skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will apologize right now, of my free accord, if I doubted you wrongly. I'm going to be less of a skeptical person, and accept that yes he is what you said.

But I do want to make a note, that the opinion stating, that corruption is like bonfire in India, is wrong, it is not that rampant, it appears large, because of recent wave of it getting much media and public attention. Its like mud, it shouldn't be tossed in the air so it can fall on those who are not corrupt. Its too easy to say everyone is corrupt, hard to recognize who is corrupt and who is not. Plus point (D) above was something, I was not able to put in more clear words myself. It is not a good behavior, something, a lot of people in armed forces and alike avoid.
How to Compete Online Against Large Companies & Brands
I don't see that those consequences follow, at all. I see a natural evolution from where we are now to a world where people own their own servers in the cloud and run all the software on them.

Or, if you really don't want any data to go over the wire, just run all the web app servers locally.

There was a big swing from the idea that at&t would sell you a terminal that was connected to a central mainframe, to personal computers that were distributed, back to everything being centralized because the advantages of the web were compelling and centralizing things was the natural path. Things will swing back again to decentralization, but the difference this time is you will be able to access all of your data from anywhere at any time.
I mess around with roguelike development and have been migrating from python to scheme for brevity.

I started with python. I've had lots of problems with it, but I'm far stronger in python than anything else, so have been in a sense stuck on it despite separate attempts over the last twelve months to get to momentum in C, C++ and racket.

During the recent 7-day roguelike challenge I found myself still stuck on my old python codebase, now creating DSLs in order to define entities and relationship opportunities between them (e.g. water -> planted_seed = sapling). I found I was able to significantly reduce code size, it's cleaner, and it's far sturdier. That was the point where I realised I needed to drop everything and make the jump to scheme, which I've been doing since.

This derailed my 7-day roguelike effort a couple of weeks ago, but it's progress.

OT, but another benefit I've found is that it's trivial to write zero-dependency, multiplatform code in racket. "raco exe main.rkt".

Whereas getting that done with with python is fiddly. With the previous game I released, I spent more time trying to get exes for the major platforms than I did on everything else combined.
Kevin Pollack interviews Elon Musk - KPCS #6
Yes, you can do all of those things with sublime's API (https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL, https://github.com/SublimeText/Origami). Yes, emacs is more extensible, but not where it matters, really. I.e., I don't think you're going to see any cool feature made with elisp that can't be ported to sublime.
Well services like Cloudflare or Blockdos try to mitigate this problem by absorbing the bad traffic and filtering it so that it is spread out across nodes and then dropped by firewalls with custom rules.
Or to simply use a selection algorithm instead of a sort, since they are asymptotically faster.
The whole fsck discussion seems baffling to me.

While I'm no ZFS expert, I've been using it for several years now and my understanding is this. Take what a normal fsck type tool does and build those features into the underlying FS and supporting toolchain. For what ZFS does and how it works, it really doesn't make sense to me at all for it to have an "fsck," whatever that means. Really, it's hard to even imagine what an "fsck" would do for zfs. You'd just end up rewriting bits of the toolchain or asking for the impossible.

I asked this in the other thread, but I'll ask here again. Excluding semantics, what is it that people want fsck to do specifically that zfs doesn't provide a method for already? Seriously, the question to me seems akin to asking why manufacturers don't publish the rpm spec for SSDs. It's a really odd thing to ask and can't be answered without an exhaustive review of the mechanics of the system.

I can't help but get the feeling that a lot of people complaining about ZFS have very little knowledge or familiarity with it and/or BSD/Unix in general. ZFS is not like any Linux FS. It doesn't use fstab, the toolchain is totally different, the FS is fundamentally different. It was built for Solaris and really reflects their ideology, which is completely foreign to people who only have familiarity with Linux. Accept it and move on or don't, but I've yet to see any evidence to back up these claims other than "this is what is done in Linux for everything else" which is just FUD.
Gaming Across Dimensions
The NYTimes has left out interesting details. First of all, the California almond crop is almost pathological in its demand for pollination. The entire 800k+ acres must be pollinated pretty much on the same week, or the trees don't set fruit. So, that's weird, and it contributes to hive stress as the bee companies transport literally every beehive on the continent to California at once.

Secondly, California's acres in bearing almonds has more than doubled in ten years. It's a classic agribusiness gold rush, where for some reason the growers are unable to restrain themselves from overproducing a single crop. Almond prices actually peaked in 2005. It takes 5 years for an almond orchard to bear fruit, so all the bonanza-chasers who planted after 2005 are just coming online. This will increase the stress placed on honeybee colonies by increasing the demand for pollination services.

Third. It is an established fact that almond pollination works better in the presence of wild pollinators, which for California almond orchards means native honey bees and bumblebees. These pollinators are also capable of pollinating the crop by themselves, without Apis, except the growers have systematically poisoned them with pesticides and herbicides. Growers of organic almonds (which, by the way, market for 2-3x the price of conventional almonds) will eventually win this game by not poisoning their native pollinators, and because they maintain inter-row habitats for beneficial insects instead of the toxic bare soil that stands between the rows in a conventional orchard.
Never try to use anything you're not already familiar with, got it.
They started it before they acquired Sun.
NOVA Meteor Strike
You could get a floppy disk as an add-on (a whopping 90K .. single density 5.25").

I had one back when I was a kid. Learned BASIC of course, and assembly language. There was a little plug-in cartridge called the "Mini Memory" that provided an extra 4K of RAM and an assembler.

The keyboard was small so a lot of the punctuation was accessed with the "FN" modifier key, unfortunately FN-= was an immediate hard reset which was all too easy to hit accidentally. More than once lost a lot of code that way. Taught me to save frequently.

I seem to recall there was some hack (POKE a value into a specific address?) that would disable that....
> Why would you do that?

There's a tradition of putting operating systems on anything. FreeBSD runs on cameras and game consoles and all sorts of devices that did not intend the user to install an OS.

So it's just a fun gimmicky project.
It's nothing to do with techno-elitism, it's to do with the fact that, as an engineer, the most important skill you need to have is to know the right tool for the right job. If you only know about a very limited subset, you're doing it wrong. There is nothing wrong with using PHP for the right job, or whatever else. You still should make an educated decision and not just use something because you don't know better. I give a damn about buzzwords and find many things very questionable when it comes to the latest and greatest in the interweb.

Edit: In the end i feel like i have to justify my post more then i want to. It's not that i hate that guy or that i think he is a bad programmer or a bad person or whatever.
I was just surprised to read that someone who has been coding PHP for 7 years never used an ORM. I imagine that most people that want to learn "web programming" start with a framework that includes an ORM. He surely has a big benefit over "competitors" who only know ORMs and never cared about the underlying SQL. That's surely not good as well.
That article is incorrect, it says there are 109,000 BTC in circulation. It's more like 11 million.

http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/
My husband is here in the US on an H1B Visa as a Software Engineer at a fantastic SV company. As his wife, I was given an H4 and cannot work. My career (not in tech) has screeched to a standstill, because although there are plenty of places I could work and be a useful contributing member of society, I am unable to even get a social security number. This visa renders me a second class citizen. We are also considering moving back.
This made me think that thought as well. Judging by the number of ushers usually at events like this, in practice they probably wouldn't even need sensors on the seats. The ushers probably know the system better than anyone, and given a list of seats that should be empty, I'd bet that it would not take them very long at all to check if someone was sitting there.
This article describes things well, especially the last paragraph:

http://www.economist.com/node/21533453
Mechanical meshworm, grossome
If Lennon & McCartney designed an app...
> Does anybody else have some cool ideas for Python projects?

A general suggestion -- write programs that solve numerical differential equations. They're very useful in science and engineering. Your fluid physics idea is along those lines, because realistic fluid physics simulations are nearly always based on numerical differential equations (they have to be).

Other useful numerical differential equations are any planetary orbit systems with more than two bodies, biological predator-prey "games", and most real-world supply-demand analyses.

It's only a slight exaggerations to say that modern physics is defined by a large set of differential equations. Many of them are only soluble numerically.
A few things I might have done differently with gdgt
There is a huge gap on how people behave at home and at work. Following our primitive instincts our home has to be defended. That's why we don't like somebody walking into it and doing stuffs we are responsible for. There is a summary available for this blogpost here http://tldr.io/tldrs/5155bc59ccd25bb8600005c1/what-being-a-h....
Better Eyes for Flying Robots
The ads I used to see (before I started blocking) when I would search for LaTeX stuff were generally related to paint or rubber products... some NSFW.
Only a bad real estate agent would do this. Their commission is percentage based, so a good agent will try to get you the most possible for your home. Also, it's unconventional, by try an agent who is open to dual-agent sales (represents both the buyer and seller). Their interest in that case is to get the most fair deal to each party.
The dual todo list, plus long term list of projects/writings/ideas under separate headings is exactly what I do. It used to be a text file, now it's a google doc.

I'll tend to manage my time by email a lot, but then if I get beyond inbox zero, I'll process certain things I'm lagging on into my todo list. A lot of my email also files into labels for certain business functions or partners/clients, skipping the inbox, but remaining unread so I can do it in blocks.
> Listening to him speak in 2009 was surreal, especially during the Q&A session. I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges for an ounce of symbolic freedom.

Was that when RPI ACM brought him in to speak? I recall he spent a while complaining about Linus letting binary blobs into the kernel. Then in the Q&A, he got trolled by someone claiming a music sample business was being undercut by CC-licensed competitors. RMS didn't handle that well.

In my opinion, RMS is actually very pragmatic, meaning he's willing to do almost anything to further the goal. He only appears radical because he has uncommon ideas about what the goal is and what furthers it. His radicality varies according to pragmatic considerations. He'll give his blessing to BSD-style licenses in a case like this, and he'll hold out against GCC plugins for years when he thinks that furthers freedom.

From a purely principled point of view, Free Software advocates might want to weaken copyright for software. RMS hasn't put much effort into that, because it would weaken the GPL. It would also be harder for Free software to compete if all software could be distributed free and legally. So he rarely attacks copyright in general, for pragmatic reasons.
Firebase bindings for AngularJS
I certainly see that as an issue. I've written here before about how the recruiting industry could change, and my business model addresses that at least a bit. For one, almost all of my clients pay me flat fees up front, which is why I'm willing/able to advertise for them (as opposed to contingency recruiters doing free PR).

I'm also transparent with my candidates. If they have two offers and my fees are different with the two clients, I think it's my duty to let the candidate know so they can make an informed decision if they feel I am showing any hint of bias towards one client (of course the difference in fee is usually nominal at best).

Being retained or engaged by a client, as opposed to contingency, really minimizes the incentive to encourage a bad deal for either side in the transaction. I know I'm going to get my fee eventually, so I don't need to try to talk both sides into a marriage that isn't good for either.

The real estate example is a very good analogy for most contingency recruiting models though.
Top Highest Paid Bollywood Stars in 2013
No need to decipher elisp. It's pretty simple and straight forward. Being able to express something is not unique to Python. Any language would do.
I'd say both documentations are very complete but take a different approach. Very often the python standard library is very self-descriptive and it's just doing what you would expect. If you're in doubt you can always start up bpython and have an autocompleted shell. That python has an interactive interpreter really is very convenient.
I think he meant this figure "1,019,672,546 USD".
"Just How Old Are You?"
It means any and all text rendered in it is gonna be blank and take no space.
Software Patents: Incompatible With and Antithetical to GNU/Linux
I have a semi-disposable pre-paid credit card[1] that I load with a small amount of cash and use only for uncertain transactions.

I agree that storing a CC number has a number of problems (including lack of parental controls, as mention in the article).

[1] Yes, calling something a credit card when it doesn't allow me any credit, and doesn't provide some of the advantages of credit cards is annoying.
No, it is completely fair to only blame Cyprus (the people obviously in extension of the leadership), given that Cyprus got itself into this mess and needs European money to find a way out. Expecting them to contribute[0] at least a little bit to the bailout is perfectly fine, and it is not the EU’s job to police how Cyprus procures said contribution.

[0] This is true even more since contrary to Greece or Ireland, there’s no indication whatsoever that Cyprus will ever pay back 10 bn €.
Correct, about half of all bitcoins have been mined, 11 million to go!

I wish someone would make a drop in widget for me to sell android apps for bitcoins and PayPal on my website.
Not a comment on the Ouya specifically, but we live in an odd moment in computing history when many of us carry powerful computers with us everywhere we go, but connecting them to our existing peripherals is difficult enough that we'd rather just buy another with the right plug.

I wonder how long this will last.
This isn't ancient Athens, we don't have punishment by popular vote.

As far as I can tell her conduct was appalling, but this is not the way to accomplish anything.
No mention of price-pressure from outsourcing?
Adding to your statements: my family has a hive. We harvested it once in 6 months and the colony died about 4 months later. We have put absolutely nothing in the way of chemicals or pesticides in there, we haven't replaced their honey with sugar water (we harvested in summer, gave them ample time to rebuild honey reserves). We never moved them.

And the colony died, randomly. Also happened to some friends' hive. The beekeeper we bought the supplies from hypothesized it was the cold, but we didn't have an unnaturally cold winter and we live in the bay area (not really known for being freezing).
Such a mindset is consuming this planet, not just the bee industry. Humans, as a race, seem to be unable to forgo short terms gains in exchange for long term sustainability. Particularly if the "term" in "long-term" is out beyond our lifespan. As a society, we are collectively losing the prisoner's dilemma.

Our only hope is that it's actually a false choice and that human innovation can, at some point in the future, cash the checks we're writing with industrial farming, pollution and others without significant harm to our race. The checks will be cashed either way, it's just a question of how painful that will be.
Corn syrup on an industrial scale is cheap enough that I don't see much room for it to be cheaper to make a segregated product that is less regulated than the stuff humans end up consuming.
(I don't remember the bathroom sink sensors.)

He didn't strike me as a Luddite. I think that's because he spends a lot of pages glorifying manual labor for its spiritual and liberating side rather than mourning the jobs destroyed by assembly lines for economic reasons.

I don't think he is as much a luddite as he is against mindless and seemingly pointless "work". Unfortunately he is walking that thin line along the whole book. He is not against the industrialization of the world or "the machines" although he does states that those events broke men.

In the book, he complains more that skilled artisan were chained to assembly lines while Luddites were replaced by assembly lines. Again, it's a thin line.

Assembly factory workers and data entry monkeys are one and the same for him.

I think his main practical argument against white collar job is pretty weak because he takes it from his personal life and he was a qualified mechanic, not a skill-less minion. So he colors much of the "manual" experience. He is a mechanic, a masculine glorified profession (insert coke adv.), working alone for hours (and for himself) on something deeply engaging and getting some kind of meditating and enlightening and relaxing experience... he's not a wielder working on some tubes along the road with a chief supervising his every actions on the job. Also he's deep into philosophy so I hardly buy it he has the same experience as regular mechanic trained since his teens as an apprentice and whose definition of culture is the latest blockbuster. He isn't one of the typical manual worker he describes in the book.

I wish he had shared his thoughts on software engineering and how it compares with 'code monkeys' and data entry clerks.

What bothers me most is that he didn't expand much outside of the "life of a mechanic" and life of a "mindless encoding drone in the publishing industry". The essay falls short on that.

Personally I read that book at a time of my life when I was fed up with webdesign/webdev and wanted to do something more real. I'm in the process of retraining myself to get a bachelor in industrial and electronic computer science and I am more than happy to deal with real wires and boards and huge factory machines now. I will revisit the book in the future.

To make it short: I believe that industrialization is good because it frees men from mind-numbing jobs, not because it saves money. And that's certainly a naive white-collar opinion :(

I am not sure I was really coherent, I'll clarify if I can and if needed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaloprepus_caerulatus
Here are some dot file sites.

http://dotfiles.org/.emacs

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryDotEmacs

http://www.dotemacs.de/
Why do you assume this? Maybe you just sit in your mom's basement reading the internet, but my life-long ambition has been farming, i just program computers for the side money. I lease some of my land near Davis to an almond producer, so I happen to know quite a bit about this topic.
>>Also there has been a lot of usage of 2.4GHz devices in recent years.

bluetooth? - low power, doesn't travel far

wifi - been around long before 2005

cell phones - don't use 2.4 unless BT or wi-fi, have also been in the 1800/1900 gsm bands long before LTE/data networks

microwave ovens - been around forever.

Doesn't seem to add up.

not saying RF doesn't hurt, just playing devils advocate.
Anastasiades: Cyprus will not leave the euro
So what I find interesting is a swarm of these suckers. Put cameras on them and send a small swarm of 40-50 into a building. The fun part would be writing the pathfinding code so that they don't hit eachother.
Anyone have statistics on the total size of BTC transactions? Has BTC 1B in trade occurred yet?
The solution I use is to not use storyboards. Although storyboards have some nice features, they don't work well in large projects. Merge commits are the big problem. The storyboard diagram can get huge. Also, storyboards don't handle the re-use of view controllers very well. My teams stick with using the traditional viewcontroller per nib model. I have read that some companies, such as google, forbid the use of nibs altogether.
Ask HN: Best environments to hack in SF
Hi all,

I'm in SF for two months to explore and take some time out to work on personal projects and I'm looking for some nice places to hack on my projects.

Places with WiFi are preferable but not a necessity. I'm just looking for good environments from calm to busy. So if anyone has any good well known/not so known spots, please share :)

Thanks!
Obviously. You can't program the GPU without driver interfaces (DX/OGL).

(DirectX + 4kb) vs. (OpenGL + Python + Pyglet + 500LOC)
=
4kb vs. (Python + Pyglet + 500LOC)

Long are gone the days when you could manage the framebuffer yourself :) Specially if you want to run the demo in modern OSes.
I agree this article in not content free but all these points could be made in many fewer and less convoluted words. And they buried the real news (at least to me) that the hardware is lying to the OS. Did not mean to offend.
A novel and beautiful new solar PV design promises 8¢ per kWh
Stallman on steam for Linux (in 2012/2013 ?).

"However, if you're going to use these games, you're better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Microsoft Windows. At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do.

Thus, in direct practical terms, this development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux. My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?"

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html

He may not be as pragmatic as you would like. But he has his valid reasons and walks the talk.

It is important to not be offended when he calls you unethical for using / writing non-free software.
If you know anything about how things work in India, you won't ask him to give concrete proof about dad. For the safety of his dad and other family members, he is right to keep details secret.
Give it the fishing rod to the wrong guy, he will pawn it, use the money to buy a fishing app.