skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Promises + CoffeeScript really hits the sweet spot for me:

getUserFriends = (userName) ->
db.users.findOne(name: userName).then (user) ->
db.friends.find userId: user.id

Or prezjordan's example:

getUserFriends = (userName) ->
db.users.findOne(name: userName)
.then (user) ->
db.friends.find userId: user.id
.then(function (friends) ->
somethingAsync(friends)

The concise function syntax and implicit "return" really helps.

If that's not good enough you can implement higher level control flow abstractions much more nicely than with raw callbacks, e.x. https://github.com/tlrobinson/q-step

getUserFriends = (userName) ->
QStep(
->
db.users.findOne name: userName
(user) ->
db.friends.find userId: user.id
(friends) ->
somethingAsync friends
)
I think the issue is that most programmers actually never touch threading, or if they do, they get complicated threading models shoved in their faces and run away in horror (which is a reasonable reaction). But these constructs looks sort-of like they're just wrappers around callbacks.

Never mind that the only reason callbacks are all that interesting in JS is because they allow the engine to sneak in threading behind your back - most people have a very woolly idea about how JS execution happens and the fact the javascript execution itself isn't threaded.
Original content: http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/05/28/nasa-admits-t...

Really poor article, don't bother.

The impression I got is that this is made up crap to lure us to the site and try to exploit some zero-day. Would HN bite?
Then you will really like http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/index.php?DRIS_ID=MS58...
And yet Ed Thorpe, from 1969-88, had 227 months where he made money, and 3 where he lost. Over that time frame, he had a mean return of well north of 15%, with a standard deviation of 4%.
What precisely did you prove? Edit - your arguments are incoherent - I, or most others who claim that some people can consistently beat the market, are not relying upon some mythical, eternal method. You're correct in that any such method will become public and therefore worthless. I imagine consistently winning takes constant work and innovation.

Furthermore, no is claiming that [i]anyone[/i] can "make huge sums of money systematically without risk," or that successful hedge funds that can turn 1 dollar into 1+r dollars can always turn 1e9 dollars into (1+r)e9 dollars, or even that there exists a single financial genius that can entirely eliminate risk.

What a collection of straw men you have succeeded in knocking down!
Agreed, the absolutely pervasive 1960s car culture in America seems to be vanishing, and it is on its way to becoming more of a quite-popular hobby. Traffic is worse, insurance is expensive and now may incorporate your credit score, and driving a car gives the police carte blanche to search and violate your civil rights under the flimsiest of excuses. More young people, other than those in very rural areas, are interested in re-urbanizing and riding a bicycle. As both a motorsports / driving enthusiast and bicyclist I think this is great.
Except that qwerty_asdf wasn't referring to a /24 subnet, (s)he was talking about one of the three address spaces defined in RFC 1918 and described thusly:

"Note that (in pre-CIDR notation) the first block is nothing but a single class A network number, while the second block is a set of 16 contiguous class B network numbers, and third block is a set of 256 contiguous class C network numbers."

So it is common for crusty old network engineers and sysadmins to refer to 192.168/16 as "the class C" private block, even when they understand that you can subnet it however you'd like.
New form of carbon said to be strongest material ever found
Anatomy of a brute force attack - how important is password complexity?
> NASA is currently working on the first practical field test toward the possibility of faster than light travel.

Yes. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359

> congress recently discussed and looked at evidence for Earth like planets recently found by Kepler Telescopes.

Ok...

> UFOs and the technology behind it should not be subject to speculation. Odds are we have retrieved some of that technology

Ok. We're done here.
All you have to do is click on over to the 'About' section!:

I'm an Industrial Designer recently graduated from the Ecole Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne (ECAL)
What % of that ratio is intentionally "unemployed"? I am. That statistic is similar to the commonly quoted % of US residents w/out health insurance, which ignores that a good deal of these people (again, like myself) choose to forgo this due to careful cost/benefit analysis.
Seems like it would be easy to make a model that still houses the paper to prevent tipping and would still allow for infrequent loading.
Scientists Reach Milestone In Quest For Smart Windows
I think one particular problem with the strong-form efficient market hypotheses is this:

A stock should already be priced for all of the publicly available information. However, that information has to be analyzed and interpreted. That's the catch.

"Today company XYZ announced their purchase of Chinese company ABC."

There are probably many different ways to interpret that information. Maybe the purchase will result in increased profit, maybe it will bankrupt the company. Nobody knows.

If all public information were easily interpreted, i.e. if X happens the stock will drop by 5%, then the markets probably would be efficient.
Not to support the "evil executives" hypothesis---obvious market(ing) forces are a sufficient explanation for the dominance of LiCoO2---but I would easily opt for a laptop that offered an LiFePO4 ("iron phosphate" [0]) option. The drawback would be slightly reduced initial capacity; the advantage would be much greater cycle life. Also, less spontaneous combustion.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
As a Brit holidaying in the States, I have been asked many many times in the most serious of tones if I know Prince Charles/the spice girls/David Beckham. Quite bizarre.
These are things you need to do on any biopic in order squeeze a human life into a ~2-hour bucket. I would ignore this review and go see it anyway. I think it looks wonderful, despite being a confirmed Apple-hater.
Lol, up vote for the prank!
Comparing U.S. & World Covers for TIME Magazine
cbs - cbSucces
cbe - cbError

replaces all the "if (e) return cb(e)" lines with cbe when you call the async function.

A whole abstraction over js just because of this, running away from the problem...instead of solving it on the spot, keep running.
very cool & pragmatic project: javascript / java / c++ coders get one step closer to functional programming.
His point is that playing the market is "speculation", not investing. He differentiates this with "investing", where you simply try to assess the intrinsic value of a stock, and if the stock is trading at a significant discount to it, then you buy it.

Further, once you've bought it, you keep it. You don't try to time the ups and downs of the market, buying moving and out of the position quickly. Since this is how Buffett likes to invest, one of his key principles is investing in owner-operators or people that are behaving as such. You want the executives of the company to treat it as if they owned all the stock and could never sell it. Because when you have the people running the company worrying about next quarter, you're not worrying about next decade.

Also related, Buffett's two key rules to investing:

Rule #1. Never lose any money

Rule #2. Never break rule #1
It appears to be very similar to icedcoffeescript: http://maxtaco.github.io/coffee-script/
Would it require a perfectly stacked pile? It would seem annoying if you slightly bang in to the pile and have it be off balance.
I'd be knocking the thing over all the time I'm afraid. Would probably only use 100 or so sheets at a time, though.
All I see is a target for my stumbling clumsy self!

And a big cleanup job afterward.
5-HTP Reviews
He's been planning for his retirement/demise for a very long time. He's pretty good at playing the long game, so I wouldn't bet against him.
This is very awesome. Please consider writing about other tree data structures in the future :)

Specially, sofistications on AVL and Red-Black trees
I'd be more interested in performance than features. If you use tasks when they're not needed, how much more JavaScript code does it take and how fast does it run? Also, what do stack traces look like?
I assume "joeyh" stands for Joey Hess, a name I recognize from seeing it many, many times over the years. :) I didn't know you did slink-and-a-half though.

Thanks for all your hard work, and especially for introducing me to Debian. Have a wonderful Debian birthday!
...what? How is putting additional restraints on jackbooted thugs against your interests? Perhaps it's "throwing good money after bad", effort-wise, but I hardly see how the pursuit of due process makes things worse. We can build guard rails while the bridges are in pre-production.

To be clear: are you referring to working within a conventional political system (over 50% consensus), or outside the political system, through NGOs/technology/etc? The former is more easily achieved by allying with those you disagree with. What would be your practical strategy to building bridges instead? Not with long-term "consciousness change", but right now, today?
Mapping the connections among 950 neurons in the retina
Arg... Assume the entire population of fund managers, which is smaller than the population of the entire "market", has a mean return of 15%. Further, assume the market as a whole (superset including fund managers) has a mean return of 10%.

Under those conditions... in a sampling of 100 "typical fund managers", more than half would still produce higher returns than the market.

You made an implicit assumption, which I believe is probably correct, that fund managers as a population are an unbiased sampling of the entire market -- ie. that their returns are the same as the market (or worse) -- but provided no evidence to back it up.
I am a high school student, and I am curious about your path to this very attractive lifestyle.

Would you mind giving me a point by point summary?
The Uberization of services
A new Svbtle layout
There has to be a limit, but in most real world use, people rarely leave tons of paper on the printer without collecting it (of course there are exceptions).
I didn't know UNIX won't allow kernel exception handling. Source?

Of course exceptions are suboptimal; bad performance compared to "goto" can have unintended side effects depending upon the OS (scheduling work may be triggered off of the additional interrupt).
FYI, in surveillance context the NSA/US government define "collect" as "look at"/"analyze", not as "store".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Battery_lif...

> The rate of degradation of lithium-ion batteries is strongly temperature-dependent; they degrade much faster if stored or used at higher temperatures.

That might be related. MacBook Airs get really hot even if you aren't doing anything too taxing.
Como hacer tiramisu casero
This printer concept is also cool: http://renelee.net/arc/
I recall reading about this idea in the science-fiction role-playing game Shadowrun. It's set in 2060-2080, so technology is better in nearly all ways: including a printer design as described here. Very interesting, in the shadow of the total lack of progress in actual printer technology in the last few decades.
exfat is also the default filesystem on Android devices for large (>32G maybe?) SDXC cards. It has clear advantages over FAT on huge filesystems, though this is excruciatingly annoying as it's easy to forget to format it wrong by accident and end up with a filesystem I can't read from my Linux machine.

What use is removable media without a universally recognized format?
My point was not when bash was created, rather good systems people have been doing this very thing for quite some time. I think I'm just tired of reading ZOMG blog posts. My bad.
Worthwhile story and I've always thought that entering a space that already exists is a better bet than trying to create a market.

Selling to developers can be tough because they aren't shy about telling you what details you left out that is just obvious and necessary according to them.

Do you envision the "product" initially being willingly customized when a well-paying customer comes along or do you feel it's already viable for a wide variety of needs?

What differentiates you from say apiary.io ?
No, I had a crazy cat lady neighbor that abandoned 9 of them (in stages), and #10 was an impossibly cute kitten that showed up because there were other cats here. I've recovered several lost cats for neighbors, they tend to gravitate to my yard since it has a bunch of contented cats.

It's a long story. My wife and I are trying to turn it into a children's book.
My biggest personal problem with what the NSA is doing is that they find it OK to store any data, and are only applying the laws on queries. If you look at the violations, some are typos performed on searches. If the NSA never stored the data about Americans in the first place an overly broad typo in a search box wouldn't be an issue. I would like the law to include protection against having our information stored, not just viewed. And I also want protections for non-Americans that aren't legitimate targets. Why is nobody talking about not storing the information or the moral violations, if not legal violations, of collecting private data of innocent people who are not citizens?
Nice article, might start tracking this too! My mid-2011 MBA is at 203 cycles and 99.5% capacity. Seems to be holding up remarkably well.
It's not obvious that the same or greater government spending on R&D would not have happened without the cold war.

In an alternate history where government spent the same percentage of GDP without a cold war (not a huge stretch, I think, since no cold war means no red scare and presumably some higher level of survival for the political left) the amount spent on research would presumably be a lot larger.

People love to look on the bright side of military spending but it's often a case of the broken glass fallacy. You spend a lot of money either destroying property or, at best, building stuff you hope very much will sit around unused. The economic activity that looks great often has an opportunity cost.
Learning the Meaning Behind Words
Of the tonnes of Javascript libraries that are unloaded on HN regularly, this is one of the more fascinating ones. Absolutely love the syntax. Great job!
What made me finally stop trying to use it is that you can't modify the environment of a command like so: HOWDY=pardner env.
OT, but I just meant that one would be preoccupied with the gun to one's head.
Huh, interesting. I'm not sure that page is accurate. In my personal account I've never noticed that behavior -- even on messages I send which have a valid SPF + DKIM and a 1024 bit key.
I saw it tonight and I actually thought it was very good. It definitely exceeded my expectations. I was a little unhappy of how they portrayed Woz, but altogether the movie was well put together.
Missiles could be in the air right now...
Hp desktop
I searched http://api.genderize.io/?name=batman

and received
{"name":"batman","gender":null}
Their food is the only reason I would consider working there.

This is bald hyperbole. There are a lot of reasons you would consider working there.
AOL lays off about 500 at Patch local news unit
Neat. I love http://requestb.in/ which you guys recently acquired? Can you share more about plans if any for that service? Thanks!
I read all this 1975 dated letter and while I enjoyed every piece of it, this phrase contained in the very last page is what caught my attention the most:

"Conventional approaches to money management should not be expected to produce above average results."

It basically means that if you want to perform better than your competitors you logically should act differently from them. As in distancing yourself from the status quo.

I can see this advice being spot on for startups as well, it has everything to do with thinking outside of the box and redefining the rules of the game.

Good ole Warren nailed it decades ago.
Is this art or a prototype? I just see it on my desk tipping over. :-)
Because you really need a bunch of people who think they're smart and want to bother you with every idea they have. Especially at the bottom of your cap table.
Density. Certainly it's possible to start a courier business in a less-dense city (and not saying there aren't others -- Boston and NYC especially) but you've now made getting off the ground a lot harder. Obviously the culture in SF has made courier start-up pretty popular lately, but without density I bet that we'd be seeing far less of them.

Density allows these P2P start-ups to succeed with a lot less hassle, and from there they can grow the capital they need to expand.
Google goes dark for 2 minutes
Google Trends - Visualize Hot Searches
I first heard this this story on "Extra Credits": http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/narrative-mechanics

No affiliation, but if you like this kind of game analysis, be sure to check out their series. It's bite-sized and pretty good.
Please post the torrent link once it's done.
> Or Android app programming, even; most Java developers would still take months to get up to speed on Android, if they ever managed adapt to the Android way of thinking at all.

So you doubt they would be able to adapt to an environment that uses the exact same language they've been using for 10 years, simply because they don't know the API? Do you think that someone who is smart enough to do Java development for 10 years isn't smart enough to pick up a new Java-based environment in days/weeks?

Your attitude reeks or arrogance, elitism and lack of empathy. I'd never want to work with people like you in any capacity.
Maestro - Container orchestration for Docker environments
I like this. I’m not as impressed with it as many others seem to be, since I’ve worked with Encore and Sibelius a lot and they have almost this exact feature. That is, they play synthesized audio while moving the bar along with the sheet music. But it is nice to have better-played music to listen to while following along with sheet music.

I do also sometimes pull up some classical sheet music and try to read it along with a recording. So if you get a bigger library that includes pieces I end up being interested in, your site would be useful in that respect. I would enjoy the safety of having the red bar following along to make sure I don’t lose my place.

You said on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226990 that the left and right arrow keys should move by page, and not by measure, and they’re just mislabeled. I think it would actually be more helpful for the arrow keys to move by measure. That’s what I’m used to in other programs, and I would want to do that more often. I often move back a measure or three back to replay a complicated part I just heard. Moving back a whole page is too much, and using the mouse to click the previous measure is less efficient. You could still keep the keyboard page-moving functions, but bind them to Page Up and Page Down instead.

I’ve used Transcribe! (http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html) before to manually mark up the measures and beats of pieces. You say you have some JavaScript tool that helps you mark up pieces, and I would love to see it, but you might also want to look at Transcribe! and see if that makes marking up pieces easier. Transcribe! uses a proprietary file format, but it’s not too hard to extract the beat times by parsing the text of the file.

Another scrolling method you could try to help people keep their place is showing two rows/systems at once. When you get to the end (right side) of one row, move the bar to the left side of the next row, and then scroll the next row up, displaying the row after that below it. I’m thinking of the effect in this video, which uses Finale Notepad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxTav4S-4Tk.
How about a 50 year-old slim guy with a full head of hair and a 911? Is that pathetic? Why? That would be me (minus the 911). I'm too frugal to buy a 911 but if another guy has socked away two or three million $ (or more) over the course of his tech career, how is this different than a 25yo with a big exit buying a 911? You seem a bit misinformed about age, a bit of an age-ist perhaps: I'm healthy and can bench press more now than in my entire weight-lifting life (since about 22). I agree with you that "kids" (i.e. people 20-30 :-) ) in tech are very often suckered into giving up their young lives to their tech employers. I saw this happening in the mid-90s at M$ and in their Seattle-area wannabes. I never participated in that, my time outside of the 9-5 norm was precious to me. You are right that "no amount of money compensates ever" for those years if they are lost.
> Further, assume the market as a whole (superset including fund managers) has a mean return of 10%. Under those conditions... in a sampling of 100 "typical fund managers", more than half would still produce higher returns than the market.

No, because we're comparing manager performance with market indices, like the DJIA, both of which include overall market growth.

The "average market" is measured by market indices, each of which tries to characterize a typical buy & hold portfolio. Thus, market indices ascend with overall market growth. That's what an average manager has to beat.

And the WSJ Dartboard Contest, which compares market indices with submitted manager performances, proves that managers cannot beat the market, even if their fees aren't included in the tallies.

> Under those conditions... in a sampling of 100 "typical fund managers", more than half would still produce higher returns than the market.

No, just half. not more, not less. Both the market indices and the managers would ride the ascending average value of the market as a whole. The only difference would be the theory being tested -- that some managers have special abilities that would give them an edge.

> You made an implicit assumption, which I believe is probably correct, that fund managers as a population are an unbiased sampling of the entire market -- ie. that their returns are the same as the market (or worse) -- but provided no evidence to back it up.

I keep proving my point with examples like the Dartboard Contest, and people keep ignoring the evidence. Don't you understand that submitters to the Dartboard Contest had every incentive to display their best performance -- a success would assure them of fame and wealth. But none of them could do it, over a period of years.
Thanks for your comment. Your experience in the space is insightful.

We see delivering products (of any kind) in as fast as possible more inevitable than as our differentiator. For a large group of consumers, Uber has contributed to the shift of consumer expectations to mobile, instant and high quality.

We actually don't think of local florists as competition. Rather we partner with the good ones, provide the tools and training to make awesome arrangements, and bring in the urban logistics to make on-demand delivery possible. As you said, vertically integrating all of this new infrastructure would be way too capital intensive. There's a fairly new entrant to the market doing that now and it's taken a long time to hit a $4mm run rate.

On the consumer side of things, you're absolutely right. Great branding and awesome customer service will solve a ton of problems. Worst case for BT, a little bit rubs off on the incumbents and customers still win. Thanks again for your comment.
Awesome stuff, I always wondered how difficult it would be to build one - with the SIM card etc. I'd love to work on 3D printing smaller phones, with larger screens with touch support - bringing the barrier of cell phone creation down to consumer levels.

Nice :)