skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> a tarball of shit is better than NOTHING

Not necessarily. A tarball of shit can become the de facto standard for some utility, and end up haunting us for ages after it gains critical mass, even long after a superior replacement arrives. See, e.g., rvm.
It's your perception of them that they are evolutions of an existing concept.

If you speak to customers it's surprising how groundbreaking they feel very simple things are.

Competing on quality isn't yet as important on the web as many people in our industry seem to think. Just look at all the crapy project management, time tracking and build your own website tools out there. Many of the ones you think look bad and are poorly built have customers that love them and profitable businesses built on them them.

I want quality to be a more important factor in web products but the only way that's going to happen is for more brilliant web developers to be running them. Once they have profitable businesses they can switch to putting quality first.
> EDIT: Plus your observation that you rarely use default values is probably for a good reason: they don't really work. Maybe if they worked, you'd use them?

Honestly, no, it's probably because I don't write methods to be generic enough.

Ignoring that,

>argument that "this is how python does it" is not a very good one

Except that if you're writing Python you have to work by Pythons rules, so yes it is.

> The reason for having the default value on a function in the first place is to allow me to make functions work with a default value

Then in python, make sure you are using datatypes that are passed by value, not by reference. That is the core of the problem and it bites everyone at some point in every language because the rules of passing by reference or value are different in a great number of languages.

def foo(name=[]):

In python, is not saying if I didn't pass something make name an empty list, it says 'if name is not defined in this scope, create an empty list.' But with Pythons rules a name[] was created in that scope when the function was defined. It was the programmers mistake for assuming otherwise.

Once again, we are writing Python here, Pythons rules are the only ones that matter. If you are getting unexpected results because you're not following the rules, the issue is yours. Python is not called C#, or Java, or C or Ruby or whatever because it is not C# or Java or whatever.
I feel like the OSS consulting model benefits from releasing buggy, hard to use software that requires the developer's assistance to get working.

It sounds like she wants to release software that works well without needing any maintenance, which would tend toward a payment up-front model.
Here is graphical comparison of safe landing and Asiana crash:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BOhIDCWCUAApHFV.jpg:large .

Also it appears that runway was modified: http://metabunk.org/sk/HL7742_777_Crash%2C_Korean_Asiana_Air...
Yep both Websocket (from server) and data channels (from peers). Streaming from server should always work.
it would be a nice highschool homework
Holy cow. It's built on macros, and macro-friendly! And I can use it with the node.js ecosystem!

As a guy who built his own npm-installable macros.coffee, [0][1][2] I am torn.

I love macros enough that I felt I needed to have them in JS-family languages, which have few metaprogramming options outside of tricks on 'this', which is why, when I saw that CoffeeScript had clean syntax and a relatively clean AST, I made it my "learning node/npm" project to add them.

On the other hand, my project is simple because it depends on a fragile hack: running a deep-copy on a chunk of AST for 'quote'. It's a fragile hack that jashenkas could break with a single well-placed closure, and as I promised on my project page, "If you want to ... build a substantially more 'heavy-duty' implementation, I'll probably end up using yours." This isn't an implementation in CoffeeScript, but it's better -- it's actually built into the language (as macros work best as a core language component; once you have 'em, it's easiest to write your language with them).

I'll have to try out GorillaScript and see what it actually feels like to write code in the language, allowing for the fact that its syntax may not be as pretty as coffeescript yet. But I wouldn't be surprised to find myself using GorillaScript this time next year.

Macros++.

-----

0) github.com/mrluc/macros.coffee

1) http://mrluc.github.io/macros.coffee/docs/macros.html

2) https://npmjs.org/package/macros.coffee
This is an excellent article. Like Air France 447, seems very plausible that pilot error did play some role. This reinforces my respect for the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, Captain Sullenberger.
Ask HN: How do you manage a relationship when obsessed with your work (or play)?
Interesting post, the author can be proud.
Not being from the united states, and now living there since one year , here is my 2 cent , I think these are the most important points of the post and my own advices:

- Drink water only, no soda, even diet coke and whatnot.

- Avoid sugars (I'd say especially high corn fructose syrup).

- Eat vegetables, cooked in good olive oil in a pan, it's really good. I don't know about other oils, the Mediterranean lifestyle with olive oil works great, and olive oil tastes better.

- Avoid too salty food (preprocessed food will be too salty.)

- Sleep well, stop watching at screens (TV/computer/ipad) an hour before sleeping. reading a book before going to sleep is great.

Attempting to reduce the problem to :
>" it's basically a physics problem (calories_in < calories_out to lose weight)"
is completely wrong I think, the "Try eating 2,000 calories of pasta versus 2,000 calories of chicken" comment speaks by itself.

I disagree with the " “listen to your body, and eat when it is hungry, not because it is a certain time” routine. "
Stick to regular hours for eating, breakfast, meal and dinner. But the most important is not to eat in between the meals. If you eat good food you won't even feel hungry

Finally, stop trying to measure everything, relax.
Yep ShareFest is very cool. Does Peer5 (the streaming solution) use WebRTC?
A defense of evolutionary psychology (mostly by Steve Pinker)
Alternatively, and easier for some: put low calory food in front of you. It may be possible to grow fat from eating raw celery and tomatoes, but it certainly is harder than growing fat from eating burgers and chocolate.
I just noticed you are the author, but I am a lurker and very much enjoyed some of your book recommendations and personal anecdotes. It has inspired me because I can tell your thought processes are similar to my own, so it resonates.

In the sea of HN pessimism, I thought you'd appreciate hearing from a stranger.
Because, well, making it available for free means that fewer people will be compelled to buy it?
The problem is the the overwhelming majority of Americans don't know this. I've had this conversation with many people and almost all don't know that you can get your cost discounted and that you can usually get them discounted to the Medicare/Medicaid price (which you just need to discover by matching it to CPT codes).

My mom was told about a procedure that would have cost her $120k, in one question the price dropped to $30k. That's such an unfathomable discount that I think many people are ignorant because it sounds too good to be true. They end up thinking that it doesn't exist, there is some catch or that they probably don't qualify somehow.
In my country hardly anyone has a gun but you can gamble all you want, no one gives a shit about that.
Ask HN: Best office design to improve productivity?
So I have a 10-12 people team, what are the best/current trends to improve productivity and team work in terms of office/workplace design and distribution? Eg. Communal tables? No assigned desks? etc.

Are there any study about this?
Thank you for your armchair analysis, but I will wait for the NTSB's report.
Thanks for your take, it sounded like you were promoting the government's position.
Are you not required to know what speed you were driving at? How else would you be able to stay under the limit?
The delay in leaving insert mode used to drive me nuts in vim-powerline. I posted an issue and the author pointed me to this helpful Vim config snippet as a workaround (original link gone as the vim-powerline issue tracker has been removed, so reposting as a gist): https://gist.github.com/brendonrapp/5944296

I imagine the delay that the README for this project is referring to might be the same thing, so hopefully it can be alleviated with this same trick.

EDIT: Looks like the official Powerline docs share this little trick now: https://powerline.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tipstricks.html
How clothes should fit
Will it install with pathogen?

Looks great btw!
I always start cautiously, with Ctrl.
Haha - whoops!
The difference is that CoffeeScript has a massive amount of mindshare, integrations, and tooling. GorillaScript may be better than CoffeeScript but that doesn't mean that it's even remotely close in terms of day-to-day usability. Because CoffeeScript got there first (and was decent) it's got a huge head start on ANY other competitor.
Regarding the money thing, remember there are other currencies than dollars.

When I open sourced my own RSS reader[1] some of the "non-monetary currencies" I received:

* Several (non-robot) recruitment emails from well-known companies doing Ruby
* Additional development time from strangers to fix things I wasn't interested in
doing (i18n, performance improvements)
* Additional testing time to iron out all the bugs
* 50-100 "qualified followers" (i.e. other developers/designers) on Twitter, many
thanking me for creating the project - increasing my network reach
* Five people have sent me messages that their merged pull requests were there first
open source contributions - that feels really cool
* Links from two of my favorite blogs - OneThingWell and The Changelog
* Being referenced in a Ruby book written by a community leader
* Socially-validated (1.8k+ stars) open source project that I can forever point to
* Material for future blog posts, user group/conference talks

Not all of these have the same value to each person - but for me, they were worth the trade-off. Could I have charged for the software instead? Probably, but I have a day job that pays me well and I enjoy. I wrote the software because I wanted it to exist (one of my favorite things about being a developer) and any extra benefits are just icing on the cake.

[1]: https://github.com/swanson/stringer
Python 3 is deliberately not backwards compatible. They made several big breaking changes to remove warts.
People tend to believe the source code is more useful than it actually is.

A good example was when Netscape open sourced Navigator v4. People couldn't get it to build and it was missing some proprietary components. So even though the open source world was desperate for a web engine, nothing was really done with it. In the end it was decided to start over from scratch with Mozilla.
I like Flattr's overall schema, which is basically:

- Set a monthly budget of money you're going to use (eg. $100.)

- Every time you like/retweet/flattr/etc. someone, you give them a share of that budget. So if you flattr five people, they each get $20; if you flattr twenty people, they each get $5.

I think the issue here is what makes using Flattr better than, say, purchasing goods (ie. an EP/tickets for a musician or a print for an artist.) As the user, this seems like a win-win for me, since I get something fungible out of the donation and the artist gets more money than had I done it through Flattr, since I'm a capricious selfish human who is reluctant to budget a large amount of recurring costs away from myself.
Kinda like C# ;)
Kudos. Very important distinction to make.
Interesting. I wonder what the Asiana's descent profile looks like compared to the average and some outliers of other safe 777 landings at SFO. Did you generate that image? If not, what was the source?
Describing them as sheep seems a lot less dehumanizing than depicting them as out of their minds with fear.
In other words, capitalism ruins it for the rest of us....
Of course there is a lot more non-police crime than there are reported incidents of police misconduct. What about simple mistakes? I'm not sure if buffoonery is counted as misconduct. What I'm really referring to though, is what is my own personal exposure to risk of harm? I wouldn't be surprised to find that it is more likely that police might kick my door down and shoot my dogs, either by mistake, misunderstanding, or misuse of power, than say armed burglars.
How many people are doing this at once? Farming 100 leads by identifying possible companies and finding a good contact is about 10 hours of work for one person in my experience, if you are not working off of some sort of minimally qualified list. Do you have 3+ people cranking on it? Also, getting 23 answers out of a 100 calls sounds like a pipe dream unless you are calling very low into your target organizations. At a Director / VP Marketing level you'll be doing good to get 10 conversations in 100 calls.
Certainly not, but it's not even close. There were ~5,000 reports of police misconduct and ~12,000 homicides in 2010.
Have you gotten in touch with the iHub people in Nairobi? Seems like it'd be right up their alley
and if no one is compelled to buy it to begin with? that's what I'm asking. I don't think we can just assume that someone would buy it.
Well, yes, but you can't elect politicians who aren't like that because that's all of them.
Afghanistan's Buddhist buried treasure faces destruction
Bad things happen to other people, and sometimes it's easier to get their job done if they skirt the rules a bit. The target-du-jour would be fine if they hadn't been doing activity-du-jour anyways, so it's not like the person didn't deserve it.

Few believe that it will happen to them.

Humans are really good at denial, rationalization and ignoring the plight of people they do not directly care about.

It's a damning combination.
My experience has been that if you're obsessed with work (or play), then find a relationship where the other is obsessed with work (or play). Hopefully, similar work. (So you can understand what each other are talking about.)

Outside of that, most non-obsessed people expect you to give them a healthy chunk of your time and attention. If you're unable, or unwilling to do that, there is little else you can do to ensure that both of you will have what you desire as a healthy relationship. One of the two is going to get short-changed.
Well, to be frank, Siri is equally good at pretending to help, without really helping. At least the bofa boat does not say anything in that creepy monotone.
It makes me very happy that I am never going to convince people like you that accessibility is optional. I can't convince myself of it either when it comes to profitable products.

We need more people like you running profitable businesses and ensuring that it is never optional in the (misguided) name of lower costs and more profits.

Unfortunately when you build an MVP for the 100% you build it for no one. If accessibility is the most important thing for you then make your product and therefore your MVP for with people with disabilities as your primary audience. I would suggest a much narrower focus than that as its sadly far too big a market to start with.
Let me be the first to welcome those fine representatives of three letter agencies to this discussion. I hope you enjoy your stay and enjoy watching the process of having turned almost a whole industry against you.

Thanks to your "freedom enhancement techniques" even (most likely) innocent citizens are by now considering using methods previously reserved for high level criminals.
I lost seven pounds in the first week when I started changing my diet. It was primarily by significantly reducing my sugar intake (snacks, soda, and sheer easy calories). I was nowhere near this guy's weight, but I hit a high of 197 and freaked out and began changing my lifestyle.

It's clearly possible that he lost 20 pounds.
You think trained submission to authority is scary? How about being trained for constantly being monitored and brain washed?

[…] as much as the program offers freedom and continuity, it also comes with a substantial monitoring component. The iPad keeps teachers and parents constantly informed about what children are doing, what they have learned and how they are progressing.

Better technology in education is clearly the future and, in many ways, the way to go. The mind boggles with possibilities. But, but… we need to put much more thought into it than just the implementation of another nifty feature. We also need better laws and regulations that constrain the authority of the, uhm, authorities. And a government we can trust would be nice too.

The way things stand today, this article just scared the bejesus out of me.

_______________________________________

[1] M. Evers. Radical reform: Dutch iPad schools seek to transform education. Der Spiegel, Jun 28 2013. (http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/new-ipad-schools-...)
Do you have an explanation for why OP is wrong beyond that you find his claim aesthetically displeasing?
While I liked Flattr I doubt that it's a sustainable service:

It's a huge vendor lock in, like iTunes, but without a large user base/customers that are probably worth to accept the terms and conditions and the vendor lock in.

Flattr is popular only among a specific kind of websites: Here in Germany, flattr users are probably podcasters and bloggers. Even as a popular site your traffic/audience is much smaller than in the US or global, so ad-driven sites and even flattr isn't going to work.

Large content producers, like the Axel Springer Verlag, recently started an "inhouse" SSO subscription platform. No dependencies except CC providers. No 30% charges. Full control.

Even as a high profile community person with 5000+ Flattrs, you can't live from that e.g. it brings in maybe 2500€/month but those very few people work a lot and invest a lot in technology. So i doubt this is enough. Also, nobody knows how long it will last. The subscription functionality was implemented as auto-expiring and changed only a few months ago (iirc)…

With lots of cheap and easy payment providers (like Stripe), paypal and bitcoins it became quite easy to accept "real donations" e.g. 10€+
Talk about coincidences, someone very recently recommended Jetstrap for the Coursera Stanford Startup Engineering course :).Best of luck in all your endeavors!
I'm american as well.

When TV news and viral videos and newspapers make us feel like terrorism or kidnapping is more prevalent than it actually is, we call it sensationalism. Why is this any different? Is it because it confirms things you already believe to be true?

I looked at the list you provided, and tried to correlate it against the Wikipedia list. Many of the dates etc don't match up but I tried. A number of the cases where the suspect is listed as "unarmed" don't jive with the police reports, at the very least. Others involve things that are clearly assault even if there was no gun (like assaulting someone with a car).

That said, I do think in particular if you are a black male you are likely to be mistreated by police. That's not justifiable. But I still don't see real evidence that this is an epidemic or particularly pervasive.
Great app and a super achievement for someone who's only been working in JS for 8 months.
This is awesome!

Thoughts: after clicking, sometimes I decide I want to cancel drawing from that point. I can click on the original point to cancel, it would be nice to be able to press ESC or SPACE to cancel drawing (just noticed that Z for undo cancels).

For the "game" side, it is very important to have simple tasks that almost all players can complete to get started. I would add an even simpler first challenge, such as make two overlapping circles.

I would love to be able to share constructions. I'm thinking a button I press that pops up a URL that I can share. When visited it shows an animation drawing the construction, then when done lets you do more drawing. That would be cool.
A driver obviously cannot constantly keep his/her eyes on the instruments.
"...Dirac was absorbed in writing his Ph.D. thesis, a compact presentation of his vision of quantum mechanics. Confident though he was of his understanding of the theory, he knew as he wrote his thesis that it was not the whole story, for he had recently heard than an alternative version of quantum theory had appeared, one that completely different from Heisenberg's. The author of the new version was the Austrian theoretician Erwin Schrodinger, working in Zürich. He was 38 years old, a generation older then than Heisenberg and Dirac, with a formidable reputation in Europe as a brilliant polymath.

Dirac ignored Schrodinger's theory in his PhD thesis "Quantum Mechanics", the first to be submitted anywhere on the subject. The thesis was a great success with his examiners who took the unusual step on 19 June of sending him a short hand written letter congratulating him on the "exceptional distinction" of his work.

....Dirac disliked celebrations and formality, so he was almost certainly not looking forward to the ceremony. He could have taken the degree without attending it but decided to be there in person for the sake of his proud parents, especially this father, who had given him the money that enabled him to begin his Cambridge studies.

...Wearing evening dress with a white bow tie, a small black cap and black silk down with a scarlet-lined hood, he knelt on a velvet cushion, placed his hands together and held them out to be grasped by the Vice Chancellor, who delivered a prayer-like oration. Dirac arose, a doctor.

Like his father, he had no need of holidays – the long vacations were not for relaxing but for hard work. The university was about to hibernate for the summer and would be virtually devoid of social distractions for the few scholars remaining. It was the perfect environment for Dirac to concentrate even more intensively on his work. Heisenberg and Schrodinger had knifed a sack of gemstones, and the race was on to pick out the diamonds.

-- Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man
Backbone took a REST opinion, I imagine if you want something like you describe, they (or someone) will implement something like backbone.io.

https://github.com/scttnlsn/backbone.io
Why do you think they'd actually monitor those themselves? Get a bot to monitor them, and a text spinner to reword the texts.
Snowden says, NSA works closely with Germany and other Western state for spying
I agree, there is absolutely no room left for nationalism anymore.

The situation is so f##ked up that all citizens of all concerned countries will have to band together and let our respective governments clearly know that this will not continue.
It seems to me that most of the issues are a result of the jury system, where people feel that the defendant is guilty or not.

There was an example at the end where a witness claims she saw the defentant at the crime scene. Her testimony would have been ignored because it is so unsupported.

But if the defendant stated to the police that he wasn't there, he could be accused of lying and thus be more likely to be convicted.

To me, this just doesn't make sense.
Well, they do things that will make them look tough on crime without really carrying if it will actually reduce the level of crime.
Thanks. Someone submitted it, being discussed here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6001843
My Many Failures before Success
I found picture on twitter, it is generated by FlightAware - live flight tracking (http://www.flightaware.com)