourable to Tesla. Elon Musk's response, on the other hand was both technically accurate and fundamentally dishonest. Technically the car may not have run out of battery power, but it was dead until recharged nonetheless. Technically it reported its range accurately on the last leg, but that was no help to Broder since once he found out it had lost most of its range overnight there wasn't enough left to make it to the Supercharger. If you look at the logs, he did drive around for 0.6 miles on empty when he reached the second charger - but that's what happens if you miss the turning. He could've charged completely rather than just to 28%, but Elon neglected to mention that would've taken 10 hours, longer than it actually took to complete the trip including breaking down and getting towed! And so on, and so forth.

Broder's figures are wrong, but Elon's entire story is basically a lie, and that's far worse.
Looks pretty nice.

For what it's worth, it seems like a lot of the other players in this space have gotten popular by providing tutorials for usage with Rails, PHP, etc.

Might be worth a few paragraphs.
Lets be very clear - it is not a retraction.

Public Editor is not part if the newsroom. It is a role outside if it and she does not have any authority other than to post to her blog.

If there is a retraction it will be clearly posted on the original article.
No, I don't think that sites like HN should be governed by poll results.
That aside, urandom won't actually have duplicates. Just don't truncate it to a tiny size. And as far as I'm concerned grabbing a chunk of urandom is using someone else's implementation.
The Gamification of Time
Previously posted as "Making Death Useful", but after a few edits and refocusing the essay, here's the new submission.

Looking at video games, I delved into analyzing motivation and it's relationship with time and how to hack our attitudes/perceptions to influence our motivation. All intrinsic techniques that can be done in our conscience. Thought share would be helpful to a few and encourage discussion on matter.
The job of a public editor is wholly to fact check and criticize their own newspaper, which itself lends credibility to both themselves and the paper (because a paper that is its own worse critic seems above reproach). They have no boundary on tearing into their own paper.

However the primary complaint of the editor is effectively that the author used poor judgement in not getting every single detail absolutely right with pinpoint accuracy, particularly in dealing with anything to do with Tesla. They said that they turned the temperature down at a certain point, for instance, giving Musk the ammunition to cry outrage when his own data showed that not much further in the journey the temperature went to the minimum for over 50 miles of the journey (which, at the slow speeds recorded, would have been over an hour). It's things like that which have been the topic of most outage about the NYT article, despite not changing the actual substance of the article whatsoever.
Should it be called a theorem? It looks to me more like a theory, since economics is not an exact science like mathematics. According to Wikipedia, [1] a theorem is fundamentally deductive, in contrast with a scientific theory, which is empirical.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorem
Try using Vundle to add one plugin at a time!
It works quite well. The only negative I've found is that using matcher seems to disable CtrlP's usual highlighting of which letters in a search result are matched.

In the end, though, I went back to Command-T.
That's too bad. I love the Ipad hardware, but I'm just not a fan of the Apple interface. Being locked out of my own computer drives me nuts--especially whenever I try to watch something in Flash.
It was unfair to turn it on while representing to him that it is only turned on "with customer consent" and not telling him that they don't consider him a customer.
1.2 TB really is not very much data in the context of "Big Data". The supposed advantage of Hadoop is that it can scale horizontally with linear performance.
I'm pretty sure that it's a win for Codecademy whether Twitter changes their API or not. The brand name will motivate students to learn, and the point is to find out how to work with APIs in general.
The train animation didn't reflect the underlying traffic simulator. And yep, that was the trick.
Even more proof that Douglas Adams saw this all coming

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." [1]

I can't believe I'm the first one to get this quote in :)

[1] http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Douglas_Adams/
kind of ridiculous that this even makes to court in the first place....

edit: Does anyone know much about the precedence (in court rulings) of ownership of programming languages?
Interesting. Only when it comes to the defense of Musk, we can "figure what the important points are"?

The Times review's important points were "Supercharger distances are a bit iffy and cold weather drastically affects driving distances"

Tesla's important points were "Hey, since you quoted your speed wrong, I'm going to accuse you of lying/intentional sabotage and ignore all other issues/bury the criticisms"

To be honest, the Tesla owners telemetry drives confirms Broder's issues on the first 200 mile leg to Milford. I believe 4 out of 6 drivers ended with < 30 miles remaining (one with 3 miles remaining I believe) on a full 100% 270 mile range charge. Broder charged to 240.

Broder made many stupid choices. But the "important points" are that more superchargers are needed (confirmed by CNN), and cold weather affects battery level (confirmed by Consumer Reports). There were many ways of dealing with those two issues while showing that Broder had a outlying experience without turning this into a media whinestorm.
From purely a grammatical standpoint, it does. If one was trying to indicate that George was, in fact, a policeman, then the grammatically correct thing to do would be to add a comma after 'policeman' because it is a parenthetical phrase (i.e. a nonessential bit of detail/information). Without the comma, it is to be parsed as a list.

However, this isn't really a commonly known thing, so it's easy to see how the sentence could be interpreted in different ways.
> These three are all similar -- avoid threading. :-(

Perl gets a bad rep on threading because it's threads don't map to what many people consider the strong points of threads, which is light weight processes. Perl fails spectacularly in that regard, but if you want multi-process programming with a standard, well understood set of primitives for IPC, it's really quite nice. That is, the 'threads' module isn't all that great by itself, but when paired with 'threads::shared', it's really quite nice (as long as you are pre-spawning workers or don't require quick thread spawning).

For example, I love how locks are scope based, which makes the following possible:

my $local_var = do { lock($lock_var) }

as well as:

{
lock($sync_var);
$sync_var = "start!";
cond_broadcast($sync_var);
}
It seems that npr is talking about this paper [1]. Where a simple Standard Model Higgs is assumed and then extrapolated to the Planck mass. (We already now that this does not work.) And the news is not that we all are going to die ( we knew this already), but the news [2] is actually that such a naive extrapolation gives a value for some coupling very close to 0 at the Planck Mass, which might hint at some interesting phenomena.

In addition the paper makes a nice sales pitch for a future electron-positron collider.

[1]http://pubdb.desy.de/fulltext/getfulltext.php?uid=23383-5971... (pdf)

[2] News for me, I am no specialist.
This article is trying to make hay out of various tech wars because it makes a nice narrative, but the key here is

A copy of Microsoft's legal brief was not immediately available on the Federal Circuit's docket.

All we know is that they filed a friend of the court brief. Oracle's appeal has a fairly diverse[1] spread of approaches to copyright and APIs in an attempt to make their case. Microsoft's brief could be equally sprawling or limited to a single aspect of Oracle's claims. We won't know until we can actually read it.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/on-appeal-oracle-...
the OS itself looks decent and promising. Now the only problem is getting this into a decent hardware and they're golden.
I think what he's saying is that co-sleeping provides benefits to his family. While there are risks, it's difficult to discern what the increased risk is in the absence of drugs and alcohol. He feels that there may not be a causal link between SIDS and co-sleeping for families who take co-sleeping seriously and take steps to minimize the known factors in SIDS.

It's not a great argument necessarily, but people accept additional risk of injury to their kids all the time if the benefits outweigh the risks.
Since you're here, I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents on the API lessons:

There seems to be a pretty big knowledge gap from the HTML/CSS/JS tracks to the API tracks. It's nice that you give some basic info on HTTP requests and responses, but after that we're sort of left hanging without really knowing what to do with the material we've been presented. The Youtube lesson, for example, shows you how to retrieve JSON with the top videos for a given query and insert it into an HTML file, but what good does that do?

Honestly, most of them seem more like advertising space for the company making the lesson than anything else.
Does Microsoft actually have a vested interest specifically in the use of Java by Google, such as being upset that Google had free use of the Java APIs while itself was scolded for implementing their own JVM?

Or is it basically "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"?
What we use at graphdat.

Source code: http://www.github.com
We could host our own server, but github is really convenient and our SDKs are open source so its easier.

Workflow & Issues: http://huboard.com/
Given we use github, huboard makes it easy to mange the issues

Build: http://jenkins-ci.org/ and https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano
Such a nice setup, we host our own jenkins server, I have seen some links above to Travis, might give that a spin.

Tickets & Wiki: http://www.uservoice.com
Its a love/hate relationship with uservoice. They make some things easy, others are so arcane. I'm adding in a wiki article right now with some images in it. But uservoice doesn't let you host an image, so I put it into an S3 bucket, add the link to uservoice and there is a security error. I go back to the bucket, reset the security settings and uservoice is caching the image error and wont let me add the images, so I need to edit the source. So hard for something so simple.

Team Communication: https://www.flowdock.com/
We were using Campfire, but we like flowdock much better. Threaded conversations are still tough, I actually miss Google Wave. We had 1 wave a day, it starts to grow on you.

Log Aggregation: http://graylog2.org/
Very cool once you get it all working together

Server Metrics and Application Analytics: http://www.graphdat.com
We dog food our own product, so it's our servers on the homepage..

Some other notable candidates:

'your personal website': http://backstit.ch/
handy to monitor a couple of feeds

'tech news aggregator': http://skimfeed.com/
nice way to skim some news
I dont think this will be added in the near future, so you might enjoy the HN enhancement suite: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojd...
would you mind saying what the herbal supplement was that you ended up using? my girlfriend has a lot of these issues as well and I would like to mention it to her so she could discuss it with her doctor the next time she sees him. thanks!
This looks really good. Can we expect new features soon?
>> The point is that Linux UIs are perpetually half-baked.

Even though I'm not a fan of Unity it's because I miss small thinks like being able to right click on a panel and add stuff or all the cool desktop themes which are missing in Unity.

Having said that, calling modern Linux desktops half-backed is either a clueless (and you make your case that you're not clueless) or possibly having an ulterior motives for drawing such a flawed conclusion. Modern Linux desktops are no more flawed than Windows.

Want to see a frustrating Windows UI bug? Put your start/task bar or whatever it's called at the top of the desktop. Then run Cygwin XWin and open a new X window. It will come up under the start bar/task bar. Several other programs do to. That bug has existed for like a decade from my recollection going back to at lest XP if not 2000.

Microsoft has like thousands of engineers, how hard would it be to fix that?
Actually lets be clear - odd as it is - the Public Editor does not speak for the Times.
Yes, if the persons doing the AMA's are of value.
> Out of? Or into?

I'd argue into. He appears to think he's digging his way out.
I would suggest you start with analytics and testing. This way you can test everything and use GA (or whatever) to gain insight into your app/sites usage.

If you wanna really geek out, try to learn HTML+CSS and build some mocks.

Logs? After you review a prod log and notice a bug or exception, you create a bug and assign it to a developer. I guess this could be helpful. But that dev will probably review the same log and do some tests to find a root cause then go fix it. I feel the same for any log review or server/app alerts. Unless you know the code, its simply one interpretation.

Editors? I'm not sure this will help out much.

Git? I think that anything git related will eventually lead you to code.

Testing + Analytics, imo, should be your sweet spot for now.

Good luck.
A lot of the violent crimes are drug related.
You might want to take a look at our Webscript example for doing this: https://www.webscript.io/examples/s3upload. (You can ignore the download part.) It should be trivial to use Dropzone.js instead of the normal <input> in the example HTML.
By "increase consumption of the higher-quality good," is that in absolute terms, or relative to the lower-quality good?

Is there a concrete example of "reasonable" demand functions under which a fixed increase leads to an absolute increase of the higher-quality good?
What if you required a certain amount of points or more to ask a question?

HN already has good software to deal with voting rings, so we shouldn't get too much karma whoring in response. Plus, people would have to invest in karma, because once the AMA is announced for the following day, or for right then, it's too late to get 300 (say) more points. I think it's workable.
Nuclear monitors detected Russian meteor explosion
Food insecurity is not the same thing as going hungry. Changing your food buying patterns, ie foregoing a purchase you might have otherwise made, to buy food is not pleasant, but it is not hunger.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2279984/NHS-pays-1mi...
Yep! Rails has a lightweight, API-oriented flavor.

But even without the HTML templates--even if you're just serving up JSON or XML or whatever--you're still stuck with one language on the client and another on the server. What I'm really curious about is whether the advantages of having a single language on both client and server will ultimately outweigh all other concerns for most web projects. I have no idea what the answer to that question is.