skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are some things you can only do with a sense of desperate urgency driving you

I don't know how to prove or disprove this sentiment so I'm not going to say much about it other than to observe that some people manage to be pretty driven without a war threatening them, and a lot of the resources we desperately throw into a war are thrown into solving problems which are fundamentally uninteresting outside the context of that war.

The whole "war is great for the economy!" thing, in the context of something massive like WWII especially, is fundamentally arguing for the efficiency of a directed economy over a free market, which is pretty iffy.

> Hence the code-breaking machines that give us computers, hence rader, satellites, jet engines, etc etc etc.

The world had computers well before the war. Radar too, interestingly, and jet turbines. I'm not trying to be disingenuous: obviously getting radar up and running is less of a priority without WWII, and so on.

> Why would you develop computers when you had clerks and a typing pool and that worked perfectly well?

That particular conundrum took longer than the end of WWII to answer, though.

The interesting questions to me are whether something like a Manhattan Project are more of a distraction or a spur to people like Alan Turing and Johnny Von Neumann, and what would have happened to them and their field without the war and its spending. Maybe once the economy bounced back from the depression a computer industry would have begun quite a bit before it did on our timeline.

An awful lot of the visionary computer work was conducted with DARPA money over the years, but when you look at the career of someone like Robert Taylor, for example, you have to wonder if - in alternate history terms, I guess - you don't get Xerox PARC earlier or just in another context if you have less of the defense spending and more spending of our GDP on pure research.
Anyone who goes to Berkeley and majors in American Studies obviously has never heard 'No' before. Talk about a wasted opportunity. This guy has douche stink all over his various profiles.
I have a similar, but largely converse problem:

Facebook makes me feel worse about my friends. i.e. their posts make them seem more lame than they are in real life.

I am currently much older than average person in the sample set.
I totally agree with ya'll. I'm not blaming Groupon, I should have been more specific when I said 'they'. I mean the kid and his (real?) buddies. I don't even think Groupon know what's going on right now since this is getting worse by the minute.

I'm just saying they gotta hurry up because their customers are not blaming this dude, they're blaming them directly, and it seems to be spreading really fast. Some of those facebook comments have some real vitriol.
This entire discussion is moot since Facebook does not, in fact, require you to log in to see content.
At least not the content linked in this thread.
Thanks for that.

I don't see them as whistleblowers, because their actions stand in contrast to Ellsberg. For one, neither of them tried to go to a higher authority to report wrongdoing -- that is the very first thing that a potential whistleblower must do, is handle things at the lowest level possible and allow the situation to rectify itself before taking matters into their own hands. When that fails, then you escalate to higher authorities. Secondly, Ellsberg surrendered himself to the court system willingly, knowing full well that he could face life imprisonment. Manning was caught and brought to justice after having bragged on an AOL chat to someone about his "hacking", while Snowden fled the country taking with him a trove of classified documents which could be in the hands of other countries, weakening any argument (to me) that he had the US's best intentions at heart. My argument about Snowden is that he knows so little about the programs he supposedly leaked -- I watched his interview and was astonished at the blatant lies in it (see my other post on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5885846), not to mention him saying that he could wiretap any american (or even the president!) at any time. True whistleblowers are caught in the middle of something that they have solid knowledge of, but are unable to change the course of, so they go to the public in order for the public to do the course correction.
Only in the same way that it's an error that the spec doesn't define isinf for strings.
Other than sauce, his reviews seem good to me (I've been to most of the places in his reviews... coincidentally, while I worked for Groupon and had to travel to Chicago)
And here's a completion code that works for Mac OS:

function _jump {
local cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
local marks=$(find $MARKPATH -type l | awk -F '/' '{print $NF}')
COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W '${marks[@]}' -- "$cur"))
return 0
}
complete -o default -o nospace -F _jump jump
We interviewed Tomasz about Edge.js on Herding Code a few months back, show and detailed show notes here: http://herdingcode.com/herding-code-166-tomasz-janczuk-on-ed...

We asked about Mono support at 06:11.
Has Voyager 1 Left the Solar System?
>> Have you ever seen a real-estate agent in a car worth less than thirty grand?

I've not only seen such an agent, I've engaged hers & his (they're a couple) services to buy my house. And it was just fine. Of course, I don't know the exact price tag on their car, but it was a moderately old suv, nothing flashy, probably nowhere near 30K. Actually, I'd be more vary of an agent with a really expensive car - if he's already so rich, would he care about getting my money enough?
Food Porn Cartoon
This has come through before, I wondered then if, had this been done in the US, the last bit of video would be the bomb robot coming up and shooting the package with a shotgun :-)

I was Fry's the other day and they have "spy pens" (those pocket video cameras) and I thought it would be an interesting way to do this project. Basically put one camera on each corner of the box (four sided) and then edit the camera contents together once you got to the destination (eliminating the boring /not useful bits).

I saw an interesting hack at a dinner the other day which used a camera and a 6DOF attitude sensor, to post transform the camera input so that it was always "up" (basically if you turn the camera upside down the orientation of the picture doesn't change). It seemed like a pretty cool application of these cheap orientation sensors to cameras.
I didn't find any images in flickr, but this should be fairly easy to verify since there were probably a lot of photographers capturing that meteor shower. Hopefully we can find a second image with any part of the explosion to confirm it.
For Windows users I have a closely related shameless plug:

cdhere navigates your cmd.exe to wherever the current topmost Explorer window is pointed at.

It's not the same as the OP's trick, of course, but since you're voluntarily using Windows, I'm going to assume you "live" on the command line less than the average UNIX user, and more on GUI tools such as good old Explorer.

https://github.com/eteeselink/cdhere
So out of the main b-tree operations (Insert/Replace/Delete/Seek/Next/Prev) you make a convincing argument that Tokutek can be faster than b-trees for inserts, if you use non-unique indexes (which automatically disqualifies the primary index in most cases, and makes foreign keys hard).

That is good but not quite "beat B-trees pretty handily across the board" :-)
ULN2003 - practical example of «reading» microchip schematic
How To Build A Company That Warren Buffett Would Invest In
Lots of the discussion below focusses on the merits of MBAs, upper management, etc. - and while that is good discussion, I just want to add that the killing of this policy - if valid - is yet another example of our flawed practice of capitalism. Capitalism was never meant to destroy creativity nor innovation nor people - but our use of it does lead to those inevitability because of our worst human trait - GREED. Gecko was indeed wrong - GREED is not good - drive is - and they are not the same thing. We need to sharply change how we practice capitalism and develop, into all of our financial models, factors both for total cost impact (i.e. environment, people, etc.) as well as innovation. Current economic models in use do not look at these critical aspect of our existence and until they do, we're all screwed. Innovation and drive are what have brought humanity to this most amazing place in history - not cash (especially fiat cash) and not the hoarding of resources.

I dare the management at Google to reverse course and allow their brilliant stable of top talent to keep the 20% perk - let a few Benjamins go for the sake of building awesome shtuff ("h" intended).

INNOVATION RULES - cash - well, it's just dirty paper...
What's the status on browser adoption of APNG? Last time I tried it (a couple years ago) it required a Chrome extension.

For reference: http://www.reddit.com/r/apng
That's because you don't understand the law correctly. Now show me the prohibition on classified material that applies to non military members.
Yes. The owner of Cafe Riace in Palo Alto once raved to me about how he has done Groupons multiple times at all of his restaurants and it worked out great for him.

Generally it has taken a savvy owner to make it work for them. Non-savvy owners would get over-sold by the deals sales reps. At the height of the deals craze, small business owners were getting 5 calls a day from various deals sites.

What Groupon never figured out is how to make a sales organization that wouldn't burn out merchants. So now they're pivoting into being Woot.
I'm curious about this as well, I'm looking at getting a ThinkPad for battery life. I've heard they support Linux well, but is there any component(s) that I should avoid getting for Linux? I run Debian.

Mac is not an option for me, I want Linux-on-hardware.
Sure! I'll send you a mail tomorrow when I return to London. Sharing ideas on how to improve parsing is a great idea!
> Once in a while, I have felt the need to find out exactly what was going on at a certain point, and had to awkwardly put in (do (pprint x) x) statements everywhere.

Use this:

https://github.com/dgrnbrg/spyscope

Less awkward and more informative!
I don't think the prospect was unreasonable at all. Hanging up happens all the time. It's whatever. The problem for Groupon is that this guy reps them. They need to explain to their customers fast what happened because this looks viral to me.
>you pay once for it to be received by mailgun servers, and once for it to be delivered to your webhook.

Mailgunner here. This does not sound right. Can you please reach out to me via address in profile? Mailgun does not charge for webhooks, you're probably confsuing this with email relaying (which we also do).

Also it is impossible to have complimentary inbound email of production quality due to the need for quality spam filtering. Handling spam in production setting (throughput, quality of service, uptime, performance) for free would mean wiping out CloudMark and other spam filtering vendors.

In other words, as always, you get what you pay for. Mailgun has always been known for being a true bi-directional programmable ESP and a sizable percentage of our traffic is inbound.
Would it be hard to support both syntaxes?
A Palestinian posted on Zuck wall — here's his story (translated from Arabic)
I completely agree with picking a pain that you are experiencing and try to solve it.

In addition to the pluses mentioned above, solving a pain you experience means you will be in a position to "dog-food" your own solution. This is obvious but worth reiterating. If, for example, you solve a problem that people other than you have, then you will not be using your own solution, and this is likely to lead you astray.

Having said that, be careful about being too "niche" or too personal with your solution. After you have come up with a problem you would like to solve for yourself, and you have ideas on how to solve it, go out and ask others:
- do you have this pain?
- how bad is it?
- if someone offered solution X for Y dollars, would you consider it?
- what would be some of the requirements and hangups that will keep you from adopting solution X?

In other words you don't want to solve your pain and then find out nobody else perceived the same pain in the same way. That's a one-way ticket to the deadpool.
That's a pretty negative perspective. Not everything has to be about money and getting ahead. I think there's a lot to be said for contributing back to the community for the greater good, without a profit motive. That doesn't mean you have to patch someone else's profitable code for free, but creating your own stuff to give away to the world, or contributing to a project whose philosophy or utility you like regardless of their corporate sponsor, is a very good thing to do.

I'd suggest the opposite of parent comment's advice to young programmers. Don't buy in to the mindset of "how does this benefit me, me, me." If you find yourself in a position where you're happy with your burgeoning career--i.e., having a roof over your head, and not worrying about your next meal--contributing your talent to F/OSS, regardless of who "benefits", is one of the best ways you can apply your specialized domain knowledge to improving the general good. Basically what the article says.
I've been moving to do the exact same thing at home, to get rid of all that paper clutter. If you don't mind me asking, what scanner do you use - presumably one with an auto document feeder?
Interesting that there seems to be no mention of Cyc, which is explicitly intended to be good at problems like those mentioned.
i'm using fasd a lot but this is absolutely awesome, thank you!
This is exactly why I use the name "Edgar"
Thinkpad, they are indestructible tanks.
I use CDargs http://www.skamphausen.de/cgi-bin/ska/CDargs
Facebook vulnerability 2013
check this article , and guess what !! facebook pays me nothing .

http://khalil-sh.blogspot.com/p/facebook_16.html
>>> have worked in some management capacity, you're expected to look a certain part

If you're talking about dressing cleanly, not betraying only passing acquaintance with showers by one's smell and being able to appear in public without shocking small children into tears - yes, sure. But that costs next to no money. Beyond that - nobody could care less which car you're driving and which house you're living in, unless you're a bank president or some other C level executive or business owner, where your conspicuous consumption skills may imply the success of your business. If you, however, are a professional, there's no problem with living simply, should you wish so, if that doesn't imply looking like a dervish or living literally in a cave.
The Killing Machines: How to think about drones
Title says "Groupon Sales Rep..." Was it changed?
Right, or they could be a bunch of incompetent idiots, which is way hilarious.
Very interesting point - I'm not sure how best to judge what is exploitative and what isn't. I guess it becomes exploitative if it serious subverts in some way the business model of the original data/service provider.

But then I'm not sure still...maybe that is okay if consumers massively benefit from the reverse engineering, and thus overall utility is increased...! What do you think?
Not to forget Noah's floating palace!

Edit: just realized that was Ark with a K. My bad.
Awesome! Speak to you soon hopefully!
I use powershell aliases for this. Works great.
And this is why there is a high turn over rate in sales, seriously.

The salesguy is clearly over the top aggressive and likely new to the business. He will get let go, if he hasn't been already, and some other person will replace him. If you deal with sales folks you will find the ones who have had the most success in their career seem to push right up to the line and don't cross it. This guy will no doubt re-calibrate and head back in selling windows or something.

I expect it is the nature of sales, you measure someone on their completed sales, period. You don't measure anything else and they will experiment with different ways of maximizing that number, some of them illegal (see the behavior of the Google sales guys in Africa [1] as an example) Businesses fire the ones that generate ill will and keep the ones that don't.

[1] http://memeburn.com/2012/01/mocality-scandal-mortified-googl...
I use a Mac at home, for uni, and for my previous 2 summer jobs (software development). I now use a Thinkpad at work for software development.

It all depends on what you want to use it for, and your previous experience. For a Linux user, the Thinkpad will probably be great, although I have heard from people who work at IBM (and therefore only use Thinkpads) that they can be a little unreliable. Macs are pretty good hardware, and with the new MBPs the battery life is amazing.

You can always install Linux on the 'bare hardware', I dislike developing in VMs. But you might find that if you try OS X for a little while you might like it. Not saying you will, many don't, but I find Mac applications tend to have more polish and I spend a lot less time fixing my operating system while I'm on OS X.
Try living in something like Silicon Valley and not owning a car. Shopping for groceries would probably take a whole day, if you're lucky, and you can forget about doing anything else.
English version: http://khalil-sh.blogspot.com/p/facebook_16.html
To anyone who hasn't read Camus: I cannot recommend reading The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus enough. They are probably the two most influential books in regard to my outlook on life.
You could install cygwin and use the OP technique, though.
I can't figure out the sendgrid pricing at all. 10/mo for 40k emails and 80/mo for 100k emails doesn't fit a normal model of reducing price for incremental usage and there's no clear explanation for it.

I use sendgrid, and I thought I was using mailgun, but now after seeing the pricing simplicity and ease I'm feeling like I should make the switch.

What reason would I rationally have at the <100k emails level for staying with sendgrid?

Additionally, for the lite plan with sendgrid, they don't include email open and click tracking (even though they DO for the FREE tiers).

Would love an explanation for why this is sensible.
Many primary keys in the wild are sequential, which makes the unique check hit cache and not require any I/O.

Let me be clear: in the worst case with a unique index, Fractal Tree indexes are the same speed as B-tree indexes. In most cases, they're far better. When you add in compression and agility, it really is "beat B-trees across the board."
You are absolutely right, it was just my first exposure it, and I wanted to share it with everyone who didn't already know about it. No disrespect intended to the Lisp's that already had it.
According to LinkedIn, he just started working there this month. I guess he is just dumb, inexperienced, and maybe it was first time someone hang up on him.
So what is the chance they put out an insurance file that they know can be decrypted by the NSA and has really damaging documents in it? I mean it would be a way of showing the NSA what you have, having it already in the hands of a bunch of other people. I wonder if that would be a useful strategy. It could give the NSA time to build a counter story (parallel construction :-) which would be mitigate some of the impact, but it could also be construed as a form of "responsible disclosure" letting them know before the world knows so they can "patch their systems."

I hope some creative writer is out there doing some exploration out there in a novel. Lots of interesting questions to think about with regard to the mechanics of this whole story.
I wonder what if a laser printer could be feed like with the paper of a dot-matrix (with the tray helpers)
thank you for sharing this , it was a full story that shows how facebook treats me reporting that exploit , and i got now choice than post to mark himself ,

regards
I don't think you can opt out of receiving calls from a company which you previously had business with...
In that case project selection is important. Unpaid work towards a project who's main effect will be to reduce licensing costs for fortune 500 companies is very different to working on something to (say) improve educational outcomes for low income children.
Does anyone really take unscreened "review" sites like Yelp seriously? I never even bother looking at them.
Want to learn web development from novice to employable?
Integrating socket.io and express in 3 LoC
A very common problem people face when building realtime applications in node.js is communicating and sharing the session between the socket and routing scope. Generally socket.io is used in combination with express or connect, so I picked these common use cases and implemented a tiny module which provides the session integration in a couple lines of code.
callbacks are also known as continuations which are known as generalized goto.
My understanding is that programming languages exist because they attempt to solve an existing problem under a defined paradigm.

I'm not against borrowing features from other languages when they can be ported without affecting the paradigm, but when they do... does it mean the language will die without a specific set of features?

I believe it's the project manager's responsibility to evaluate whether the problems a project will solve can be solved with a specific language before taking the decision to use it.

A language will never be an "all-in-one solution" and forcing a language to solve a problem it was not designed to solve will lead to extra work in the best scenario, ex. String Manipulation in C.

My perception about C is that it was the best option available when it emerged, but newer languages emerged that managed to solve specific problems in a better way than C.

For me this doesn't mean that C is a "dying language", but the completely opposite, C has become a specialized language suitable for use cases where higher level languages mean "expensive overhead", but lower level languages mean "expensive complexity".
Wow, your hybrid optical illusion at the end of the article was fascinating, quite spooky/surprising.
Evaluating the Opportunity Cost of Meetings & Events
What a terrible submission title.
Because having a bully-ish personality does make you a more efficient salesman (the less ethics you have, the more strategies you can use to convince people to buy stuff), and it's easier to be a bully in tech-related jobs.

Jobs where being an asshole can be an asset attract assholes. Simple as that.
I would have recommended a Thinkpad a couple of years ago, but now I'd say go with the Macbook if money is not an option. If it was me, I'd get the new Haswell MBA 13" and put Linux on it.

Thinkpad quality is terrible these days, and they got rid of the good keyboard. Just do some forum searches. On the plus side, you can get a used Thinkpad for really cheap - about 1/3rd the price of the equivalent Macbook. Just make sure to get one with a warranty.
Again with the title-changing.

"Tillery to Represent Hays Against UC Berkeley in Dispute over Lab Fees" does not tell me:

- who Tillery is
- who Hays is
- why I should care about a dispute over lab fees.

The original title made it clear what the issue is: the scientist in question alleges that his lab is being shut down due to his criticism of a herbicide made by Syngenta, who coincidentally give money to the university.

Please, stop secretly editing the titles.
Great article full of helpful info.

The main takeaway for marketers who don't have the scale of content that RapGenius has should be this: content is king.

Long form content is back and making stuff people want to read is more important than ever. Great content + the semantic web is something everyone can leverage to increase their site visibility.
Where Are All The Craigslist Cats?
Build Meteor apps in the browser with Nitrous.IO and MongoLab
see my comment at the bottom
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6229468
Data center interconnection: An inconvenient truth