skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool. One quibble with the title. This is what happens in zero G, I'd love to see the behaviour in space (outside the capsule) too. Does anyone know off the top of their head the state/behaviour of water in the low temperature and low pressure of space?

My prediction for the Zero G experiment was that that it would spray in all directions. [Partial spoiler] I was wrong because I forgot about a critical behaviour of water.
Great!

It would be nice if I could see the entire tree of ancestors at once.
One is dead the other will soon be dead and then everyone can go back to posting about how horrible America is.
Tablets are simply post PC device. Mostly for media consumption/internet browsing. Two very mainstream things. None of glass's uses are obvious/popular.
You're projecting your view of Linux package management onto Haiku, when the situation with Haiku is going to be pretty different.

For starters, let's start with libraries. To use a concrete example, let's say the Cairo vector graphics library. What happens when a program requires Cairo 1.12.14? The library package gets downloaded. What happens when a second program requires Cairo 1.12.13 (i.e. the previous version)? The library gets stored alongside the newer version, so both are available. What happens when a program has forked Cairo, and requires that version? Hopefully the answer is clear.

So in this example we have three versions of Cairo. Seems inefficient right? In some ways it is, but efficiencies can emerge when programs do target the same version of Cairo on our system, as the library will already be ready for new programs to use.

It's also important to realise in what ways having these three libraries is inefficient. The only real issue here is storage, as we'd probably be looking at three times the storage space for the Cairo functionality. However, as inefficient as this is, it's still more efficient (from a storage point of view) than each application bundling its own libraries, as with installing the libraries separately there's at least a chance of the libraries being shared.

There is an alternative, which is to specify library versions that developers should use and bundle these with the system. This has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the functionality available to you is easier to scope out. The disadvantages are that recommended libraries get updated less frequently, so if you wish to use a new version you're either forced to wait or bundle your own library, which brings you back to the inefficiencies you had before.

Taking time to reflect, I see now that your issue isn't really with package managers per se, but rather that you dislike the 'rolling release' approach of many open-source projects. It's the shifting target that annoys you, how this gets managed is secondary. Would you say that's a fair appraisal?
Whois returns Domains By Proxy, LLC
(Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domains_by_Proxy)

My guess would be that it is Microsoft hiding behind this "movement".
This whole thread puts HN to shame. It is a shame on all of us. Horrific. Just horrific. Shame on the people who threw some innocent Brown (yes, the school, not the skin color) kid under the bus, or MIT or whatever other school. The kid is missing and his family gets death threats for something he didn't do. They even had to take down their searching for him page. Shame on all of us for participating in this.
How to use Social networking site for planning holidays
What you say is true, but it doesn't rebut the parent's point: for the employee, it's not worth it
I work at a major online bank in the US. We have strong "Know Your Customer" policies as required by the Patriot Act, but they do not, in the normal course of business, require a copy of an ID. The Patriot Act does not require IDs, it requires processes to identify the customer, and different banks approach that differently.
But reddit confirmed it's malicious, so the idea that reddit DDOSed itself is out of the question.
If your startup aims to terraform Mars I'll be passionate about it.

If it's a location based social advertising network, meh not so much.
http://revealingerrors.com/akamai_ssl
I certainly do hope someone is going to take this down. I did downvote it when the post was first made, but it seems like people have gone crazy over there in the States, what with the public naming and blaming of "suspects".
Yea I know, we have talked before. Remember?
There are a lot of people listening. I think perhaps the best way of learning information now is to follow the info posted in #bostonbombing on Freenode, they are live-updating what they hear on the scanners + a lot of other sources.
You’ll Probably Never Upload Your Mind Into A Computer
I don't think they were using Excel's weighted average function in this case but simply averaging filtered figures per country and then averaging the averages. This has no statistical basis, but it's not Excel's fault
very roughly, water is $50 million per tonne on the ATV, so (even more approx) $30,000 for the water used in the video.
Cool goal - reminds me a bit of the graph of boards of directors which lets you see how the web of board members for major corporations are intertwined.

My first assumption was that you had scrapped University sites and/or tried mining LinkedIn and had already constructed a database of thousands of scholars and their academic genealogy. But from your comment that doesn't seem to be the case.
Code Club – inspiring a new generation of programmers
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2030420/Meet-...

We're well on our way. And I wouldn't expect the paranoia to not sully this advance as well.
When this is all over I hope there is a decent post-portem look at reddit and its relationship with the media, especially with the efforts to attempt to find the Boston Marathon bombers.

The story of 'internet wizards find Boston suspects' was too good to not publish. The media portrayed it as hackers using their intelligence and the resources of the internet to track down criminals, but it ended up being nothing more than some people flicking through photos and profiling based on race, appearance etc.

In total I saw over two dozen people marked as 'suspects'. I open Facebook and my non-tech friends are all sharing homemade 'WANTED' posters with full pictures of the people identified. Everybody was suspect until they were 'cleared' - the very definition of a witch hunt. Digital vigilante justice.

Nobody learned their lesson, because it was only a couple of hours later that the media were reporting that suspect #2 was the missing Brown kid. I switched on prime time news in Australia and the news that the Brown student was terrorist suspect number two was the top story!. Speechless.

I tried in vain to get the reddit threads removed and shutdown (IMO they violate the 'no dox' rule) but got nowhere. The privacy right of individuals are being torn apart by online mobs (I was told in a reply that if I have nothing to hide I have nothing to worry about). It depresses me to think that nothing will be learned from this entire experience.

This is exactly why the government feels like they should get involved in regulating the internet, because we aren't taking care of it ourselves. I can already see how a case will be put together next week using the reddit witch hunt threads as a reason why the internet needs censorship. Think about what our responses are going to be to that.
It's challenging because the only official documentation on the subject is this:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports...

Speaking personally, I love reading about EFF taking the US government to court, which is politics. I also love reading about the technical advancements in Formula 1, which is sports. Sports and politics, yes, but also very gratifying to my intellectual curiosity.

Here's the thing: I wouldn't want to see them on Hacker News, because I can (and do) get them elsewhere. This particular community gives me things I can't get elsewhere, and I love it for that. I don't want it to become another Reddit (or even another Slashdot, or Digg, or Gawker, or TechCrunch, Cracked, Metafilter, or ZDNet).

Hacker News is not (yet) a general purpose "news for nerds" or "all your internet goodness curated", and the longer we can stave off its descent into the general-purpose semi-curated things of somewhat geeky Internet interest, as every other good site of any age seems to have descended to, the better.
I made a site that checked for SSL cert expirations and misconfigurations, but I couldn't acquire any customers. I still think there's a business there somewhere, although maybe it really only sells as part of another product.

Edit: If anyone wants a script to check their certificates, here you go: https://gist.github.com/bretwalker/5420652. You'll just need to add in some sort of notification logic, especially for expirations, since they need to happen before a problem arises.
Really? What kind of hacker are you if you don't think about basic statistics and false positives? Jeez... The readership here has dropped to the level of slime mold. I guess I'm starting to fall into this category myself.
Chris is just awesome. What a good way to get everyone interested and involved in space exploration! There's so many big questions, but the little questions (like this one) are so interesting too.
Google is worth a shot but don't get your hopes up and don't take it personally if you get shat on.

Google has a lot of great engineers, and if you get a good manager for your first project and get to a launch in your first 2 years, you become a Real Googler and it's awesome. If you don't establish credibility early on, you're fucked. It's impossible to transfer to a good project without already having had a good project, so your first manager determines your career.

On the whole, I think Google is in decline and it has an absolutely shitty management structure (probe about "calibration scores") but there is still some genuinely interesting work and there are some great engineers so, by all means, give it a try.

However, there's probably a 60% chance that you'll land on a dogshit project with no career advancement and have to job-hop yet again in a few months. Make it 85% if you're outside of MTV. But if you don't mind taking that risk, then try it out. Google's upside (stable pay and great projects) when you actually land well is too high to write it off.
Once you have the experience of trying to get a baby wipe out at 3am while a baby is crying, you'll realize they already come pretty close to vacuum sealed. :)
A Misfit Emerges in the Crowded Field of Fitness Trackers
It's safe to assume that there is water on premises for other reasons.
Manipulating Search Rankings Can Shift Voting Preferences w/o Voter Awareness
Unlikely, why would someone retaliate? Who on Tripathi's side has such power? Right now we are not even sure if the attack is related to boston events at all.
good list! must see videos...
Disclaimer: Not saying what should be, just what is.

I don't come to HN for updates on current events, I come here for the interesting commentary. I do not agree with the 'Vigilante' threads, which will be flagged, but news threads with a healthy discussion have some value.

Have you looked at the comments on any news site article?

This may not be in line with HN's intended goal, but it's a side effect akin to bringing critical minds to the water cooler conversation.
During mining, you're actually not decrypting hashes but encrypting a certain piece of data until the initial N digits of its hash are zero. By increasing the number of initial zeros required, you decrease the probability of it occurring and increase the time which it takes to figure out what data to encrypt to get that hash - therefore it gets harder to mine coins with each block.
I read the post just a day or so ago about how the news are bad for you and make you unhappy. I thought to myself 'good for me that I knew that already and have limited my news intake to HN and HN only'.

There we go - looks like it's not possible to be on a strict news diet but keep oneself updated with tech news only.
Yeah, Liskov Substitution Principle. I believe that (mutable) circle and (mutable) ellipse is the chief example of the bad kind of inheritance wrt to this rule.
I'm not sure where you're getting this, but that's absolutely untrue.

As luck would have it, their coding errors mostly cancelled each other out; fixing them changed their conclusion from growth of -0.1% in high-debt countries to 0.2%; an insignificant change.

As for the weighting chosen, Reinhart and Rogoff chose a fairly standard weighting which - as it turns out - has some flaws. In particular it makes their conclusion highly sensitive to the experience of NZ (which had terrible growth during the brief period it had high debt), which is - admittedly - problematic. But their chief critic suggests an unusual weighting which is subject to the precise same flaws except in reverse. By weighting each year equally, Herndon's conclusions are dominated by the results of Greece (which ran debts for year after year will little result). Than sensitivity is also problematic, and the inherent correlation of debt loads in sequential years raises questions about the meaningfulness of their results.

Professional economists are now debating the question of the best weighting, but if anything Reinhart and Rogoff seem to have the better argument so far.

In short: Their errors did not eliminate their result. Even changing weighting did not eliminate the result (much less reverse it - that would mean more debt leads to higher growth; a simply absurd result!). And in any case, the method they chose has strong arguments in its favour.

Or for real TL;DR: Everything you said was wrong.
An Internet crash: It could happen
It's therefore NOT a DDoS if the traffic is from legitimate sources.

DDoS is by definition malignant.
I just pulled up their TOS and searched for "compete" and found nothing. Where are you seeing this?
Did anyone else laugh when they saw the url 'startingdotnetprogramming.blogspot.com'? I think there's a correlation here with the post title...
One Boston Marathon suspect killed; second suspect on loose
Take care, some European countries are very pro-American and will cooperate without even thinking about it. At least Germany and Bulgaria would most probably hand over all requested data, so West-East Europe doesn't really make a difference here.

So far the Russians have been pretty cool - when America told them to shut down their mp3 search engines, their reply was something along the lines of "go fk yourself". I assume they have this saved as a template.
What's funny about this site is that we all love personal surveillance when it helps us do things like bust animal abusers or discover dirty government secrets, but when people are publicly carrying their recording devices, we all feel uncomfortable.

Also this site talks about "glass free zones" and "surveillance free zones" and doesn't seem to acknowledge that they aren't the same thing.

If somebody wants to record what you're doing today, they don't need glass to do it. Why not make a big deal about devices that are actually undercover?

Maybe having these things so easily available will create an etiquette we don't expect and can't predict.

I feel like once Glass actually delivers, it will play out as really nothing special in these scenarios, and we'll realize it in short order. All this talk before it gets here about surveillance and privacy violations, not actually knowing how its used or how buyers will want to use it, or what its most popular applications will be; all that is FUD.
I was just thinking the same, but then on a second thought, wouldn't that create a huge web of people inter-connected together that couldn't fit into one page? Maybe could use Ajax to dynamically expand the family tree as users scroll up or down
Well it's very amusing if you do that to a superlative, it might be better to just go with the cliche.

I sought a synonym for unparalleled for you here:

http://thesaurus.com/browse/unparalleled

But these seem to be even worse. Sorry, I tried.
Occam's razor beats "time's arrow".
Twitter Introduces Keyword Targeting In Timelines
all the data is local ... and it's a lot of data
I really like the style of this. I remember seeing LINQ years ago and wondering if something like it was possible in Python. I was disappointed when it looked like it couldn't be done, but generating an AST then translating to SQL is smart.

It seems from this thread not many people appreciate the parity of:

list(o for o in Item if o.price>3)

when Item is a normal in-memory Python iterable, and:

select(o for o in Item if o.price>3)

when Item is a row in a database.

After just helping someone get started that was new to Python and Django, it was weird helping them learn list comprehensions and generators and then having to teach such a divergent form of syntax to work with the Django ORM even though the a lot of the concepts should be similar.
As an average, 50 hours per week is way too much-- if you actually work (and don't fill lazy afternoon hours with errands or self-directed learning). The average person of working age can do a stable 60; that means you're imposing psychological monoculture over 83.3% of your available cognitively-intense hours. That burns people out.

Spikes to 50-60 happen and, if you're in a position of ownership, you better be prepared to throw down when they do. But no company should ever set the baseline at 50 hours per week. That's counterproductive and it leads to burnout and catastrophe when spikes occur.

I actually believe in planning based on a 3-hour work day. A 3-hour block of uninterrupted time to focus on work is an expectation and also an entitlement. The other 5? Spend those catching up, learning about other projects, and building skills.
The traffic surge from the Boston incident is extremely marginal compared to the DDoS which we're facing right now. It is far and above any form of possibly being compounded, unfortunately.

But I wish it was :) Compounding I can deal with, astronomical is harder.
With very few exceptions, all this comes across (to me) as mumbo-jumbo.
About Icefrog - I can't really say anything about his programming skills - I think he must be decent since he optimized the JASS scripts used by the Warcraft 3 engine and he also created tons of fun stuff using it. As a comparison, his predecessor, Guinsoo, had created a map with a 10 minute loading time (!). In Icefrog's reign I don't think any map had a loading time above 1-2 minutes on a decent computer.

Anyway, getting back to the topic - I don't know about his strength as a programmer, but I think we could all learn from him as a community leader. Anonymous leader, rallied a lot of people around him (a few other coders, a lot of testers, a TON of contributors), gave Dota a rhythm, a release flow that made Dota huge. You'd play the game knowing that game crashing bugs would be fixed ASAP, that game play balance issues would be resolved, that the next version would make everything just BETTER.

A ton of dedication and hard work didn't hurt either :)
Video of firefight between suspects and police http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nbc-news/51592958/?from=en-us_m...
Nlp is a good tool for creativity
Just a small London startup in the community space: http://microco.sm/

There's only three of us considered full-time right now, with an additional pool of volunteers and helpers that churn around us.

Our core team have different skills, and so we think it's good to cross-fertilise that knowledge, to teach and learn more of each other's skills as well as to support the mastery of our own skill in sharing it and learning how to communicate it.

We have people - freelancers mostly - who help for a month for free, and then go do something else for a bit before coming back between jobs to help more and learn more. They get to work on something they care about and learn new things at the same time.

We're not kidding ourselves about wanting to pay well, to build a successful business, and to only be bootstrapping this hard while we have to... but this process is really helping build this strong learning and teaching environment and that's been a real benefit to us, so we can all see that staying even after the numbers side adds up more.

The core value that has emerged is that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn.

By helping improve career security for all of our workers, we really feel we're improving security for us as employers and job security for the employees. There's no downside to this.
I think the Brown student's name was mentioned by police as one of the two suspects and it went from there. There's probably a lesson in public reaction to information from police scanners to be had.

Given that police mobilised near the suspects' apartment only around or after the time that their address was hitting social media, I suspect that at least in this case, many cops on the ground (and using their radios) were getting info at roughly the same pace as everyone else.

e.g., if there's an official statement, it will be a press briefing or designated as something official.
My understanding is that it originates with plugboards. See the third image in this recent article:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_...
Android with google isn't completely open-source, and it's certainly not free as in freedom. But this is a role that Firefox OS will fix, I guess. I don't think sailfish or ubuntu are going anywhere.
Anyone know if the jQuery 2.0 fixes/enhancements will also be applied to the 1.x branch, particular the 1.9 series. Based on what I've read they are running in parallel with the IE stuff removed. I can't seem to find anything that mentions that 1.x stuff has been updated and released.
Startups: Blog more, it is good for your health and exposure. Really.
The quotation is nearly twenty years old. For context that's before Java [practically speaking] and before C++ was standardized - and when programmers of Graham's age had a background using PEEK and POKE and GOTO in BASIC or exposure to assembly and the older programmers had often seen plugboards in use.

I won't guess at Graham's definition today. He can speak for himself, anyway. But it resonated with me in the context of Rich Hickey's ideas - particularly "Are We There Yet?" http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...

As I understand it, an issue with [some] object systems is that when objects are made by aggregation, rather than inheritance, they are of a different type than each of their components. And this requires the programmer to write some code [however minimal] for the new type in order to reimplement any desirable feature of the objects from which it is composed.

In other words, the behavior of an aggregate of objects is undefined. Hickey's comparison is to data. Which he claims aggregates into more data. When, I ask myself "what is data?" lisp-a-cadabra - it's code. Which is the [structuralist] way in which I read Graham's note.
That can be for many reasons but an example of events for me will go like this:-

> Get new job, jump in there really eger, do a good job.

> Face stupid political BS, eagerness disappears.

> Start looking for other jobs, then ultimately quit.

If you keep working hard in a toxic environment you're going to do yourself harm. If you care about doing good work, move company. Many will be content with just collecting a wage though.

As an aside, I'ved worked on a helpdesk and got through about 5-8 tickets a day while colleagues got through 40. Ultimately I was promoted because those 8 tickets were the ones everyone else was skipping because they didn't have a clue what to do. Neither did I, but once I figured it out I did. If your tickets regularly require on average 5 to 6 minutes work, then perhaps you should question the value of the work you're doing.
The real question is, why were you on bing? :P