skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are these people really idiots, or are they just vulnerable consumers

This is a good point. I knew a guy who would probably classify as a whale. He made about 40k and because of his spending habbits was effectively quite poor.
Why does this whole thing reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsQxaNKWFfA
Clickstorm 2000 makes you click links fifty times
The definitive guide to NSA spy programs
A (cheap) trick for formatting shell scripts is approximately:

wrap script into a shell function
source function definition
diff defined function against script

with something like:

{ printf 'dummy (){ '
cat script
printf "; };\ntype -a dummy\n"
} > dummy
source dummy > defined
rm dummy; unset -f dummy
diff script defined

Issues include:

comments are absent from defined function listing
trailing semicolons appear after each shell command / line
the first semi in the trailing "; };" may be a syntax error

The default function listing format is fairly generic, so personal
formatting preferences must be left as an exercise for the reader.

MHO: people who insist on specific code formats should provide tools
that can convert arbitrary code into their preferred format.
Plivo Targets Big Enterprises With 'Bring Your Own Carrier' Cloud Telephony
‘Impossible’ material made by Uppsala University researchers - by accident
I've lived in Atherton since 1988 and decided to create a Hacker News account just so I could comment on this issue.

First, I applaud Kent Brewster's compilation of the data and I believe his suggestion of racial profiling was done with good intentions. Racial profiling is a terrible thing and it should be pointed out if it exists.

Having said that, racial profiling is not the reason that 175 of 182 people cited for driving without a license (DWOL) were Hispanic. I do agree that being cited for misdemeanors instead of citations is wrong. That's something that either needs to be stopped or perhaps has an explanation.

Anyone living in the Peninsula or South Bay knows that a lot of gardening, moving, and repair work is done by Hispanic people. These are the people being pulled over by the cops. They aren't local residents being pulled over.

It shouldn't be surprising that many of these workers are illegal immigrants. With the exception of some loopholes, it's not possible for illegal immigrants to have a driver's license. One California State Assemblyman estimates there are one million illegal immigrants DWOL in California (see http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2013/01/...)

Since the Trayvon Martin ruling happened recently, I can understand that people's awareness of racial profiling is much greater. But in this case, it's really about illegal immigration and that these workers aren't allowed to have driver's licenses. Remember, they aren't being cited for drunk driving, speeding, or illegal U-turns. They're being cited for not having a license, which they don't have.

By the way, I've been pulled over in Atherton (my home town) three times for speeding. And I'm not Hispanic.
Ubuntu Edge Campaign Tops $10 Million
I'm not sure I follow. There's nothing mystical about the idea. The hypothesis is testable as shown by the research. The data currently looks to support it. I'm not sure why you are saying it is unscientific. I grant you there may be alternative explanations for the data, but it is often true that science has been lead astray by incorrect framing of the question, but it's still science...
NY Times down due to alleged cyber attack
Correction: better having some redundancy because otherwise a single country can shut down the system (while not steal data).
Site has been down for over 30 minutes: http://www.nytimes.com/
Japan studies ice wall to halt radioactive water leaks
>My personal favorite theory about why iOS makes more revenue in the app store, is that more rich idiots use iOS.
Now, I'm perhaps not serious about that, and I'm just reacting to the tone of "Android users are lesser people"

Nobody said they are lesser people. But iOS does sell to the richer demographics, the same way the Mac laptops are bought by richer and more urban demographics.

(Also: "idiots", really? Actually being richer makes it more common for them to have university education).

Plus, besides the guys only go for "open" and "tinkering", most of the other tech savvy users go for iOS. Where by tech savvy I don't mean hackers but people more likely to buy and use lots of apps, as opposed to just buying an occasional game or utility.

Sone example demographics: most people that care about mobile photography tend to buy iOS (and almost all books and projects done by amateur/pro photographers on a mobile phone, have been done with iPhones). Almost all people that care about mobile music (e.g synths, audio recorders, guitar amp emulations, et) buy iOS. Almost all mobile video projects I've seen were done on iOS, etc etc.
Just a heads up, your link to Android SMS Relay is broken here (http://nyaruka.com/#open). I think you intended to link this one https://github.com/nyaruka/android-sms-relay.

But great stuff! I'm going to try and play around with it over the next few weeks.
I wish people would stop using the word "wrong" in this context. Words may have more than one meaning, and if people choose to use words that way, the meanings are not wrong even when they contradict each other.

Example -- Joe says about Larry, "He's really a baaad dude." The appropriate response is to determine the context of the remark, not assume the word is being misused.
Hi! We fixed some more stuff last night. Can you check and see if this one has been fixed or if you're still having issues with it?
Your semi-serious theory is crap. That one study you cited is not enough to make an all-encompassing statement enumerating the benefits or detriments of developing on one operating system or another. Nor is it properly indicative of the gross spending habits of an entire user-base.

That Wired article is similarly ridiculous - I find it exceedingly hard to believe that people who spend $6000 on alcohol in one night and have to replace this inane habit with equally obscene in-app purchases aren't just outliers. They're also not indicative of any real substantial user-base.

What I'm trying to get at here is that your favorite theory is completely unsupported as written. It's a gross oversimplification, generalization, and it's potentially insulting.
Age Discrimination in the Design Industry
#RatioMetrics: Moneyball for Digital Analytics via Atlantic Media
Docker.io's legal section
> SSL, non-"flat" UI and a good thread/conversation view are my only musts

Your answer "IMAP" doesn't _entirely_ fit here.
Agreed. I have mostly stopped reading MIT Technology Review articles for this reason, and this article showed the same problem with hype and lack of context.
I am a great fan of Napoleon Hill.

But my eyes always glazed over while listening to him talk about tapping into the "Infinite Intelligence".

If nothing else, I would like to thank this article for gently reminding me that I do not know everything there is to know about this universe.
We had an issue with app creation last night. It should be resolved. Can you check now and see if things are working for you? (Sorry.)
I have the same issue. I have a fully upgraded 2011 Macbook air, and a very fast internet connection.

New maps are completely unusable. It's shocking. My computer is faster than most computers. Maps shouldn't fail on it.

I switched back to classic maps. The option is on the right hand side. You may have to clear your cache to make it permanent.
Heh, actually both those links are wrong, that is a standalone relayer that we built before TextIt, it does simple polling instead of the fancy TextIt one that uses GCM. The one for TextIt is called 'TextIt' in the Play store.

But thanks, I'll fix it, didn't think to go update the corporate website.
'skeptical' doesn't seem like the right word. I think 'loathsome' would be more fitting. While the author makes some good points, it was hard to consider them legitimate given that he sandwiched the article with opinionated rants that seemed to abhor the idea of successful people having good ideas.
I think, from the example cited, what this author need is a touch screen lap top.
Those are interesting examples worth discussing, but, as you know, a handful of anecdotes doesn't invalidate national statistics reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.
good example but not sure they fall into the same field given that PRISM was inherently a hidden project and bitcoin is not. Releasing details of PRISM would have led to the NSA/CIA hunting you down and given the nature of PRISM those involved with it could have been faily certain that the NSA had the ability to do that. With bitcoin it is a public project so releasing details of the creator(s) would not impact on bitcoin and there is less chance of the creators "coming after the leaker". I think there is a vastly differnt risk analysis to releasing details of these 2 projects.
Damn, no sound at work. Going to subscribe from home though - some of these look pretty funny :-)
Personally, I'd expect a compiler to take it one step further than what was suggested here.

For example, clang or gcc (under -O1) will precompute all of the math in that for-loop, and the entire function just becomes the printf with a known value.

define i32 @main() nounwind uwtable ssp {
%1 = tail call i32 (i8*, ...)* @printf(i8* getelementptr inbounds ([6 x i8]* @.str, i64 0, i64 0), i64 500000000500000000) nounwind
ret i32 0
}
Okay so this is why I was confused by your comment:

I did use GOMAXPROCS with the number of logical cores that I have, and I did test the node cluster with the same number.
Towards a Programming Language nirvana (2007)
They are cool, though. Why the snarkiness?
running BSD required paying multi-kilobuck prices for a UNIX source license.

How is that relevant? Running linux requires paying multi-dollar prices to buy a computer; does that make the software any less free?
San Francisco split by Silicon Valley's wealth
Windows users: patch up your PuTTY
How is "Less secure than we thought" a troll title, given that the article is about how one of the fundamental assumptions of cryptography is less secure than we thought? It doesn't say insecure.
If you read all the way into the comments, you'll see that this does happen -- but only for values of n that are quite small. And this is a side effect of other optimizations -- not because of anything specific to this closed form.
As a side note, I had to copy and paste the link across multiple browsers thinking it was Chrome that wasn't able to fully render the page.

I really wanted to read the article after the first quote, and the more I look around as to how to scroll down, the more frustrated I became.

For all developers out there, please the fact that you can implement a feature (in this case a ridiculous style of scrolling) doesn't necessarily mean you should
Believe it or not, this is a century-old problem.

The theremin is an electronic musical instrument, played by waving your hands in the air. It works by detecting RF capacitance between a pair of antennae and the player's body. You can see the Theremin being played at the YouTube link below.

Playing the theremin is incredibly difficult, due to the lack of tactile feedback. The human body is very poorly equipped to point precisely at an arbitrary position in free space. Only a handful of players can achieve anything better than squeaky science fiction noises and even virtuoso players struggle constantly with intonation. Modern theremin technique depends on a system of discrete hand gestures, which reduce the player's dependency upon coarse proprioception.

If the Leap Motion is to have any real utility, it will need phenomenally sophisticated software, to interpret intent from hand motion rather than simply passing the hand location as a raw input. The human body simply isn't capable of making the kind of movements that the designers of Leap Motion seem to expect, even with a great deal of practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptq_N-gjEpI
Born in First Place (vs the 10,000 hour rule)
Source: New York Times Website Hit by Cyber Attack
Thats not lazy evaluation so much as "this loop literally doesn't do anything"
Just tried to submit this but was redirected here. Fascinating article and an important discussion for the tech community to have.
Why can't apple and Android fanboys respect each others choices? This one is hilarious http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsQxaNKWFfA
Is there anything you can say about how you arranged a license for this use? The default Leap EULA forbids use with medical equipment, as well as use on a shared work-station.
He mentions Musk by name.
~15 secs to load a blog post???
Sorry - that's not a problem w/ Django. Something else goofy going on here. Whether or not Go/Revel is ninjarockstar faster than Python/Django, I don't think this is the benchmark to prove it.
Something about Palantir has creeped me the hell out ever since I lived in DC and used to see their ads in areas close to the Pentagon. I am sure its founder is every bit as brilliant as people In this article say.
I was initially worried about their stance on immigration, too. It was reassuring to see this on their FAQ page:

"Immigration (as it relates to population growth) is simply about numbers – not race, ethnicity, skin color, or nation of origin. NPG strongly condemns racism in all its forms."
The Best Advice I've Ever Gotten | Impossible HQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug ?
Very true and I did originally have some text about targeting vulnerable depressed individuals and how that's reprehensible. But as I said immediately after that line about rich idiots, I was reacting to the current way this is presented.

It would be like two towns where one makes much more money in their restaurants, and boasts about their rich and discerning clientel and how the other town is full of people who can't appreciate good food, or are simply cheap etc. Very much making value judgements about people based on the size of the revenues.

But when you look into it, the vast majority of the money is spent on alchohol, and a fair portion of that is spent by people with drinking problems, which is encouraged by the restaurant owners.

You can and should feel sorry for those people, and angry at the people taking advantage of them, but in terms of disrupting the previous, and widely accepted, storyline of "connoisseurs of fine dining" the temptation to call them a town of winos is too much, for me at least.

(apps = food, games = alcohol in this terrible analogy. And I suppose these new breed of psychologically exploitative games are like caffeine-infused cocktails designed to get you messed up quickly or bars that encourage such drinking)
That was a rather weak disproof of the 10,000 hour "rule", but I suppose the burden of proof is still on the positive...

I read Malcolm Gladwell's book. I'm paraphrasing here, but I distinctly recall his champion example being that of musicians - future music teachers at an elite school had accumulated ~3000 hours before graduating, while the elite musicians had at or over 10000 hours total.

I think it's important not to take these things too literally. I mean, come on, it's not like Gladwell actually believes life is essentially an RPG where you grind for 10,000 hours until your skill xp is "maxed" - there's no magical moment of mastery.

You practice a lot. Take it at face value. Putting all this science into it obfuscates the process and distracts you from practicing.
> No profession stays on top forever… just ask your recently graduated lawyer friends.

This is really a poor comparison. The issue with the legal industry is that there are too many bad law schools. Students from top 13 law schools simply don't have trouble finding BigLaw positions, sort of like how engineers from Stanford have their pick of top tech shops, or how Wharton undergraduates have a whole host of investment banking and private equity opportunities.

It's the law school candidates from poor schools that have trouble.

If the author's point was to say that anyone can log onto the Internet, learn Ruby for a month, and make a very respectable salary, and that this isn't sustainable...well, duh.

The rockstars — the people that read HN, the people that think about software engineering and computer science constantly, the people that don't stop tinkering and building — they're not going to have trouble keeping their jobs. They are the top 13 law schools, the target school investment bankers.

The difference between the automobile industry and the technology industry is that the tech industry won't be going away for a long, long time. One can easily imagine other forms of transportation, but computer science is here to stay, as far as we can tell. Even as we automate how easy it is to make a web application, we see new engineering challenges in different domains that still require the rockstars to be rockstars.

Yeah, we should obviously still be learning. That's why we're on HN in the first place. But I'm not exactly worried for the long term.

Maybe I'm too bullish.
Microsoft Outlook is down
A very similar-looking product for phone applications, called QuickFuse, is here: http://quickfuseapps.com/

I think the diagram-as-programming concept has some legs for certain high-business-value, low-complexity applications. One of them is voice applications, and another is probably SMS applications. You can imagine many others: email workflows, document workflows, query tools...

It comes down to the age-old problem of how to represent and store logic in a fashion that end users aren't afraid to manipulate.

Disclosure: I worked on QuickFuse.
NY has a few things going for it most notably it is seen by many as a "capital of the world".

- People want to live here. Not everyone of course, but if you're young, like a diversity of entertainment options and people, good food, culture, etc (yes - there are downsides). Very few people in the world say "I'd love to live in Boston, Seattle, Portland, etc for a bit to see what it's like". NY has that effect on people.

- Major companies and industries which are being disrupted or enhanced by technology are HQ'd there. Advertising, financial services to name two. If you roll in CT and NJ, you have insurance, pharma, etc.

- Lots of people so if you're doing something on the consumer side, many guinea pigs.

- Lots of money and influential folks here. The whole 1% thing.

- More and more VCs are setting up shop here as well. I think they see a good ecosystem here, and I think many of them don't mind having an excuse to visit NY for business.
If I remember correctly (read this book years ago) the argument with the hockey players was that a few months of difference between kids makes a big difference with their physical strength and development and a few months of difference between to adults is not that visible. So the kids who are born in the first few months are able to outperform the younger kids who haven't developed as much.
The problem is the Mobius strip of reasoning you go through when you start to punish yourself into picking the 'best' language. Different tools for this and that sure...but I think ultimately Golang in the long run will see a more widespread adoption rate.

There will always be better tools, you just can't beat yourself up trying to pre-optimize for each one per project.
Touchless sucks on AirSpace. Try BetterTouchTool. The gesture tracking and usability of that App is incredible.
Css3 selector engine
Chronos 2.0 Launch Today Passive Location App (video)
Or you can do those two things at the same time. That's the essence of @sgblank's "Customer Development Process" - it's mean to run in parallel with the Product Development process, with periodic synchronization between the two.
iAMerican
SNS Mobile Push - Amazon
Agree, I had to stop ScriptSafe in order to be able to scroll. Surprising how many things use JS nowadays.
Flickr Cofounders Launch Slack, An Email Killer
The Lies Aren't What Makes Obama's NSA Stance So Awful
Why to all Forbes articles read like flaming propaganda bullshit?
In what way is it similar? The electric motor has the wide range of speeds available, and the gearing is completely fixed.

Completely fixed vs continuously variable seem about as far apart as it gets in my mind.
That's why sometimes the best cofounders are old colleagues at university or company (or hackatons!). They've already worked together and know they can get shit done quickly.

Good point. I know I went that route, recruiting a co-founder from among the group of people I had worked with at Lulu.com.
Yeah, I was just now skimming through the comments as well and I saw that. It looks like their constant propagation logic doesn't work on loops at all, and it's just that their loop unroller stage (which runs before it) will unroll loops of less than 10 iterations.
I laughed at the notion of a Ph.D. (in social theory, no less) masking one's business inexperience.
KDE Software Compilation 4.11 Released
Few questions. Is Grasshopper intended to be a vehicle that ships a payload into a low earth orbit and return itself back to the launch pad?

With that, a question of descent, once it's reached orbit and released its payload, would it re-enter with a short burn towards its earthly destination, decelerate with, say, parachutes, and then do its final descent onto the pad with the rocket? I can't see it doing its entire descent with a rocket, that would use so much fuel, and require so much extra weight.
I think the map isn't very helpful. I would be interested in seeing how many women have access to maternal leave in the U.S. I best the number is surprisingly high. Also, many small employers are willing to work with parents. A mandate doesn't give any flexibility. For example, perhaps a parent would prefer going part-time for several months instead of 6 weeks paid. Employers compete for hires, why not allow them the flexibility to design their own benefits?
IMO, simplicity, no surprises, doing stuff in a way that "makes sense" without a lot of boilerplate or cruft.
What utter garbage blogspam. Hijacking the back button, regurgitating someone else's original work, and using a sensationalist linkbait title? Please keep this kind of submission away from HN.

The 10,000 hour rule is just a general rule of thumb that's backed by a significant body of research. It's a correlation, so to imply it doesn't exist would require hard data that indicate otherwise. Athleticism is a straw man, and makes for a poor disproof.
In science, the explanation is both the cart and the horse.

I'm sorry, but no. Observation comes first, then hypotheses, then prediction, then verification. Explanations go from proposed to confirmed, but they are certainly not the genesis of scientific knowledge. The phenomenon itself must come first, otherwise all you have is the fitting of facts to theory.

So, we have observations w/out a coherent, compelling, or generally agreed-to theory. If and when a successful theory is developed, it will predict observations to date and predict more effects not yet observed or observed and ignored. Well, that sounds like a pretty exciting field of science, actually.
"presenting data miners for the Man as rock stars"

Yes, this really bothers me as well. We should believe in the power this tool has, and that should cause us to be afraid. Biz-mag dorks are always going to eat up such things, but who cares about that. The adulation by people who seem like they should know better is what rankles.
You remember correctly. And the kids born in autumn quit in their teens because the slightly older kids are naturally much stronger and get all the playtime.
Google: Gmail users have "no legitimate expectation of privacy"
Autism and Induced Labor