skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surely not. I like science.

What I don't like is hastily done applied technology that pretends to be science, but instead of knowledge it caters to money interests and the need for a quick buck. And the people that go "Oh, science was used in the process of creating this, we must defend it" (hint: science was also used in creating cigarettes and high fructose corn syrup).

Science is about learning. Those kind of endeavours, like Monstanto, is about locking-down and selling -- and let the future generations sort any bad outcomes out.

They can (and do) sidestep scientific rigor, objections, methodological issues, and the need for long term impact studies (and of course, all the ethical and societal issus arising from a company patending seeds themselves) to the maximum extend that regulatory bodies allow them.
Rails does need a better logger by default, and your idea is really good but I am just not prepared to push this much configuration into my apps. We're talking about a yml config file, 14-odd lines in application.rb and an additional 67-line logger initializer.

Given the choice between crappy, non-automatable but still searchable default logs with zero configuration, or this operationally superior solution that requires over 100 lines of code/config I will take the former any time. Also, no way I am introducing a global log check time variable. Is it just me that finds this way too messy? I'd rather push for a Heroku/Scrolls-style logger by default in Rails.
No, I think that's a rediculous assertion. Journalists have choices about what the direct their attention to. Various things help them make those choices, and misuse of state power against somebody they can personally identify with is the sort of thing that will draw their attention.
Geo-Spotting: Mining Online Location-based Services for Optimal Store Placement
Leonard Ehrenfried's notebook
I don't understand the comments about snake oil and the other vitriol. Why jump to conclusions about the author's motives instead of just taking it for what it plainly is: a draft idea put together in the spare time by Elon and a few SpaceX and Tesla engineers? He's not trying to get funding for it, so what's the motivation for trying to hide some fundamental flaw?

It seems the article is more concerned about criticizing the details of the proposal rather than the idea.
Well, if they patended "talking to your friends" like such big companies patend "seeds for growing vegetables", people would very much suggest it.
The Investor Pitch – Balancing Optimism and Risk
Unit testing Javascript UIs
Poll: how to teach course in scientific computing?
This fall I am teaching a graduate level course in scientific computing to non-CS graduate students. I will be teaching them in the unix tradition, using C, Python, R, and I will teach them about tools like emacs, LaTeX, etc. They will come in with a laptop but I suspect with mixed OS's including Mac, Windows, and perhaps even someone using linux (prob Ubuntu). I plan to demo everything using Debian Wheezy.

How should I approach this? What should I suggest and/or require students to do?
buy a cheap netbook and install linux (after all many courses require textbooks(s) totalling in the hundreds of $$ so this is not on the face of it unreasonable)
boot their laptop into linux using a USB key of sufficient size to allow scratch space
run linux from virtualbox using a machine image that I provide to them with debian wheezy already installed
dual-boot their laptop from their HD
allow them to use whichever OS they want (mac, windows, linux) but tell them if they use non-linux they are on their own for support, I can't help them
Why should it be the responsibility of the government to filter out the crap? The market does that pretty well.

I think they just want to filter so that there are fewer companies to regulate, disregarding the fact that this kind of regulation affects small businesses disproportionately.
India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear
You shouldn't poo-poo escapism wholesale. Granted, the vast majority of them are used for complete non-productive rubbish, but recreation and inspiration can go hand-in-hand.

After all, film and video games (and, of course, the TV series that came before) were the inspiration for this as well, no?
People need a break, and video games, films, alcohol and drugs can provide those (just like hiking, gardening, and photography). There's nothing like a bit of downtime to let your mind turn things over in the background.

And with regard to film, alcohol, and drugs specifically - these can all be tools to gain a different perspective on reality, they're not necessarily mindless escapism.
How do they deal with thermal expansion on traditional railways? Same problem no? The track needs to expand, they spread across miles and miles and I never saw a damper area (except that the tracks are disjointed by a quarter to half an inch each, which would be the same with a tube in a tube configuration)...
I find it interesting from the point of view that, to me, I assumed he would have at least somewhat internalized how closely he and his work is watched now. The fact that isn't the case is interesting.

I wonder if this will be the lesson that gets him to shift into that last bit of understanding as to what it means to be so watched by the wider world, awaiting your next bit of output.
Why do you say "similarly" when you give opposite answers?
I would think those two examples are more about Elon Musk putting many millions of dollars of his own capital into the companies before any other VC's jumped on board.
I think his point is that these people aren't depressed; they're enabled sociopaths.
I'm reading this python example (http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/examples/python_web_app/) and it's a wrapper for running bash scripts with arcane syntax layered on top.
If you're charging customers and aren't making enough in a few months to cover the minimum fee then your business is going to be in trouble in any case. Sure the percentage is going to be crappy, but if you're a SaaS business and your margins are so small that the percentage is worth stressing about in the early days then you're probably doing something wrong.

Right, so if you're in that position, why would you put up with the onerous application process for a service like Braintree if you have a simpler alternative like Stripe available and it provides the functionality you need? You want a payment service that takes as little time as possible to set up and then just works, because you have a million more important things to be doing. Any advantages Braintree might have had if their pricing did work out more favourable than Stripe's flat rates is instantly lost because they can't give straight answers to too many basic questions (like "What does it cost me to collect a payment?") and their API and documentation are significantly more complicated.
Warning: that tab completion script will be very slow if you have lots of branches.
somewhat strange that this was downvoted. some people are obviously incapable of facing up to reality.
Learning a new programming language is an intellectual, exploratory endeavor, even if it might result in adopting that language for future programming projects. Writing software professionally is a pragmatic engineering job constrained by non-intellectual considerations such as customer expectations (and lack of knowledge thereof) and limited availability of resources (time, money, skills, etc.). Suggesting that both activities should be approached the same way is a huge mistake.
Thanks! That's an invaluable addition to the conversation.

For my purposes and for the purposes of the people building this site, I was taking "complete beginner" to mean "never played chess, ever." If you think about it there are many things I know that such a person doesn't, e.g., what it's like to make an ill-considered move.

I knew what pinning and skewering were, for example, although I didn't have a name for them. Learning about pinning for me is putting a name to something I've experienced. A "complete beginner" doesn't have access to that and will be incrementally harder to teach.

That's what I meant, not that 50 games is substantial experience or that I am not a beginner.
> really really good (and senior) engineers at organizations that have money / are somewhat large, are known to easily hit salaries of 300k-400k.

That's really high. I work in NYC and know of a small set who're hitting 175k-180k max (not me, I make less!), and those people are a rare bunch. I realize there are people who may be getting up to 300k, but that's probably the top 0.5%-1% percentile.

I've heard these urban legends of 200k+ in SF and NYC - are there people here on HN who make that much, even in SF or NYC?

110k-150k seems to be a realistic range for a pretty good software engineer in NYC.
Isn't "because Instagrams are incredibly low risk and Hyperloops are incredibly high risk" a simple enough explanation?
Regulation is about control, which is what Germany is now trying to do with Bitcoin. I suspect the regulators will fail with regard to control of Bitcoin in the long run.
Of course, I definitely didn't seek to trivialize depression. Maybe the comment came across as too dismissive. I meant to apply in this particular context and not to the ailment as a whole.
> Obviously they'd have to be airtight, but there would indeed be gaps between the sections.

I objected because you used the term "gaps". They cannot be gaps, they have to be overlapping airtight section joints. There were no gaps between the sections of the Space Shuttle solid-rocket boosters either, except just once, and we all remember that day.

To understand the problem with your description, just repeat to yourself, "airtight gaps", until the contradiction occurs to you.
(I work at Balanced)

If you're interested in seeing other great companies use GitHub to "open up" their company, check out Gittip[1]. Balanced's first open interactions were with Gittip founder, Chad Whitacre[2]. He's definitely one of the most forward thinking in this space.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054867

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whit537
The Best Startup Advice You Can Give
He is only testing the ability to warp space. The setup is extremely simple actually. All he is doing is splitting a laser, one part goes through an extremely charged toroidal capacitor and the other goes through nothing. If the path lengths of these two lasers are the same, but the interferometer reads that the lasers are out of phase, then you have possible warping of space. Most of the cost is probably in the high-precision interferometer.
Part of the problem here is that VCs have funded 100 competitors instead of 5. In a commodity business, you only get profitability at huge scale, and a lot of problems like internationalization and fraud prevention to boost revenues and margins take a lot of investment. And the companies that succeed with gimmicks to get a bunch of early traction with an unprofitable 1% or 0% business model aren't necessarily the ones that will be good at solving the thornier problems down the road.

5 VC-funded companies with $60m each would be better equipped to take on PayPal than 100 companies with $3m each.
"Old money has class, new money is crass."

I've seen the differences in the US as well. It was an interesting being a fly on the wall at a gym where old and nuevo riche worked out.

The main difference was how they treated others outside their class. Old school folks usually didn't flaunt their worth, were respectful, had manners and raised their children as well. Many were willing to offer valuable advice and such once they knew you.

New? Treated people as disposable, parked in fire and handicapped zones, littered, and had a pack of spoiled brats. You could smell the attitude. I wanted to drop them without resources in one of the lower class neighborhoods or a disaster zone for a week, just so they would realize how lucky and fragile they were...
I'd rather live working around some oddities than with nothing at all.

But it's a false dichotomy, I'd say: nothing prevents them from being more agile and correcting any issues that is found in the spec in a dot update. A few people will have to update their code, or use some conditional code, big fucing deal.

Or they could, you know, provide a reference implementation -- e.g working with Mozilla or anyone interested.

Release it as an opt-in engine (e.g with something like "use strict") fix any issues that arise for 1-2 years, and make it a finalized standard from the on.
> But I've observed Musk, and if he says he can make it work

Even if such blind faith was justified, he hasn't said that.

Initially, he said "hey, here's this idea that would work better than CA HSR, but I'm not going to work on it."

When the fact that he said he wasn't going to to work on it became part of the grounds for people dismissing it, he changed tack a bit and said he would work on a tech demonstration.

But he still has gone nowhere close to saying that he is going to make it work as a project, or even put energy into to getting making it a real project.

> This is what it takes to move the human race forward. Dealing with extreme cases of uncertainty and pushing ahead regardless.

There's a difference between extreme uncertainty and certainty that basic bits of what is necessary for what you claim a system is going to deliver are missing. Like, in the case of a supposed SF-to-LA-faster-than-HSR system, actually having connections into the parts of SF-to-LA where people are and/or want to go that allow you to move between them faster than HSR would...

And not having vomit-inducing acceleration profiles...

Etc. "Uncertainty" isn't the main issue with the Hyperloop proposal; the parts that are certain-and-wrong are a much bigger deal.
The first time I noticed it was comparing 3 values (e.g. JS frameworks) and adding a 4th (e.g. JS). I would imagine this is only an issue if the 4th addition is not the least popular.

But again, this is really cool.
Can I set this up on my own server from github?
People build jsc on its own on mac, but I have never been successful on linux. Hopefully there is some way though? I've been forced to build all of WebKit-gtk.

A bigger concern for me personally is that the jsc shell lacks typed arrays, https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119828

edit: i should have said 'full spec for typed arrays', see the linked issue
Eh. There are lots of reasons writers use pseudonyms. Separation of their day to day life from their writing life (one author I can't think of ATM did that because her academic coworkers would look down on the stuff she writes). Keeping writing that would appeal to different audiences easy to differentiate (Seanan McGuire does this, her zombie books are under the name Mira Grant). Searchability (whenever I am ready to publish something this will be my reason because my real name is far too common, winning the SEO war is almost impossible).

Obviously this is the reason Rowling did it with her recently uncovered book, but plenty of other reasons exist to use pseudonyms, both for existing and new writers.
Just Be Awesome
I've recently been using white sticky notes, which are quite easy to remove and cover a 3x3 square grid almost exactly, to great effect in a pen and paper RPG I run.
-2? Wozniak worshippers, you can do better in punishing an heretic!
Apparently the toroidal ring has some property that allows it to reduce the energy requirements.

"and in particular a ring around it that is key to its propulsion system — in a way that he believes will greatly reduce the energy requirements"
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/science/faster-than-the-sp...
The issue is this: "real investors don’t care what industry they invest in"

That's a drastically bogus statement. First of all, it attempts a rather lame argument from authority ("real investors").

Second, Warren Buffett has, for about five decades, been exceptionally clear about his investing philosophy. He has written magnitudes on it. You can read it in the lines of his annual letters, and watch him explain it on countless CNBC clips. He absolutely cares what industry he invests into. One simple example: he said in the 1990s that he wouldn't invest into Microsoft, despite having become friends with Bill Gates, because he couldn't understand the tech sector well enough to pick winners. He famously stayed away from all tech stocks during the roaring '90s, with the explanation that he didn't understand any of the segments.
Maybe for business/organizations that declare what they made to the state in the first place. But how does the state demand for something of which they did not know took place between individuals? By going around pricing the market value of everyone's assets and demanding payment in they way they want or get thrown in prison? Or by going around to individuals singled out by incumbents?
I'm interested in more details on the packaging system issues. (The biggest problem I see is lack of versioning, but there must be more.)
Except that the premise is wrong - capitalism most definitely scales at that level. The railroads across America that were built in the 1800's were not a mandate by the federal government, they were private enterprises.
Does anyone know how they will test it in the lab? I thought we haven't discovered negative matter yet?
Glassified: augmenting a traditional ruler with digital functionality
For veg, sure. I'm all for it. Great way to teach and learn, as well. For example, squirrels aren't so cute after they destroy you entire tomato crop... lil' fuckers.

But grain is such a process and such an amazing supply chain. I don't see that being replicated.
Nice, great choices indeed if these trends continue.
I'm fairly confident the hyperloop business plan would include building a few miles of test track before betting the farm on building the whole thing.
Audio Skeuomorphs in iOS 7
I definitely agree with you on the reasons why concrete performance rules/documentation is dangerous - I historically have tried to advocate for better introspection/debugging tools instead of just lists/documents. But so far the reaction to those has been pretty cold; it seems as if most engine devs I speak to view introspection tools/APIs as equivalent to documenting (and thus locking in) internals and runtime design details. I can understand how shipping a product like this as a part of a large software org is pretty hard - it's difficult to establish how many customers it has and what the benefits will be.

Not really sure how we get out of the spot we're in, unfortunately - in practice JS optimization is a mix of black magic and cargo cult wisdom that can become outdated as engines improve, and I can see that causing a lot of long term drag on productivity as engine authors have to keep tuning their engines for bad code.

I hope you keep getting traction on exposing developers to V8 internals; the stuff I've learned about both V8 and spidermonkey internals has been very useful so far - my complaint is largely that the learning process is difficult, not that there's anything wrong with your codebase :) I love that so many of the v8 JS builtins are self-hosted in JS instead of C++ - makes it much easier to peek under the hood and figure out what they're doing!
> No offense, but I think you are seriously underestimating several domains of knowledge.

How so? By insisting on their connection with established scientific principles? Astrologers would love for me to do that, as would psychologists.
Do you have detailed knowledge of Tesla and SpaceX's funding history? It was my impression that these companies would never have happened if the initial investors didn't provide ~$100 million of capital themselves.

So it isn't fair to say that SV's venture capitalists were lining up to fund these types of companies, and it remains to be seen whether they will do so in the future.
Securing jQuery against unintended XSS
It's refreshing that someone like him basically speaks out on an issue many if not most of us face. If we had the freedom to work on anything we wanted, I couldn't make my mind up. I'd start working on this side project, probably shortly after switch to that other little idea, then maybe try out this gadget and hook it up to that service and that would keep me going endlessly. I love trying new stuff, figuring things out, hacking them. But turning these things into products is a whole different game.

I deeply feel that very moment he describes, when a fun side project becomes a real duty and you have to work on it because people demand it. If you're without funds or income, it might be your only option, so even if it's not fun, it doesn't matter as long as it might generate income eventually. But once you're past that requirement, these things often stay little side projects that rarely end up being finished.

But these little side projects are basically how I taught myself most of what I know in programming.
Clicked thinking this was Yahoo backing out of China and trying to ensure that none of this happens again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_C...

But rather Yahoo in China is run by Alibaba, and they are attempting to push users toward their own service.
Data Driven Delirious: An Intro to Data Visualisation Using D3.js [video]
This is just indirectly related to space travel, but there will probably be an indiegogo project for aneutronic fusion in the near future: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_l...
Why Data Havens Don't Work
Excellent summary on why "Data Haven's" will fail and why we should fight for privacy on a political and not technological level.
He mentions the 100YSS Symposium, which was conveniently held in my neck of the woods in 2011. It was exciting to be among a couple hundred smarter-than-average people who wouldn't so much as crack a smile when the word "starship" came up in conversation. Outside-the-box ideas, lessons taken from ISS, Orion, nuclear propulsion, radiation shielding, social engineering, violation of the 2nd Law, other cool stuff. It was a brainstorming excuse, and an opportunity to dream big. If you live near Houston, and you'd care to rub shoulders with some not-stupids who think seriously about this stuff, you might check this out. http://100yss.org/symposium/2013
I nearly got into a fight with an Indian, that did not understand, despite multiple official and individual warnings, that talking on a phone in the theater in the US,(except in the hood), is not acceptable behavior... But a pitcher of beer in your lap may be an acceptable reward!
My point was that the job was demonstrably unnecessary. I have seen, from an outside vantage point, entire departments that are wholly unnecessary doing nothing but creating work for other wholly unnecessary departments.
Because it has to load a virtual frame buffer (Xvfb), the chrome browser, a Selenium server, and then your testing framework. All that adds up to crap performance. There's a lot of pieces that could be simplified with a smaller set of requirements. But like @diminoten said: it's worth it if you have no other choice.
Then you have to stop using STL containers altogether as those will just use operator new internally :(