skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Elon Musk will be making an official announcement with Hyperloop details later today[1]. Hyperloop.com is now being redirected to this splash page.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/356776740409974785
Here is the upshot for those who may not want to read the whole thing: 1. Write programs for people, not computers, 2. Automate repetitive tasks, 3. Use the computer to record history, 4. Make incremental changes, 5. Use version control, 6. Don't repeat yourself, 7. Plan for mistakes, 8. Optimize software only after it works correctly, 9. Document design and purpose, not mechanics, 10 Collaborate.
A Lisp machine is designed at the hardware level for running Lisp well. This is a neat project to implement a bare-metal Lisp environment on top of Apple //e hardware.
We must define fun, first. In my experience you can have fun in any kind of genre of work. I do both design and code and I found coding pleasant too.

Creativity will blow, of course, when you're doing side projects but when you're working for a client or your company most of the things will be defined before the first line of code or the first illustrator vector is drawn. So the creativity limits in those situations may be shorter than anyone expects.
Algorithms Need Better UI
We do not change the order of the photos, we just try to find a good set of breaking points inside that order.

Actually, Chromatic tries to read the EXIF "DateTimeOriginal" information to sort the photos and falls back to the "LastModifiedDate" if the former doesn't work.
Apostrophe has two uses as far as I know... one is for elision ('60s indicates that "19" has been elided or omitted) and possession (The 1910s' greatest author was Franz Kafka)

The "grocer's apostrophe" or "grocers' apostrophe" is what's incorrectly added to the plural form like what you're describing, the short answer is yes. '60s not 60's.
I admit I didn't know that either, but does that really make it worthy of being the top story on HN?
A few notes,

- Technology solutions can't get very far. At some point they will be attacked by legislation at a level that renders them unusable. (e.g. encryption of such and such becomes illegal)

- Technology solutions inevitably create an arms-race so the surveillance state keeps growing bigger and bigger. And also creates the mindset that we can do nothing but to continue looking for better technical solutions. Eventually we forget why we are doing all of this in the first place, when politicians are supposed to be our employees who are supposed to serve us and act on our behalf.

- For as long as the majority of people don't understand the value and importance of privacy we're going to continue to see these issues. When people buy the "if you have nothing to hide" argument, it's not going to change.

- People only start to care when they feel sufficiently threatened, and in this case they don't understand the threat, until it's far too late, and then it suddenly clicks for the average Joe, years after many people have been warning them in advance but they dismissed them as crazy people

- You can see examples of the point above all throughout the history. A minority keep warning people about a certain point, the majority doesn't feel it's important and continues to ignore it until it's too late, now everyone understand the mess they are in and at this point usually revolution and civil wars start. Then after lots of suffering they all vow to never repeat what they did, and to do something to never end up in that situation again, then they forget, and rinse and repeat.
HN also sits inside a center tag using a table with width="85%", as I recently found out while trying to override its CSS rules. It's bizarre that an organization so forward looking uses deprecated html tags.

<body><center><table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width="85%" bgcolor=#f6f6ef>
The parsing rules in the WHATWG HTML standard (Sec. 12) is one source.

In the "before head" insertion mode (Sec. 12.2.5.4.3) [1] of a compliant HTML parser, encountering a start tag other than for an HTML or HEAD element is defined as inserting a HEAD element and transitioning to the "in head" insertion mode, reprocessing the encountered start tag. So a bare TITLE start tag not enclosed in a HEAD automatically creates an enclosing HEAD element.

I think this actually largely reproduces the behavior of the HTML4 DTD, in which, according to Google [2] the HEAD element is optional.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

[2] https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-html
NB: the JavaScript version is the first one I came across, but they have versions for a bunch of languages: https://github.com/VerbalExpressions
<silly anecdote>

I'm sure nobody in the Tel Aviv municipality thought of this when they had Einstein St. and Tagore St. intersect just near Tel Aviv University [1]

[1] - http://goo.gl/maps/dASWE
This isnt so much code documentation as it is simple examples of usage for a given language.
Note that Chrome extensions can suffer from essentially the same problem, since they can autoupdate.

The reason nobody does this, though, is that end-users don't want to install software on their machines. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental conflict between desire to run software off of other people's machines rather than your own and desire for cryptographic security.
Thanks I guess, but I wouldn't call it "working" just yet :)

It does render, but it seems like the search engine initialization is blocking for quite a while on iPhones, and in portrait mode it could use some more responsiveness.

Did you try it on an iPad or what device exactly?
maybe Spacex has built a hardware tech demo. They have a flexible factory.
Core rope memory
Eggbot Vs. Klein Bottle
OpenSSL provides its own CSPRNG. When that CSPRNG breaks, as it has in the past, no amount of careful validation of the OS CSPRNG helps you. The OpenSSL CSPRNG is thus a second single point of failure.
Browse beaten: The browser wars enter a new era with a whimper
Regarding Linear Type Systems and friends I recommend reading parts of Jesse Tov's PhD thesis [1], "Practical Programming with Substructural Types". I found parts of it pretty accessible as an undergraduate. In particular he uses substructural types to put types on the network protocol of a server and client. Neat stuff.

There's also the wikipedia page on Substructural Types [2].

[1] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~tov/pubs/dissertation/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substructural_type_system
I want to subscribe to a print magazine. I send my payment to them, with my name and address. Each month they send me a magazine. At the end of the year they send me a couple of reminders.

What technologies will protect my information?

Here, the magazine has to register. They need to say what information they're collecting, and why. There are penalties if they then do other stuff with the information.
Hamlet is Banned
Cutting -- an ambiguous verb, which could mean it's exact opposite.
Good point. The logo should definitely be clickable, and the menu items clarified a bit. The navigation was sort of in a tentative state until now since it isn't even integrated in the rust-lang.org website yet.
I think you meant ClosureScript. CoffeScript is mostly a syntaxic decoration over JavaScript and doesn't remove mutability.
I have time lots of it and I am trying to learn different stuff. My problem is I rarely have "new cool original project" idea, which is bad for me, because as a freelancer personal reputation goes long way.

I recently redesigned my website http://www.mohitranka.com, and looking to build a text analytics api side project (yes, I know not original) http://analytex.net.

How do I generate "original and interesting" ideas, worth showcasing/talking about?
The problem I see with this is that the pipeline concept also constrains your code in other ways. For example, using the pipeline there is no clean way to allow communication between each successive subprocess. Return values in this case aren't clean (would involve casting), and mutating the data passed around seems like a cure worse than the disease. I know of no way to construct a generic pipeline that allows for all the flexibility of simply successive function calls. I suspect most problems won't cleanly fit the constraints imposed by a generic pipeline.
Went up to the top very quickly and now I don't see it anywhere on the front page. Moderator action or did it hit anti-vote-rigging protections for too many votes too quickly?
'There's a lot of speculation about what could happen, but if we look only at what has happened, people aren't being snatched up off the streets because of the NSA's monitoring programs.'

How can you possibly know this? In fact I would argue as much as we 'know' anything at all related to the NSA program we know that it has lead to interventions. The NSA claims this surveillance has been instrumental to stopping 'dozens' of terrorist plots, which would mean by definition people ARE being snatched off the streets because of the NSA monitoring programs.
Why you should automate your business process
Wow, Great advice at #1. I think public "speaking" is not an issue for most people, its the public Silence that scares them. When I have something to say I immediately say it but when I am processing on generating the output, the very silence of few seconds becomes incredibly uncomfortable. There should be a place where we stand up infront of people and speak nothing.
Audience participation is highly dependent on culture, I've found.

When I give a talk or class in Israel, I can be sure that people will interrupt me, ask questions, challenge my assertions, and generally push me to explain what I'm saying. These interactions make things more interesting for me, always teach me something new, and (I believe) also make the conversation more relevant for other participants.

By contrast, my experience with American audiences is that they're much quieter and reluctant to challenge me during the talk. They'll wait until the formal question time at the end, and then raise issues.

And during the two classes that I gave in Beijing, participants were even quieter than Americans -- although the second group I taught (this year) were far more vocal than the ones I spoke last year, so it might have as much to do with corporate culture and their English level as anything else.

Bottom line, try to get a sense of the audience, and how they expect to interact with you. Then you can prepare an appropriate balance of prepared notes vs. discussion with the participants.

Over time, you'll get better at making these judgments and estimates; like everything else, public speaking is a skill that takes years to improve. But it's a real rush to give a good talk, and to know that you've taught others something that they didn't previously know. So do your best, and know that next time, you'll hopefully do even better!
Nope. But now we've got a great dataset of users that blindly upvote stories.
Yeah I know all about instagram.

It's turd polish around an already solved problem that's been solved a million times over.
OK, have to agree on this.

But he is saying: ignore the team, ensure your job position increasing the bus factor, ignore security updates best practices. Among other things.
What is a complete DAG? Can I create one by just taking a complete graph, choosing an arbitrary ordering of the vertices, and assigning each edge a direction according to that ordering?

Edit: after reading the problem statement, yes, I can.
thank you.
clarification smiley added...
That's awesome! Any good pointers to interesting articles about that?
I found this: http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~lwittie/research/space04.pdf
It is true that we see a lot of broken randomness code, and it is also true that we pay a lot of attention to failures of different CSPRNGs, but my point of view on this is also influenced by things like the design paper Daniel Bernstein wrote for Nacl.
hence if you are trying to prove anything about code in, say, C, you need to augment the code with explicit state and remove all non-local effects. (See: the Why language, which attempts to bridge this gap.)

Actually, you just need to augment your model with notions of state, which is standard in operational semantics. It can just be harder to prove things in a complex model, so theorists prefer simplification when possible.
This is true, of course, but our point is that there is not a lot of stuff separating the lisp from the machine -- no OS for instance. It's just a machine that runs lisp and nothing else.
When the passion fades, I change my job and do something else. Then the passion is back. I guess its because my passion comes from learning new things in technology.

I don't know how old you are but I'll assume/pretend you are in the age range he talks about (22-23 apparently). I'm 42 now so I have ~20 years on you. The things you say, the way you think, and the ideas you have at 22-23 are so different from those you'll have as a 25yo, 30y, 35yo, and 40yo. Life events will change your perspectives 10-20 times in the next 20 years, causing you to change passions once or twice (or lessen/augment your current passions). It is, quite simply, arrogance to think that, at 22-23, you know yourself. You don't. You won't know yourself for 15-20 years, I bet. I'm sure when I'm 50 that I'll think 42yo me was an arrogant fool for thinking I was qualified to give advice to a 22-23yo haha.

All in all, your comments come across as abrasive and "cock sure". Relax. You don't know what you don't know yet. How you approach this "problem" today is not how you will approach it years from now.

Example: let's say at 26yo you develop a product that becomes fairly popular quickly - enough to make you $150,000 in six months. And you did it by yourself with no help. What's next? Will you raise money and try to make $150,000,000 with it? Or will you try to keep it yourself and maybe have a lifestyle business? Whatever you say today is not what you will say in 3-4 years - you will have learned so much by then that there's no point in even speculating what you think to do then.

I'm rambling now so I'm done. Final point is "You aren't as smart as you think you are so back off the rhetoric."
Musicpad.me | Musical knowledge organization made simple.
Agreed - but up until now what has been able to compete with cab companies - and many people who don't live in a metropolitan area have yet to hear about uber or what makes them different from just a cab - or them thinking that it's someone's own private vehicle.
Inside the Pentagon's giant blood serum bank: samples are never returned
Selling a soggy sandwich
I don't think privacy is that hard to maintain if you don't engage privacy invading devices, right? You can walk naked around your home privately, but it isn't really possible to walk naked around a public square privately.

The Internet is a social tool and is used to engage remote information, not local. I want to protect privacy as much as the next person, but I have a reasonable understanding of the context of privacy.

There's simply no way to legislate (socially guarantee) privacy for individuals on the largest piece of social infrastructure ever built.
A text analytics API sounds interesting to me - even if it isn't the first one. Start with the basics and build from there, describe the existing solutions and why they aren't appropriate for your needs, show some of the open source libraries that are out there.
Which makes you wonder, where would we be today if the Apple //e shipped with LISP.
Why we must say no way NSA: an illustrated guide to NSA abuse
It was an interesting discussion, but WRT "previously examined definitions of science", quoted from the article, I did not see anything in the general area of science discussed or anything resembling an application of the scientific method along the lines of falsifiable logical predictions based about testable experiments and so on. I think a discussion along those lines with the same characters would be interesting, although this small excerpt was pretty far away from those specific topics.
I see those points where wrong. Others don't. (?)

If quotes are a reason to get down-voted, I will be more careful. Sorry.
Hell even the stated "just update the library you link to" advantage of compiled programs tends to be overstated as you end up with some software that works and some that doesn't.

If you don't break ABI compatibility it will work. A security fix very rarely changes the ABI.
Not sure about adaptors but I was able to get a new SIM card from my carrier for about $10.
Norway Prime Minister Goes Undercover as Taxi Driver
real developers who work in teams and have to maintain their codebase a month down the road stay the hell away from it.

As a fake developer, our team has had little issue with code maintenance "a month down the road". I'm not sure what "real" developers" are using but their platitudes must be an effective resource.
Through application libertarian can mean whatever people want it to mean. Its meaning is as malleable as 'politically correct'.

Want to discourage people from building dense housing, then you're stopping the government from imposing a plan on freedom lovers.

Want to encourage people to build dense housing, then you're removing unnnecessary regulation from the free market and encouraging economic freedom.

The only real constant of American libertarians is the fact that they're almost all successful white people. So any libertarian group needs to address their concerns if it wants to stay relevant. Abstract ideological beliefs such as libertarianism can be mapped in many different ways to actual real world problems. So what usually ends up happening is the more influential subgroups within an ideological organization control the mappings of the groups ideology to real world issues. Then can claim anyone who does not agree with their mapping is not a true member of their ideological organization. It's similar the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy, but not exactly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

It might seem convenient for libertarians to have a single ideology that they can map to every political problem they encounter. But I doubt many of them realize that in their complex machinations to contort libertarianism to fit political reality they're simultaneously redefining what libertarianism means to them inside their own head. This process is made easier by elected libertarians rarely having to actually do anything in politics. Since there are no libertarians at the national level every person who identifies as a libertarian can maintain their own personal definition of libertarianism that agrees with their ideal implementation of the ideology and still bond with other self identified libertarians exclusively through abstract ideology.

In short, libertarianism can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean as long as it doesn't piss of successful white people.
General users can flag submissions and push things off the front page pretty easily. I would not assume this was moderator (HN staff, etc) action, just general user population action.
Well, there's only one response to those that would tag defenders of civil liberties as traitors.

There was once a ragtag band of traitors who felt the same way. Their names included: Jefferson, Adams, Hancock, Franklin, and 52 other signers of the Declaration of Independence from England.

One only needs to look at the influence of the British "Star Chamber" on the writing of our U.S. Constitution to understand exactly how our Founders would feel about a secret court with secret evidence chosen by only one man to decide which people get to violate their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination every single day... Or worse yet, to have a non-judicial secret court chosen by the executive that decides which American citizens to kill by drone strike.

Regardless of what party or president runs our country, many things must change.
All lawyers have an hourly rate, the question is the minimum time unit they charge for.

I'm not sure what congress has to do with any of this.

I could point out engineers doing plenty of evil unproductive and wasteful things too (malware, fart apps, NSA surveillance applications, whatever), but much like your original complaint, it's just character assassination
Non-rubyist here. Can anyone explain in simple terms what this gem does? It looks like it provides you a copy of the jekyll gem, but users had that already with gem install jekyll.
How to Become Self-Reliant & Independent
Right. That's basically because employees (I used to work for the gov) want them, much to the CIO's dismay because the CIO is being better served by Blackberry sales folks than Apple's or Google's. By better served, I don't mean "taken out for golf," I mean "contracting vehicles have been set up by BlackBerry's experienced salesforce that makes this IT easy for a CIO to purchase." The SBA and many other agencies just renewed their blackberry contracts because, frankly, it was just easier for them to buy it. If you put an iPhone or an Android device into that existing framework for purchasing, it's game, set, match.
My personal stance is that my blog is MY space on the internet. It is for my thoughts - if you want to share your thoughts, that's great, but please do it on your own space (or a common space like HN/reddit).
The factorial number system
I worked at a business services group that implemented IVR applications for years, using vxml, and this pretty much describes exactly how that company built their products.
Smear-free touchscreen technology
If you're learning things and you either run into a snag that you personally overcome or encounter a poorly-documented/explained subject, you could write a tutorial about it. It doesn't require finding an innovative business idea and it a) shows potential employers that you know a skill, b) shows potential employers that you know how to write, and c) gets you emails asking for help that may lead to consulting work if you play your cards right.
If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market?

I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold if those five cards were played simultaneously.
swanson - very great post. I happen to like this "do things, tell people" so much that its been my personal website's tagline for sometime. Thanks for writing and sharing with us HNer's
I hate syntax arguments when semantics is so much more important, but your arguments are interesting. I'm both a Python and Ruby developer, and I generally do not prefer one over another. Much like web frameworks, I use the language most appropriate for the task at hand.

What syntax boils down to is the programmer. For example, how can you check for consistency in this code -

def thisfunction(foo, bar): {
foo.boing()}
{
for i in bar.fizzle(foo): { {
baz = i2 }
foo.wibble(baz)
return foo, baz }
}

How would a scanner determine the bracket issue?

Honestly, I am not a fan of invisible syntax, but for a seasoned programmer it saves me time coding because I don't have to enter whitespace and a closing bracket or a end space, etc.
Bang with Friends adopts Neo4j
Your ethics or mine?
I've heard this described as "The harder I train the luckier I get" though it's as much about marketing as production.
Withdrawal Problems at Mt. Gox: Bitcoin Growing Pains or Banking Bottleneck?
Powertrip vs leadership. Spends significant time telling people why they should leave instead of why they should stay.

Maybe a new term should be invented: "Got patched".
I couldn't be more excited about elixir, personally. All the power of erlang plus metaprogramming. To me elixir is the spiritual heir to Ruby
Android is better
I wonder if Andrew Plotkin's "Lists and Lists" (a Scheme tutorial written for the Z-machine VM) can run on a //e? Seems like it would.

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=zj3ie12ewi1mrj1t