skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You don't have to "study" clean code. You just have to overcome the tendency to write code in an overly smartypants way.

This is a great point. As an industry, we seem to be impressed by complex solutions (even if the complexity is unnecessary and the code unmaintainable). Writing clean, obvious code is often met with a "Duh, I see why it was written that way", but without understanding that it took a long time to get the complex solution down to that point.
No one you want cares about the cost of living
Have fun with the biotics which will grow resistant after a while!
>provided your system OpenGL version is recent enough.

I haven't tested it, but I don't think this requires OpenGL at all. It appears to be purely canvas 2D, which is not WebGL.
Show HN: Get feedback for your ideas
Releasing something with the strategy that it will be convenient to use for most people sometime during the lifecycle of the console seems like a bad idea. I would think that they would want to sell most of their consoles in the beginning to build momentum around the ecosystem.
I think this happened: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
I wonder how much of the karma for the insubstantial stuff is actually a response to not being able to down vote.

When you can't down vote, seeing a reply that sheds new light, puts some of the ridiculousness in context, or just takes a person down a notch may get a vote because it's your best way of voting by proxy.

For the comment writer it's a bit of a double edged sword. Sometimes the feedback you get relative to the time and effort put into a post can be disheartening.
It is not unreasonable to assume, however, that a facility such as this would include a custom-designed media management system which could hold cartridges at a higher density than COTS (perhaps with an access latency tradeoff).

1M sq ft of total area, and 100k in the data center may not preclude another 100k sq ft of 'warehouse' containing millions of carts in shoe boxes with GS5s running around in sneakers.
No, but successfully trolling three people while making my point does!
I think the author is arguing for a cultural shift that has already happened. During my 4 semester co-op readability and maintainability was the single largest concern. All commits were code reviewed and it usually took 3-4 iterations to make everyone happy. I learned a ton about why best practices were best practices and how you could structure code to make it more intuitive and less prone to misuse.

I hang around the gamedev.stackexchange a lot. All the senior members value taking extra time to make readable and reusable code. I don’t get told "once it works, the code is right" I get told take your time and make a reusable understandable block of code.

Even at the very large corporation that I work at now where I’m stuck using XP and IE 7 there is a large emphasis on making sure the code is readable and maintainable.

In my short career no one has ever told me getting it working and move on. Everyone has told me that I should strive for the code I write to be easily readable and maintainable by a new hire.
I think Vaughn and Wilson had the best answer to the blender question in the Internship trailer I saw... just lie down. those blades will just spin over your head and the motor will eventually overheat and fail. I'm sure there is something about densities they are looking for, but it doesn't strike me as a great question.
Manhole covers being round is more interesting, but not really a good indicator about how well you can code.
From experience, if you stick with standard UIKIt navigation schemes (i.e. use nav bars not FB/Twitter style pop-unders) and, critically, standard Apple approved color schemes (i.e., light not dark UI elements) then crafting an app within Storyboard is incredibly straightforward, especially if you consider PaaS solutions like Parse.com integration[1]. The problem seems to be managing the complexities of non-standard UI elements.

For what it's worth, Jony Ive seems to be pushing us to all adopt the design approach of the OP. Wonder if 'deference to content' will become the new normal?

[1] http://blog.fieldforceapp.com/post/32922733018/weekend-proje...
It's only a matter of time until there will be enough exchanges to satisfy the demand, the problem here and the potential price drop is only temporary. Bitcoin market has yet to adapt to all this.
Great post! I am curious whether you could move all these boxes to Uptano and save even more now.

What are you doing for CI?
> For all practical purposes the "classical constitution United States" that we were taught in school and media doesn't exist anymore.

The Constitution never existed as anything more than an idea, and it has force and meaning to the exact extent to which the people choose to give it force and meaning (the same as any other law.)

Laws, including basic laws like the Constitution, aren't magical and self-enforcing; they are real or not to the extent that people give them effect. The idea that "the Constitution protects" this right or that limitation on government's power is the exact thing which guarantees that those things are not protected -- either people protect them by insisting on them, or they are not protected at all. The Constitution is, at most, a statement of intent about what the people will insist upon, and it loses credibility when the people are passive and don't follow through.

I believe that one of the reasons that Jefferson thought it was necessary for the Constitution to be rewritten and readopted every generation is that he recognized that the slide into passivity and lack of ownership of the Constitution was a natural trend that would, over time, render any Constitution into a dead letter.
Ask HN: Google Reader goes down in 11 days, which alternative are you using?
SO google reader goes away forever in 11 days, which of the pile of reader alternatives have you switched to?
It's not easy to pirate though. The last versions have been pretty tricky for "normal" people to successfully crack and run. Just look at the comments on any file sharing site. The majority of them are like, "i cant get this to work". People end up running an older version and not the latest.

If this was really their intended strategy they would just make a free version for students or amateurs. As it is now, they are spending a LOT of effort trying to make it harder to crack their products. And it is harder, but it's still possible.

Look at Autodesk Maya, they have a free version for students so there is absolutely no reason to pirate it.
Quick link for the setting to browse anonymously: https://www.linkedin.com/settings/?tab=profile&modal=nsettin...
What if I don't want everyone in the world to know everything about what I do with a computer?

They're more and more part of everyone's life and not everyone is of the mindset that it doesn't matter if corporations and governments get to look at every little detail of their online interaction. Car tax, criminal law, the weekly shop at tesco.com ... all going to the profilers.

I know this is happening. I know how to stop some of it. But everyone else?
Granted, including "could" in the title would have been less misleading, given they indeed mention a "10x to 1000x" range.
But I think readers should focus more on the outstanding scientific progress than on the slightly-overselling title.

Notably, the effect on bacteria membranes, and the ability to make antibiotics-resistant bacterias vulnerable to silver-buffed antibiotics.
Ahhh yeah, colloidal silver is making a comeback!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Alternat...
Physics is not math, true.

The "physics" he didn't understand in the code IS math, though. That's the point. Even if you know physics, you won't be able to understand the code without the math.
That slider is very broken though, clicking on the right arrow only toggles between the first and last item. Clicking left still skips some. Clicking on the second dot directly only goes to the third. :(
the second option is the intended one, yes. I'd only switch that out to first one if you ever found that allocating objects is the bottleneck in your code, which it shouldn't be.
"the glamour of paid advertising is a total illusion"

Not quite. What appeals about paid marketing is very simple: definable, scalable success.

"word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising in categories as diverse as skincare and mobile phones."

While I cannot attest to this being true or false, I can say that word of paid marketing can have a very appealing success rate.

For example, after 5 years of marketing online with my own money I can say the following:

1. 73% of all campaigns failed

2. 22% of all campaigns that did not fail became a moderately profitable success (~50-100% ROI)

3. 5% of all campaigns became absolute smash hits, earning over their lifetimes well past many times the investment I made to find them.

(NOTE: ROI for this example means the amount invested to test & optimize the campaign at the start ($1k-$10k) as opposed to the actual ROI of earnings over time, which is entirely different)

With a 5% smash hit rate - and a 27% success rate, that is a pretty damn good risk factor. This isn't to say that word of mouth doesn't work - it most certainly does - but paid advertising definitely has its place.

If you've got your wits about you, use paid to jump start word of mouth, and capitalize on word of mouth with paid. There is a myriad of opportunity and I would not leave either one out of the mix.
Enabling the Web of Mobile Apps
The problem was that the "car" they launched with wasn't going to work. It's like they pushed a car with no doors or seat belts.

I like the MS vision for a future of pure digital content that's associated with an account so that you can log in from anywhere and get access to it.

The problem with their vision and the Xbox One is that they didn't fully commit. They made a half-step that didn't take us all the way to their vision but still put some, frankly, poorly thought out requirements on the user.

A half-step is fine if you have the ability to iterate quickly and get the rest of the way there in a week or a month. But consoles do not iterate quickly. It would be YEARS before they could take us the rest of the way to their digital wonderland. That's just too long when you're stuck with some awkward intermediate step.

Their vision is still a good one, and it's still one they can build. They just need to be sure that when they launch the next Xbox (after the One), that they take the full step and commit to their vision completely.
I think he meant to use the term "blogspam", which colloquially refers to paraphrasing or copying other content.
> in my experience, there seems to be a correlation between people who love to study algorithms and people who love doing this.

Very well put.
> And PHP only makes it worse because it's old versions are absolutely terrible...

You just need to put your foot down. 5.2 is absolutely too much, I would never develop for it. Just tell them to stop being so damn cheap and upgrade to a decent hosting company. AWS is free for a year for new clients, there's no reason for them not to switch to something decent.
Largest repo on github (3GB)
> My question is what does it take to build a real business in the app store?

Conventional wisdom is that the money is in development work and not selling apps by yourself on the store.
Could you point me to any software packages that use XMPP/Jingle with ZRTP?

Also, do you know how the key distribution is managed with ZRTP?
shoot me an email if you can, can't seem to find yours online.
AppScale 1.8.0 released
msn.com? really?
I haven't heard of Uptano, I will certainly look into it. I've been very happy with the features and price of Digital Ocean, and I am not sure how much more I could really save over the already low $45/month.

CI is actually the one app we did pay for, we use http://semaphoreapp.com. We love it, has great github integration.
I disagree. I think that's not one of tptacek's better comments. He uses ad-hom to support his (probably correct) evaluation that the person/subject of the OP was not notable enough for a Wikipedia article. While ignoring / distracting from the more important points about very real problems with the administration of Wikipedia. The mere fact that many of the proposed additions to Wikipedia are junk is not proof that all additions that get deleted by admins are junk. To his credit, at least he boldly confesses in that post to being a ranting windbag (his words). And to be clear, the real problem in this particular case is not with tptacek's comment, but that HN'ers probably just blindly upvoted his post because it was his, or because it appealed to their own bias, not because it was any good.
Of course, the gait speed itself takes as inputs many of the rest of those factors. Smoking history, body mass index, and chronic joint or muscular conditions all pretty directly affect one's ability to walk fast. So gait speed turns out to be a very convenient, easily measured proxy for those other variables.
He should wait to see how the free graph will develop after a few days/weeks because chances are that download numbers will fall pretty quickly to ~1000/day.
Perhaps, but I'm not sure why we'd give someone "extra credit" just because they were too stupid to sharpen their knife before they plunged it into their victim.
What's the advantage of using a Python VFS instead of FUSE?
Betaworks: the startup factory behind 'Dots' and Digg keeps evolving
Indefinite Surveillance: Say Hello to NDAA 2014
> One difference here is that when the USG says "well it's all done according to law", that law was written and passed by an institution who at least nominally represents and is elected by the people. I don't know if the same can be said of the USSR.

The USSR was also nominally run under laws, which were notionally written and formally adopted by an institution which at least nominally represented and was elected by the people, and no doubt for any particular policy the regime could point to some justification in some provision of the Constitution and laws for the authority to carry out the action.
Israel Unveils David's Sling Missile System In Paris
Hi, I'm the author of the blog post (on twitter at @aatishb). I'd be happy to get your feedback and constructive criticism on this analysis. My take is that, given the many assumptions, I'm pretty darn surprised that it gave a reasonable answer. On the other hand, it just shows that you can go a long way with some dimensional analysis and a few crude measurements. Look forward to hearing your take on the writing, analysis, and ways that you think it could be improved overall. Cheers.
I'm not a Catholic, or a classic religious person at all, but when I hear Catholics speak like this, I often go "this is not my world view, but it does make sense, relative to its premises".

I don't get the same sense at all when listening to folks from many American churches. Their stuff seems... cartoonish.
Bradley Manning Teespring Campaign
No, it doesn't. People commit crimes and get away with them al the time, in fact. I'm not proposing that we put people in jail for having criminal potential.
Yeah, refreshing fixes it but it just happens again after 10-15 seconds again.
Just think about finishing it up. It works for me. I mentalize to do it and do it well. Most of the times, at the end, I like what I did.
CAUTION: One Marketer does Not Make a Digital Team
I think it's a lot more useful to show em your GitHub than it is to show them GPA. That's how I got my first internship :D.
I'm sure loads of amazing projects throughout history have been pulled off with great assistance from amazingly competent people who were hesitant about their abilities. It'd be interesting to find out if more teams are successful with arrogant or humble people. Perhaps you're just more likely to hear about the successes of arrogant people thanks to their loud trumpeting about themselves.
I asked these questions until a year ago. Brain teasers were never ok. They are defined as things that require a single insight and/or domain knowledge and could be communicated in a few seconds.

"Monopoly" is a perfect example of a brain teaser and anyone using that would be treated pretty harshly by the committee that reviews interview feedback. Estimate questions are not: there's no expectation of a "right answer" and the important fact is the working.

Some programming questions border on brain teasers to non programmers but that doesn't matter because you are asking programmers and again, it's the working that matters.

Finally different roles get different types of interviews. I worked in PM and there were analytical (these questions), product (design a better x) and technical (basic engineering interviews). The behavioral type was not one I encountered in PM or eng but maybe used elsewhere.
Ask HN: Datacenter provider for privacy minded startup
With all the recent discussion about privacy and data access laws, I'm wondering which international datacenter service providers would people trust for data privacy and general integrity in their operation.

eg. There is still a big question mark over certain providers like leaseweb (their role in the megaupload.com takedown?)

Assume that the startup is a scalable provider with user content, but not trying to skirt the laws with regard to DMCA etc.
>I can't bring myself to test this because I'll know I'm just doing it for points, so I continue to mostly respond to others (as here).

Why not? I've run some of these little experiments myself. Aside from the ethical breach of performing amateur psychology experiments on unwitting subjects, what's the harm? You don't have to adopt the model to all of your future posts. Do it for science!
Sleep Better with Sleep Genius For iOS
My Experience in Analytics Technology for the Obama Reelect
My instinct was to pronounce it "knee dee bee", so I think there's definitely an ambiguity there. On the other hand, that didn't stop people from naming GIF, SQL, or nginx, so I don't see why it should stop you.
One thing that’s mysterious, and possibly telling, about Amazon’s job announcement for a “Systems Engineer—Government Cleared” is that the location of this job—Herndon, Virginia—may or may not coincide with the location of the CIA’s own cloud computing centers.

This is not mysterious or surprising. Herndon, VA is full of entities doing TS/SCI work. It would be mysterious and surprising if the job announcement was in Kohler, Wisconsin.
I think my company does it right.

After a phone screen we ask candidates to complete two problems at home at their leisure. One is a simple filesystem traversal problem where we ask you to build in some runtime extensibility, and the other is a binary space partitioning problem (2D bounding box query) with a very difficult performance requirement (low 10's of ms max for 1M records).

All of our interviews are conducted by more senior software developers. Before we ever interview you we read through your code. These aren't huge tasks, but they're enough to show whether or not you use good organization. Then comes the interview...

We do use the first problem as sort of a litmus test. We figure that runtime instantiation of an arbitrary class which implements a known interface is a little on the edge of the realm of what you'll be doing day-to-day, but it's close enough that if given the problem to take home you should know how to Google the right runtime API calls to make it happen. And we're pretty flexible. If you misunderstood the extensibility requirement and when asked how you'd make it "runtime extensible" you can spit out something marginally close to "MyInterface blarg = (MyInterface)Class.forName(pluginFQDN).newInstance()," or even "I'd Google 'instantiate class by name in Java'" you're still doing more or less fine. You're doing very well if you can tell me how to add the plugin to your tool in such a way that it doesn't leak implementation details to the user either through its use or its installation procedure.

We absolutely do not use the second problem in anything close to a pass/fail manner. If you get the optimal solution, awesome. If not, no problem. Either way, let's talk about it. Let's work together. Let's have an in depth technical discussion about the various pros and cons of different techniques to solving this problem. If I say something which in the context of our discussion is by common-sense reasoning obviously wrong, will you call me out on it (preferably politely)? If I say something that you don't understand will you just nod and smile, or will you say "wait, what?" Or the single biggest problem I see surprisingly often - are you capable of in some way communicating a semi-complex idea to another person who is "skilled in the art," either verbally, on the whiteboard, or otherwise? These are the things we're evaluating on the second problem, not if you can pull a kd/quad/r/other-tree out of your ass.
I use Newsify on the iPad, which announced plans today to integrate with Feedly[1].

[1]: http://newsify.co/faq/general/what-will-happen-when-google-r...
node.js used to see really slow GC cycles (>1s) at over ~5/600MB of heap usage, and bomb out fatally at 1GB. Is this still the case?

If it is, you should probably put a larger warning about dataset size than the line you currently have :)
Functions like php7_htmlspecialchars() wouldn't live in the standard library, they would live in the "compatibility library" instead. That might help discourage new users from using them and mentioning them in tutorials.

I agree with your point that bulletproof conversion will make reflection-heavy code less readable. But still, if we can make a bulletproof converter that works on 100% of old code and leaves simple code relatively unchanged, doesn't that open up some nice options for everyone?

- Users who don't care about code quality, and just want their old code to work, will be happy because they will have a push-button upgrade solution.

- Users who care about code quality will also be happy, because they can run the converter and have a complete working program right away. Afterwards they can modernize it piece by piece, at their own pace, having a complete working program at each step. Without the converter they'd be stuck doing a full rewrite.

- Language implementors will be happy because they can keep the language clean as it evolves. Imagine how awesome Java could be today if they took this route.
Wow, PSR-2 (Coding Style Guide) seems fairly extreme (existentially, not in it's specifics which I haven't looked at) for PHP.

Part of me thinks it's odd, considering I never felt all that much freedom to change how I expressed things in PHP (at least not in the slightest compared to Perl).

Another part of me thinks that enough amateur programmers use PHP that some style guide may benefit them greatly. Then again, if people don't come to a better style through experience (or at least an explanation of the benefits or what mistakes it helps prevent) then is it really as useful?
I could indeed reverse engineer by playing around, but it's unlikely I'd ever be able to independently produce something like that myself if I went down that path. I think both is the best, learn some theory, play around with it, rinse, repeat. That said, what areas of geometry and physics should I focus on? Any good online resources?