skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll wager this isn't a valid use case for you, but having worked with a number of disabled veterans who prefer the AR15 for its ease of use and modifiability to accomodate their physical injuries, something like this may accomodate their needs for hunting and such more easy.

It also potentially enables those with diminished eye sight or nearsightedness for greater accuracy.

On top of that, at least as it stands right now, it makes the operation of a long-range rifle safer and more effective. I don't know why that would be considered a negative.
The worst issues with the ETronX were not legal, but technical. Primers killed it.
Some awesome CSS for messing up your colleagues' browsing experience for April Fool's day: https://github.com/wesbos/aprilFools.css
So then it should be banned not because of the extremely unlikely possibility that it could be used criminally, but the infinitesimally unlikely possibility that it could be used for crime of an extremely specific purpose?
Didn't help me. It needs to visually stand out a bit. Here's a suggestion: http://www.webdesigncompany.net/files/hn/snap.png
How to throw a party at a professional games conference
Not sure if this is real? Or just an april fools joke? Not much on the net about it (yet), twitter seems pretty quiet as well.

So I'm still not sure.

http://www.defcad.com/ is still accessible - though it strikes me this was the least visible of the sites and maybe registered to another entity.
Kudos for the apology.

I don't believe that the potential for misuse should be a valid reason to prevent development of new technology

It's a bit of a stretch to call this new technology. Aside from some clever trickery to get around remote firing laws, this is just a (maybe) novel assemblage of standard technology. The argument is obviously about its legality and its availability to consumers.

Given that, surely you can't stand by your statement if it's modified as follows:

I don't believe that the potential for misuse should be a valid reason to make something illegal

That statement's so clearly wrong to any reasonable person that it's simply not defendable.
Even on the last one, once I parsed the sentence, I thought that was a good idea, too :). Configuration should run on a sort of prototype basis, where it can be specialized at any point in whatever processing chain is at work... Excuse me, I need to rewrite some code.
I personally did not update my phone iOS from 5.x to version 6 until Google released their Maps application about 4-6 weeks after the major version upgrade. I know of at least 2 other people that also did not update for the exact reason that they did not want to use the Apple/TomTom maps and directions.
This reminds me of PG's essay about startups - where he says that all great ideas look like really bad ideas in the beginning. Like black swans, the next big thing, and the person to create the next big thing seem to share the trait of not being easy to predict or spot.
While I agree that rsync came off as a might obnoxious, I feel it's important that I point out murder is also illegal.

I honestly don't understand what point you're making, unless it is to say that because sarin gas is illegal, this gun ought to be too?
The makers of Forcast release Skycons as open source
Twitter Announces "Twttr" — Starts Charging $5/Month To Tweet Using Vowels
Hunting is 99% spending time getting into a position to take a shot, and then dressing your kill (and, for larger animals, getting all that meat out of the woods) and less than 1% aiming and pulling the trigger. This weapon increases the chances of you accurately targeting the vitals on an animal at ranges from 100 to 200+ yards, which a lot of hunters would probably be nervous about trying to shoot at.

Ideally, this weapon would reduce the number of animal injuries, and increase the number of immediate kills.

[edit: Ah, I just re-read your comment - you are actually saying you understand the use of this weapon while hunting, but don't understand the purpose of target shooting with it. Perhaps to prepare for hunting?]
You can double-tap with spread fingers to zoom back out. A semi-one handed gesture.
<meta>Next year, I'm going to cite your comment in the 2014 version of this thread and say "And someone will comment ahead of time, explaining what will inevitably happen throughout the day"</meta>
If shooting things were a chore to me (shooting wild pigs perhaps? A legitimate issue from what I've heard.) then this sort of thing might be appealing. If it were a hobby, then I think I'm with you.
"The reason we don't get more mass killings is that most people aren't homicidally insane."

The average person isn't especially relevant, because all it's going to take is for one DC sniper incident with one of these before they get banned. Especially if someone starts using it to take out politicians, police officers, etc.
His position simply means that for him (as for many others) the terrorists have won (with the help of psychopatic mass murderers): they're statistically negligible yet much more money and attention is spent on dealing with them than with car accidents and similar real threats.
In Britain, we banned hand guns because people used them to shoot other people. Gun deaths went down.
Yeah i just submitted my newest startup via a Show HN and since then been watching Real Time Analytics.

I had no idea what that dot in the middle of the ocean was with 41 visitors; joke was lost on me for a bit. Cute.
Ageless Male Review
"Also being announced today is that the small battery option for the Model S will not enter production, due to lack of demand. Only four percent of customers chose the 40 kWh battery pack, which is not enough to justify production of that version. ... The customers who ordered this option will instead receive the 60 kWh pack, but range will be software limited to 40 kWh"

Enter the range extending hacks!
Luckily, Twitter really cares about its users and will offer up the "sometimes Y" free of charge... forever. Also free are vowels in link URLs.

So none of us are affected as long as they continue the free "sometimes Y".
Announcing The "Good Things Come to Those Who Code" Campaign
The argument at hand is obviously whether a particular thing should be illegal because it is deadly.

rsync brought up sarin in some inexplicable attempt at getting the better of hristov. I pointed out that sarin gas is illegal specifically because it is deadly. If sarin has any bearing on the argument, it seems to back hristov's (unstated but obvious) point that this rifle should be illegal. So I asked rsync to clarify.

I never implied this gun ought to be illegal, or made any statement about it one way or another.
I'm not the author, but I'll recap some of the points I've made all over this thread.

1) Where you claim it makes a more effective killing machine, another might easily say that it makes a much safer hunting weapon, or more easy to use for wounded, injured, disabled or handicapped hunters or veterans.

2) There are many, many ways that criminals could exploit even every day items to achieve extremely deadly results, and until we're ready to ban every single one of them (which admittedly, Mayor Bloomberg seems poised to do), we should not punish the majority for the very unlikely potential criminal use by a very small minority.

3) It's an advancement in technology that I worry may be stifled for private industry and instead hoarded for military application, which will almost certainly lead to slower development in the technology. Imagine further into the future, as the technology evolves, it might be able to distinguish between humans and potential prey. Or even perform sentiment analysis on humans to differentiate between humans at peace and humans that are actively trying to kill you.

Also, for the record, I'm not suggesting that being afraid of the potential for technology such as this is completely unreasonable, but I am arguing that in this country, at least for now, we do have a Bill of Rights that protects our right to bear arms and this, such as it is, classifies as such, and should not be bannable on the meritless assumption that every would-be shooter will now plunk down $17,000 and become a super-villain just because they can.
I haven't checked it out in detail, but Jeff Atwood's 'Discourse' (http://www.discourse.org/) does seem to have some of this stuff. It's a forum, but I wonder if it could be used as a blog.

And although I agree that the prevalent blogging software could use some lovin', but I hardly think it is as broken as the article seems to imply.
That seems like an incredibly appropriate class name, then. I'm glad I wasn't missing something :)
Tesla is now running at $1.5 billion+ annually, and growing.
It is now a git and hg server all at the same time.
Gmail Blue reminds me of a lot of startups out there.
> Coding is failing a ton and understanding why. It's painful and frustrating

I get what he is saying but I disagree, in that I think that coding is actually succeeding to get something working by any means necessary, even if you don't quite understand why. Be it getting your first web site up and running, getting your first program compiled, fixing your first bug, etc. There are a lot of hurdles and roadblocks you will face, especially when you are starting out, it will seem that every single piece of information is just out of your reach, like Tantalus and the grapes. It takes a lot of patience and perseverance to get through most programming problems, but that feeling of satisfaction of getting past these roadblocks is amazing. I still get that feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment, even though I'm 20+ years into my programming career.

The followup to that is that you look back at your code 6 months later, cringe, and then rewrite it to something that is an order of magnitude better.
But even though they may have gone down, they haven't been eliminated.

It's also worth noting that at least for the data I've seen, since the gun ban, assault crime has gone up, and as a result I am apparently 5 times more likely to be raped, beaten or mugged in the UK than I am in the United States.

I can't make any claims or assertions to your murder rates as you guys don't count a murder as a murder until and unless a conviction is made (and I can't speak to the effectiveness of your justice system with any degree of knowledge), but on the whole, Britain isn't objectively better because of the gun ban.

I'm also not saying that it is objectively worse, as it is a very hard issue to quantify on the whole, but one of the things that makes the United States special (at least at its formation) is that it specifically allows for an armed civilian population to keep its government honest. I don't know of (probably due to ignorance, because I haven't looked for) another country that has done the same.
A day later I looked at this again and I'm a little closer to understanding.

var listPromise = new Promise();

creates an object that, being a Promise object, has certain methods and internal state, derived from the prototype of Promise.

for (var k in listPromise) promises[k] = listPromise[k];

This confused me because I thought "k" was a stand-in for a numeric index, e.g. that it was doing promises[0] = listPromise[0], promises[1] = listPromise[1], etc. That is not what's going on. Rather, "k" refers to attributes and/or methods that objects of the Promise class have by default. It's copying those onto `promises` — the array `promises` itself, not the individual items `promises[i]`, which keep their existing methods and attributes.

Coming from a Python background, I think I would have found this more obvious if the variable "k" were instead called "method" or "attr". If it was `for (var method in listPromise)` it'd be much clearer what's going on, whereas single-letter variables like i, j, and k are, to me, stand-ins for integers.

It was also confusing, as you said, that the function uses destructive update rather than treating the input as a value. James did mention this ("augmenting the list with promise methods"), but it's still unexpected, especially when the function is preceded by a Haskell type
signature.

The reason I only say I'm closer to understanding, and not quite there yet, is I'm not sure what it means to do `new Promise()` or what is being copied over in the above for-loop. I tried James's code with a Promises/A+ implementation, rsvp.js (https://github.com/tildeio/rsvp.js), but it won't let me do `new Promise()` because it works differently:

> var promise = new RSVP.Promise();
TypeError: You must pass a resolver function as the sole argument to the promise constructor

Per an example in RSVP.js's readme, it's expecting this:

var promise = new RSVP.Promise(function(resolve, reject){
// set up a callback that calls either resolve(...)
// or reject(...)
});

If James is using a specific promises implementation in his code, it appears to be the one he defined in a past blog post (http://blog.jcoglan.com/2011/03/11/promises-are-the-monad-of...), which in turn builds on a module from his JS.Class library (http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/deferrable.html), which I hadn't heard of before.

I still think this is a great article, but that code snippet has proven to be quite a puzzle.
Show HN: Outpost - A trip planner for P2P market places only
I was expecting your link to be a rickroll.
Eh, what's wrong with the dealer trick? He has the ability to do it, the law is written that way...what does it matter?
What better way to spend the public dime than this.
Pretty lame strawman.

"X is more dangerous than Y" does not imply "X should be illegal if Y is illegal", due to any number of other factors.
Mine too... nice..
As I just learned, the .50BMG has never been used in the commission of a homicide in the United States. Extrapolating from that, I would happily place a 'long bet' and take the over on your 20 year claim and spread the odds to zero homicides.

In short, if there is even one intentional homicide in 20 years resulting from this gun (or related technology) I would be extremely shocked.
This has been on Android for quite sometime.
Faker.js - Generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and node.js
How Dynamic Programming Controls US Currency
You'd still be able to mine bitcoins on it.
Is anyone out there in SF and wants to give a presentation on something in this area and its applications for the SFHN Speaker Series?
I'm not sure how the Twitter example is remotely related to what I'm asking. You're saying that if Twitter returned long URLs as opaque tokens to get, then it'd have been ok. Sure, but it'd have been fine if they had made the tweet id an opaque token either way. Surely returning named URL pairs isn't "basic encapsulation", and "GET /Tweet/<token>" has no reason to break.

I can see how returning hypermedia adds yet another layer of abstraction (and potentially plenty more round trips!). I'm just unsure how it helps. I don't understand how actual client code (besides a browser) can deal with arbitrary hypermedia. I'm cautious when I don't understand why people are hyped up about something, but I've yet to see any "real life" examples that demonstrate real benefits of this approach.
I was doing some homework for my algorithms class and the change-making problem came up. I couldn't imagine how the greedy algorithm could fail, but then I realized my mind was biased by a life of US Currency (and other 1-2-5 currencies). I thought the insight was interesting so I wrote up this blog post. Feel free to comment or email me with corrections or suggestions.
You might just be the "Obama Translator" of my own personal subconscious. I had to be careful about the way I refuted what you wrote because I might very well have been thinking exactly that, and it looks exactly like the sort of thing I might have said.
Why not just stop sales of the 40kWh model, say "We are going to be nice and just upgrade them to 60kWh free of charge" and be done with it.

Sure, some people who paid for the 60kWh packs will be annoyed paying "extra" for it but is that really such a concern that you have to start dicking about with what amounts to basically battery DRM?

[EDIT] As someone mentioned below, if 40kWh models have already shipped then replacing them will be a PITA, but if they haven't, win-win?
Is there country restriction?

It says incompatible for my country
It's possible that nobody would hire an unknown Steve Jobs now, but it really doesn't matter. Jobs wasn't an employee, he was a founder. Founders don't have to concern themselves with getting hired.
Holy crap. I went to high school in Kansas and undergrad at the Naval Academy. I just realized where and what "NoVa" is. I thought all those kids just had a year of community college before going to Canoe U. (There is a NoVa CC, but I'm pretty sure now that was not the usual context!)
Why do people think retention is a good thing?! I think retention is actually bad even for classical education.

The lower the retention rate, the more the likelihood that they are following lots of courses at the same time or multitasking with something else. This means that people are "exploring" more! I think that "exploratory learning" has always been stifled by classical organized education and is one of the reasons why I hate most academic environments (yeah, they're cool if you're in one of the top 10% unis or in a "privileged" position", but not for the rest of cases...). I believe that, after a certain level of baseline knowledge, in any field, it's actually more important that someone learns "what they want/need/have inclination for/find more interesting" than that they "learn more"! Maybe more time exploring and less time actually uploading things to your mind is better (not "productive", just "better", and I said "fuck productivity" a lot lately because I found that it just doesn't lead to better anything). All the new ways of doing education make exploration easier (as in you can explore a lot without really "wasting" that much time), and we should take advantage of this!
Accidentally found myself in a Tesla showroom in Tokyo (Didn't even know they had one here) and the sales person was talking about how they had "sold out" in Japan which is promising.

Also seeing the model S in person was rather cool.
I think especially if you think in terms of height the functionality makes more sense as it is. Think of an aircraft where pulling the yoke in your direction goes up and pushing it away from you goes down.
If you can get access to someone's iPhone for 30 seconds you can install a web app that looks just like the iPhone interface but with various surprises when anything is pressed.

http://www.iphoneception.com
Just build your own tools, like small libraries, ,maybe event handlers, pub/subs. For node, build a basic CRUD system. Building things will force you to do research on the stuff you need to know.
Coursera courses are supposed to be college courses. College courses are a lot of work, and you have to get your reading and assignments done on time. This should not come as a surprise.

CodeAcademy (also wonderful) is a completely different animal. It is not comparable to Coursera.

What you're calling a bug (aka "dirty secret") of Coursera is actually a huge feature: that we can all, whatever our goals or our budget, sign up and check it out. Quite unlike an class at MIT or Duke, which is only available to a pre-selected few.

In short, the MOOCs, and specifically Coursera, are awesome. We are so lucky to have this opportunity. Quit yer bellyachin'.
Thanks for the clarification.

His snark aside, neither bleach nor ammonia are illegal, and require approximately zero skill to combine and deploy in confined spaces.

Actually, I'll just shut up and let rsync respond if he chooses. I get a little excitable when things like this come up on HN because I love hearing the discussion of pragmatists (which I believe comprises much of HN) on the subject.
This is slightly tempting for the teenagers I wrangle -- mostly for the embarrassment factor.
GMail Blue... http://www.gmail.com/blue
As a marketer who has been trying for some time now (I'm too embarrassed to admit how long) to learn how to code, I've heard this advice a lot. Here is my issue with it.

Everyone says, "Just pick something you want to build, and learn how to build it." I don't know what I want to build, because I don't know what I can build. That's like taking someone who says "I want to learn calculus" and saying "Well just think of a problem you want to solve."
Okay, that one made me laugh :D
Ask HN: Has anyone refused to work in a typical 9-5 job?
Or another way of asking, have you has a programmer been unemployed for a really long time? Mostly because you couldn't find a good fit for the type of work that you are interested.

I always like the analogy of herding cats, sometimes programmers are just different and work environments can be rigid. Have you held out for a really long time in the job market because you wanted that perfect development job?
So next time, a large number of people won't choose the lower option hoping to be "upgraded" for free and end up being unhappy with their purchase when the lower capacity option really does go into production due to demand.
Just found this thanks to a late night diff eq. problem set:

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/04/01/introducing-the-wolf...
The Dangers of Surveillance
Because that'd require hauling in 200 vehicles to replace a $10,000 battery pack while tying up maintenance bays, disrupting production to source and ship 60kWh packs, and incur a multi-million dollar charge on a company that is barely breaking even.

(edit: Also, rich people tend to be of a type that go absolutely apeshit when they feel they've been cheated, meta-cheated, vapor-cheated or insufficiently cheated by having to reconsider the value of a prior purchase)
What would happen if there were an anonymous, bitcoin powered Kickstarter?
One of the better pranks this year from Google - love it.
I would love to know how many Model S have been sold within 25 miles of Palo Alto, CA. Driving around Menlo Park/Palo Alto/Atherton/Woodside, one can easily see 10 Model S within an hour - it is truly unreal. It's almost at the point where buying a Model S is no longer trend setting, but instead following a trend.
INTERCAL on Interstates looked so close to real... Almost disappointed it's an April Fools :(
Google Japan has one on character input methods:
http://googlejapan.blogspot.jp/2013/04/google-patapata.html

And Kotaku is not late to the party either:
http://kotaku.com/tiny-nintendo-consoles-made-out-of-lego-46...
Funniest thing is that someone said that in the 2011 version.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2394349
Because Tesla can later offer a $5,000 upgrade to the 60kWh version.

Customers are still getting a better car that has the potential to be software upgraded. Win-Win.
Why Less is More When it Comes to Movie Special Effects
After seeing Gmail Blue.

http://i.imgur.com/ayaqn.gif
Hip-Hop Word Count: 50,000 rap songs analyzed.
Not only did other crime go up but a quick google search proves that your statement is false.

"After a school massacre, the U.K. banned handguns in 1998. A decade later, handgun crime had doubled."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732377720457819...
Would hacking it count as "downloading a car"?
The simplest and easiest way to get more important things done:

Ask yourself three times daily, via Outlook reminder or whatever is convenient:

"Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?"

This is from the book The Four Hour Workweek, an excellent, excellent book. I've listened to it twice now (26 hours). This book has changed my mindset and has made me much more efficient and effective at work, and life in general.

Also suggested in the book, time tracking software like rescuetime.com or Manic Time is extremely eye opening. It was astounding how long I was spending writing emails. Now I have various email templates for common issues I face. What a great book.

[Edit]: Well that is quite the coincidence: another article on the front page of HN talks about Tim Ferriss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5470252