skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's great advice, thanks! Hadn't thought about how it improves the ability of the vast majority of developers to get up to speed with handling edge cases. That's a really good point. Perhaps I'll start with thin wrappers and progressively add deeper bindings to get the best of both worlds.
Was it blindingly obvious to do this stuff in 1996? That's when this patent claims priority back to. Also, have you made that assertion without even glancing at the claims? All signs point to "yes."
Whilst I agree that it would be silly to say that everyone should be a software engineer, an understanding of how basic programming works would be a benefit to many people in many varying fields.

I became interested in programming through scripting Adobe InDesign. In this type of area, it's really amazing what a little bit of programming knowledge can achieve. Our technical books now contain far fewer inaccuracies because they are tested by the computer, and index-compilation tasks that used to take days by hand are done on command.

Programming is cool, and I like that people talk about demystifying it a bit.
Was it new/original in 1996, when this patent family was first filed?
Just pretend that one of those diplomatic cables contained information about the location within Kyrgyzstan of various nuclear weapons physics packages that were coming up for inspection and disassembly by an American team of experts working on reducing the threat of nuclear weapons from the former USSR ending up in Islamist hands, including approximate location and schedule.

If the possibility of that kind of laser-guided information about where to find enriched nuclear material (for a fission bomb or dirty bomb) doesn't scare you, you're not paying attention.

And that's even assuming that America is the worst thing to happen to the world ever.
%s/code/write/g
His unit and direct superiors were, by all accounts, worthless as human beings and as soldiers.

However, the DOD IG, MNF-I HQ, or congress could have wielded effective oversight.
Read the FAQ. HN is specifically not just a place for technical/business discussion.
Draft Computing programme of study - Computing at School [pdf]
Show HN: Gander, Fly through Email
25 'Minecraft' Creations That Will Blow Your Flippin' Mind
Thats genius PR. He didn't "open up", he gave a bunch of prepared statements, inserted long pauses to simulate thinking and then told that whole story of his inner zen and meditation with the Notes app open.

And the reporter bought it.
Much of those "evidence of war crimes" were instead the most mundane types of reports

"Wikileaks: Sarkozy 'chased pet rabbit around office'" is the headline that always comes to mind.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11883611
See also Joe Haldeman's "Forever Peace".
Do you have a link to the vim plugin you referenced?
related: http://www.halfbakery.com
Saw the same thing in the Netherlands. At work, you work. As a result of little idling, few work late, and most head out right at 5 or 6.
Really? You hope for murder?
I once ran into the problem where a retail site forced me to sign up before paying, then refused to accept Paypal payment from any address except the one I signed up with. Of course my Paypal wasn't myemail+retailsite@gmail.com. Very annoying.
As I suspected, XZ performs better at least for jquery. I was disappointed it was missing from benchmarks.

For comparison on my machine:

zopfli -i1000 takes [real, sys]=[1069ms, 21ms], 75730 bytes.

xz -9 takes [148ms, 15ms], 69476 bytes.

(Though as mentioned as a pro of zopfli, xz would lose on decompression speed for a larger file.)
The basics about computers are machine language. The next complicated layers are opcodes (abstraction over machine language) and then higher programming languages.

Concrete applications are the highest and most complicated level (i. e. they contains millions of complicated lines of code).
Well you don't get to complain about official channels when you don't make any attempt to use them.

I guess that's right. Maybe the more salient point is that obviously official channels would not want to send such a huge volume of documents to journalists, so it would have been a useless exercise to try to go through official channels. Worse than useless, actually, as after that he would never have had the opportunity to leak the material again.

even if the facts are not 1:1 the same as his case was.

No two things are 1:1 outside of mathematics. For instance, Ellsberg leaked material classified as "top secret" while Manning didn't leak such sensitive material. But overall, these things are pretty close, though. Manning knew full well the import of what he leaked as well: a lot of import. Neither Manning nor Ellsberg knew every detail in what they leaked, as the volume was tremendous.

to an American paper, btw, not Soviet, N. Vietnamese, or neutral party

Not sure why it matters if you leak it to an American journalist or an Australian journalist or whatever. What if he leaked to a French national working for the NY Times, or an American living abroad? Would that change things?
That still doesn't address the issue that none of those ingredients look like "food" to someone who doesn't already know you can put them all together with some heat, water, and time. Part of what keeps those foods cheap, as well, is that they aren't marketed, they have dull packaging, and they're on the lowest-value shelves in the supermarket where they're practically invisible.
This sounds as ridiculous as making the argument that everyone should not learn to read.

Some people may feel like learning to read will make them more money, so these people shouldn't learn to read, they will be wasting their time!

Some people may want to learn to read because they remember those awesome bedtime stories, and would like to read them to themselves, these people are wasting their time too because they just want to learn to read to escape reality!

And so on...

Just because someone has one silly motivation to learn to read, doesn't mean it will be a waste of time acquiring the skill, because it has many applications beyond the original motivation.

Programming is the same thing, and since so many things rely on code, it may be just as important in the future as knowing how to read.

At the very least, learning to code is empowering, and its hard to imagine someone suffering negative consequences from learning this skill.
well.. I've worked in Exxon Mobil for a while, now own a successful business and also CEO in a startup. Your point of view is acceptable for some small companies and startups, but if the company goes bigger, everyone just can't do everything, it's a chaos and loss of concentration.
This is correct, but also irrelevant.

They are representing the company as forum moderators whether they like it or not.

I agree with others that they should at least have the word "Volunteer" in their forum account title. Not just "Moderator".

You and I know they aren't dropbox employees, but I wouldn't expect most people to assume that. Thats a big problem.
I like the trend too, particularly in the sense that everyone should learn about programming in the same way that everyone should learn math and how to read/write. Not everyone goes on to become an author and I won't expect everyone to go on to be professional programmers. I think the push back against this trend is due to the uncertainty surrounding how a movement like this will change the industry. Like you said it will empower people and I think one of the ways this can change things, in a good way, is by allowing services to be centered more around APIs so that everyone can build and customize tools the exact way they like.

Take for example todo list software, there will always be many offerings because everyone has a certain way they like to go about it. If you can program then you can customize the experience for your particular case while the data (the key resource being shared in the case of teams) remains the same. It's also very similar to putting together your own macros in many programs... just taken a bit further.
Ask HN: How do you sync your music, playlists?
How does HN sync their music, playlists between devices?
This is an example of the kind of dumb partisan journalism that the Journal has been doing more and more of. Who cares what some "U.S. CEO" subjectively thinks of "French Work Habits". That's a question the CEO is answering to a newspaper. And sure, it's going to be colored by the fact that the CEO is almost certainly an anti-labor Republican.

The question the same management is asking on behalf of its shareholders, however, is an entirely quantitative one: how much will it cost to open a factory in France? Obviously labor policy (not "work habits") is a factor there. But how much? The article doesn't say.

So what was the point of my reading this?
You can play with a Python version of this same algorithm (cd for rbm) here: https://github.com/Wizcorp/Eruditio

(I wrote it... :-)
> We need passionate people who are creative and want to learn to DESIGN software in addition to coding.

We also need good workers who can scrape together the code to pipe data from one application to another. We need sociologists and detectives who can construct SQL queries. We need scientists and economists who can cobble something together in R. We need physicists and engineers who know their way around MATLAB or SciPy. We need drafters who can write simple LISP programs. We need artists who can do a little bit of JavaScript when they need to.

These are not people who will always have a passion for programming, and they won't always be producing products or thinking about design. The dream of the fourth-generation programming language is dead, and the new dream is to teach people a little bit about programming, even if it won't be their career or their passion.
Ask HN: Greatest science and tech accomplishments of the 21st Century?
I have some homemade paintings of planets and a rocketship in my son's room and am thinking I want to add to them some representations of recent science and technology accomplishments. Can HN help me make a complete-ish list of 21st Century science and technology accomplishments? What I have so far:

Felis Baumgartner's high jump,
Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne,
SpaceX's Dragon capsule docking with the ISS,
James Cameron's Marianas Trench dive,
the discovery that Neanderthals and modern humans are genetically related,
the Curiosity Mars rover,
understanding genetic resistance to HIV/AIDS,
other stuff?

Thanks in advance.
I'm surprised that there's not more comment that they guy taking over, Eric Lefkofsky, is the "slimy one" that made Groupon such as sleazy IPO, not Mason, for cashing out $1BB+ pre-IPO.
I would argue that the internet, though it was created in the 20th centuries, really took off after the dot com boom/bust.

A period of low causes a flurry of innovation. I think we're still amidst a revolution. And I'm excited where things will go for humans.

How would you represent the internet in a painting... that's your problem I guess
In defense of the multipage article
That's actually kind of disappointing to hear... I'm a sailor.
Your sanctimony would be a bit more compelling if Mason had consistently happy campers creating his riches. That's not how it happened.

Groupon made a lot of money on the backs of small business owners too unsophisticated to understand the nature of the deals they were making. Whatever lack of happiness Mason sustained, it was mirrored in spades by the folks who were burned by Groupon's rapacious sales force and very casual approach to delivering checks on time.

This is a sketchy-ass company we're talking about and this guy made a lot of money off that sketch. Let's be real.
I have a Google Docs spreadsheet with all the server information I need, and KeePass to store all credentials.

This works for about 10 active projects at various stages in their life cycles.
where's the link Mr. Zach Troll
These points are fair game, but you entered the thread by asking why 'tzs would continue to use the "rhetoric" of harm from the document dump, and so the goal line here is "reasons a reasonable person would believe the document dump would be harmful". And so those reasons include:

* The Taliban is likely to kill Afghans with minimal provocation, having done so on innumerable occasions in the past.

* Even if the Taliban had done so hundreds of times directly in response to the Wikileaks dump, it's likely we would never have heard about it.

* The poor harm minimization concern was one expressed by many journalists, including those ideologically close to Wikileaks.

* The leader of Wikileaks has been reported as ambivalent to the concern, which calls into question the diligence with which anything they published was redacted.

These are reasons a reasonable person might evoke harm from the document dump. They are not dispositive of harm having occurred. It would be difficult in any circumstances to dispose of that question one way or the other.

The comparison between the Taliban and the US Army was itchy trigger finger debate tactic stuff from me. Sorry.

Apropos nothing: I really do not like Julian Assange. But I can't think of a way anything he did was criminal (extremely unethical: yes) and I would be offended and upset if he was the target of reprisals from the US Government. Weirdly enough, given how sympathetic Bradley Manning seems to be to people, I have no trouble at all understanding how he could be a criminal. He dropped a gigantic collection of documents he could not possibly have read or likely even understood to an anonymous third party on the Internet. Most of what we know today about Wikileaks (and the basis for most people's opinions about the Manning leak) are based on the result of the leak, and weren't known in January 2010.
Yeah but the point here is to produce a .gz file which is compatible with standard tools like gunzip, PNG decoders, your browser's handling of "Content-Encoding: gzip", etc.

If you control the compressor and decompressor then applying new tricks to producing a Deflate stream is far less interesting, just use a better compressor.
Bradley Manning is probably going to spend the rest of his life in prison. He's only 25! Holy shit that's a long time.

He intentionally and indiscriminately released thousands of classified documents in direct violation of his duties.

What specific instances of corruption did he uncover that justify what he did?

Look, he was clearly unhappy. From what I've read it sounds like he was lonely, confused, and unstable. But he was given significant responsibilities and he violated that trust in a _very_ serious and criminal way.

If he was unhappy there are many, many other things he could have done than release those files.

What I see is this thread is just a bunch of platitudes. Yeah! he stuck it to the man! But what did he actually achieve? All I see is a fucked up young man making a _huge_ mistake.
Yep, all that, plus business people who can write and edit simple spreadsheet macros and people to whom the operation of the programmable thermostat in their house is not a total mystery.

Not many people have the talent to become professional photographers, chefs, or musicians. That doesn't mean they shouldn't learn how take non-crappy family pictures, cook an edible meal, or enjoy singing songs with friends.
"Just pretend that..."

Why? It didn't, so this is a non-issue.

Just pretend that they contained evidence of <insert some hypothetical systemic atrocity>, and now that we know, your mother and children are safe.

Do you see why these are not useful thought experiments?
It looks like this aggregates links to other dataset sources rather than being a source itself.
The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload.

The product video emphasised "say goodbye to boring lists of tasks" which was why I mentioned it ;-)

The point I was trying to make was that boredom wasn't really a pain point for PM software.

When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything looks the same and feels the same, everything becomes the same importance. And when you have 1000 items of the same importance, nothing is important. This is a design paradigm used on information. I think it works well to describe the problem.

You stated the problem very well - if everything looks equally important then nothing is.... so don't do that ;-)

I've easily about 500 items organised on various kanban style boards ATM (not all in trello). That's actually pretty low for us. I've worked with places that successfully do this with many, many more than that.

The thing that the OP missed in comparing droptask to trello and similar tools is that you're not just making lists - you're modelling the process you're using to do work too. For me droptask makes it harder to deal with that information overload - not easier - since it seems to be focused on task categorisation - not workflow modelling.

When I'm looking at our company's current-work board I can see - at a glance - what folk are doing right now (the WIP column), what's blocked (the blocked column), what's been done in the last seven days or so (done), and what's coming up in the next week or so (on deck column) and so on.

Once a week we make sure the backlog on that board is topped up with another week's worth of work from a separate general-work board. Takes an hour tops as part of our weekly retrospective. Usually more like ten minutes.

With have a few class-of-service rules that decide whether incoming work goes onto the current-work board or the general work board.

Once a month we spend an afternoon sanity checking the general work board against our company goals and cull / re-prioritise as appropriate.

(It's a little bit more complicated than this - since we have some external public-facing boards we use for client work and some volunteer efforts we're involved with, plus create separate boards for one-off tasks like recruitment and for tracking our consulting sales funnel, etc).

In short I find that prioritised lists are a stupidly effective for visualising our workflow. Droptask seems to only have date-based ordering which is a very blunt - and often counter productive - tool to help prioritise work.

It seems a step backwards to me.
This was hard for me to read. I spent four years waiting to adopt a child.Did almost a year of training and home visits, then waited. And waited. Why does it take so long? Because we selfishly insisted that we'd only take one ortwo children. The social workers were not subtle in letting us know that we were selfish to not want a sibling group of 4 or 5(?!) kids all at once. They made it absolutely clear that we could not expect to have a newborn, and a child under 8 was unlikely.

So to hear that, on a hunch, a judge can give a newborn to a couple that had expressed no previous interest in having kids, wtf. It's a nice story, and I'm glad that it worked out so well for everyone. But for me it really underlines how fucked up the system really is.
discussion from 3 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282343
Indeed, that is in fact very explicitly what belongs on HN. Quoted from the HN Guidelines:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

If it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, it's totally cool.
CEOs running companies ethically have to do it a little less often, I think.
I won't become a plumber, but I will learn the basics of switching out the flush valve when my current one is ever so slightly leaking gallons and gallons of water. Anything bigger and I'll call a plumber. I also won't become an electrician, but I know how to shut the breakers off so I can replace a light fixture on my own as well. There is a benefit in having some knowledge not only because it can help you in your day to day lives, but also you get a greater knowledge of what it would take for you to need to have an expert involved.

I take issue with the list of reasons when someone should probably look else where; for the most part I think that the deterrent of the results from attempting any of those will weed people out naturally - perhaps except for the one looking for a quick buck. The one I have the biggest problem with is: Coding because you played a computer game once and want to make the next Assassin’s Creed in a few days of work

My niece wanted to learn how to make a game - she was 9. She thinks math, and reading are "sciencey" (apparently the next generations term for nerdy). I got her set up with a simple click and drag game builder that offers adding logic in a kid friendly way. She started on it, got frustrated, asked me for help and then continued. She still works on her game almost a year and a half later. It's not her primary passion, and she won't probably won't become a programmer - but it's a great teaching aide, and the knowledge of what it takes to build something makes her appreciate the big name games she plays on her various consoles.

I believe learning to code can open more peoples eyes to the possibilities out there. Just because classes are available, or perhaps even mandatory in school, doesn't mean that everyone taking those classes will become engineers by trade.
"Basic computer class" made sense when computers (including phones and tablets) weren't as pervasive as they are now.

Now that almost everyone is using them, "basic programming class" is entirely appropriate. As is "basic image editing" class, "basic spreadsheet use" class, "basic computer aided drafting", etc.

I think learning a little coding is like learning a little algebra. Sure you may not use it, but then again you may.
I completly agree. We often forget that an API is still an interface, and it is often more a designer and part that a technical part.(but still a technical part or maybe a cultural technical part)
In Real Life, product interface design or service interface design is often better made by external desiner that focus on understanding OBJECTIVELY how users will and want interact with , than the original producer or provider which will be affected by what he wants to expose and its history and vision about his product.
"The Reusable Checklist"

Like Microsoft InfoPath? Or pretty much any business software with "workflow" in the feature list.

"E-mail with time function"

Like you can set an "expires" time in e-mails in Outlook?

How many more of these are "things which do exist, but searching for them and finding out about them is actually hard" rather than "things which don't exist at all"?

Vernor Vinge's programmer-archaeologist vocation was a pretty good prediction.
This line stuck out to me: "Coding because you played a computer game once and want to make the next Assassin’s Creed in a few days of work"

When I was 13, I decided that I wanted to stop playing games and try to make my own. I was naive and thought that I could build one like WoW single handedly and I soon realized that I couldn't. However I did then come across private servers for games like World of Warcraft. From that I started to learn how to run them, I started to learn about SQL to manage the DB, then moved onto to learning LUA in order to script for my server. Even going onto looking into C++. Even then moving onto learning about web development and web servers in order to run the site for my server. That's what sparked my curiosity in coding and development at a young age.

That's why I disagree with this statement. People will learn that they can't build a game just like that, but they make start to take smaller steps and learn themselves. Don't discourage people from trying. They actually have a good mindset where they want to try build things themselves.
Demo Studio | MDN