skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of nowhere, the throwaway account for opinions TOO FAR out of the HN mainstream enters.

The fact that anyone believes it's possible to have a "scientific" or purely "logical" evaluation on a race of people in some kind of sterile/unbias environment without racism being a significant factor is wrong in today's world. Studies such as this[1] are just racism.
How often does anyone try to connect white people with some negative trait? How many of those studies are done? But we love finding ways to support racism with "studies" masquerading as "science". Media, society, "studies" without all the context of history & corruption: anything to ensure black people, their culture, their home country continues to be looked down upon.

1. http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-men-smal...
The article is nearly four years old and focused only on purchases made through travel websites.
This is exactly what I came here to say. This is another case of Apple skating to where the puck is going to be in maybe 2 or 3 years time.

There is no point in Apple introducing a brand new truly low cost iPhone because such a device would by necessity only be in the market for a short time before it would get obsoleted. The 5C is set to be manufactured for the next 3 years, so they will extract maximum scale effects and maximum sales volume over the lifetime of the device.

The 'C' may well stand for 'Cheap', but not now. It stands for where it will be positioned over it's lifetime. Other manufacturers bring out a new device and only care about it for maybe 6 months, after which they're on to the new thing and ready to forget the old one ever existed. Apple thinks really long term about their device's full economic life cycle.

For example the iPad Mini was criticism for being too expensive, but that was taking a short term view. I fully expect the current mini to continue to be manufactured at a lower price point for another year, cutting off the air supply to the cut price Android tablet market, but Apple is in no hurry to get to that point.
Frenemies: How IP Law Helps FOSS Communities
Phonebloks. A phone worth keeping
> Something you know, something you have, something you are.

Excellent point - and oddly reflects a subtle point: Something you are (bio-id) is what we are asserting, and using one or both of the others to give the far point a guage of how likely fraud is.

In short:

* Something you are -> Username
* Something you know -> Password
* Something you have -> RSA fob
S is for Service
You need many more samples, much better docs and a user forum would help.

I will say we are looking at your product as well. Your print support looks great with nice browser based preview and support for large format printing. Your server side .Net component for PDF conversion sounds good, but there is almost no information on it on the site, again a doc problem.
Interesting and nice execution. A must add, send to kindle ;)
Ask HN: How do I learn DevOps?
As a developer, I feel I need to know other things besides how to code like fundamentals of security, networking, databases etc.

There are tutorials out there in the vein of "Security for developers" or "Networking for developers" but how about DevOps for developers? Is there a "bible" of DevOps? A canonical introduction?
Although I like the concept and it could be a good thing to do, I don't think this is as important as this young chap is making out.

When I was younger I used to blog (almost) every question people asked me with an answer. I would publish, sometimes not.

This didn't result in me working out on a beach. I expect this document renders a similar result and it's actually not all that important.
No, if he knew anything at all about legal expenses, he wouldn't have implied it made sense to sue someone with maybe $500,000 in assets.
At Open Software Integrators: Senior Consultant

At Fogbeam Labs: Founder / President / Janitor

Also are you with or against funky titles such as Ninja, Guru, etc..?

I prefer to refer to myself as a "Software Shaman".
I like your post, and think we need more people like you doing this. One critique: I think you need to do a much better job explaining your first part on recursion.

You need to walk through exactly what you are doing in your sum function, because it is not at all clear to the uninitiated where in the hell the "acc" variable comes from. Instead of explaining any of this part, which is perhaps the most difficult part for a non-FP person to grasp, you jumped straight to "by the way, use loop when there's a lot of numbers."

My coworker's comments when I sent him the link:

"Ok, I get it...... what's going on with the sum?..... whaaat?"

Thanks for doing what you're doing. I look forward to reading more of your work.
It really depends on the stage of the company, IMO. The cost of switching out the name of a company with no in-market traction is pretty minimal, when you think about it. In our case, we went through this whole naming process on Day 1, with all hands allocated to the task. Product development was, if not entirely halted during this process, than certainly placed on the backburner.

If we'd had an MVP out in testing, people were loving it, and we'd been preparing to go big with a launch of some sort, sure, $50k in exploration toward securing an awesome name would have made a lot more sense. But $50k, right off the bat, felt pretty absurd at the time.

And to reiterate, this was just one symptom of a much more insidious disease: the need to consult lawyers about everything. I'm using only the mildest of hyperbole here. We did not make a single decision without a legal weigh-in. Eventually we were able to convince the CEO of our financial and strategic inability to sustain this approach. But a lot of damage had been done before we got to that point. It was a very expensive lesson.
I suspect it's not as common as you think. I have many email addresses, and a couple of my friends (who work in tech) do, but the vast majority of the people I know only have one (or two, if they have one leftover from school, etc.).
Ever thought of using good old pen and paper? It's the ultimate in "always online" technology that never runs out of battery. (well, I guess your pen can run out of ink, but that's a rather rare occurrence) As a bonus, the NSA can't spy on it without physical access!
Three-month work-life retrospective
iOS or VoIP Engineer? Come build a communications empire
SendHub (YC W12) is looking for iOS and VoIP Network Engineers.

Architect a communications empire and join us in the fight against the Telco monopolies.

SendHub is looking for a talented and determined engineer to lead our VoIP infrastructure efforts. We want you to take our telecommunications platform to the next level; scaling to support millions of users and high-volume simultaneous phone calls.

Skills: Understanding of TCP/UDP, SIP, RTP, HTTP/HTTPS, distributed and highly-available fault-tolerant systems. Experience with open source soft switches (FreeSwitch, Asterisk, Kamailio, etc.), Session Border Controllers, and a working knowledge of media codecs.

Nice to have: Languages: Python, Go, Scala, and BASH. Experience with WebRTC.

What we're doing: We're building tools to make it fast and easy for businesses to communicate with their customers. We have hundreds of thousands of users on our VoIP and texting platform.

Our Philosophy:
We believe in building beautiful products, taking care of our customers and each other. We work hard delivering the best product to our customers and we wouldn't want it any other way. We're hungry and you need to be too.

We're based in Menlo Park, CA, and while we're flexible on working remotely, you'll need to be around the office and eligible to work in the United States. If you're interested, please drop us a line: jobs [at] sendhub [dot] com
> Now what am I paying the premium price for again?

The current-generation Macbooks?

* High performance
* Retina display
* Tiny package
* OSX
* Status

I'm not a fanboy, but I'm looking forward to being allowed to pick out a new macbook late this year or early next. Will probably wait for the new batch, this 2011 model I work with atm is still awesome. My previous dev machine (at an assignment) was a Core I7, 32 GB monster... but it ran on Ubuntu and didn't feel as nippy or awesome as this macbook. The OS does make an important difference.

But I digress / ramble.
Or a language with the ability to create your own such constructs!
For the interested, the easieat way of generating random points on a circle is drawing (x,y) component-wise from a normal distribution and then normalizing the vector. (And two independent Gaussian variables can be easily sampled using the Box-Muller transformation.)
We actually deal with a limited number of distros for now (mostly Ubuntu and RHE) and we distribute statically linked binaries (meaning no dependency at all).
Right, but most of the posts seem to focus on the aesthetics talk. Where are the ones that delve into more objective or even empirical results?
Thanks for the link to that paper!

I recommend reading the section on "Top Level vs Referential Transparency" after reading this article. It argues that the trade-offs for absolute transparency require the programmer to define the entire world ahead of time. This trade-off is not acceptable by the authors of the paper for reasons elucidated in earlier sections and in SICP and so they demonstrate a version of EVAL whose environment allows for forward-references to top-level forms which we know is useful to writing dynamically compiled programs and decoupled modules.

Every pure-FP language implementation has to make trade-offs with impure, mutable state and data. Haskell had to add the IO monad. Clojure has Var and Ref. Engineering isn't a discipline of absolutes.

http://this-plt-life.tumblr.com/post/44462204757/simon-peyto...
I tried to watch the video (and the page didn't load). I read the front page. I still have no idea what this is supposed to be.
Opensource robotic prosthetic hand can be made for $1000
Joel Gibbard tells us about how was able to create a functional prototype for a robotic prosthetic hand for just $1000. Usually, prosthetic hands cost between $11,000-$110,000 making them too expensive more many amputees to afford, especially in developing countries. Joel uses 3d printing and some smart design decisions to keep costs down.
Interesting, that's exactly how I feel about investment banking, as currently practiced in the US.
Not necessarily. Nav inside article functions the same as the contents list in a Wikipedia article so if you don't want that, you can remove it from the article. If you want secondary links to other related content, those should go in a different nav in aside. If you want site-wide links, you can create a separate nav outside the article.

Also of note, footer can be for the article or the whole page. If you like, you can put footer outside the article and put the site-wide navigation there in addition to any forms.

Skip to content links aren't hacks, but are in fact part of standard procedure for web accessibility and do solve a problem with fewer steps. Try not to look at things that don't necessarily conform to arbitrary standards of elegance as hacks.
Dear Marissa, here is the new Yahoo logo in 3D
If your fingerprints go on a fraud list, you can't get new ones.

You can't repudiate your fingerprints.

Similar, worse problems for iris and DNA.

Imagine being on a watch list that you can't get off of.

This is not a good road to go down.
BSlider - A Backbone.js based slider
Here's my first Backbone.js plugin. I did this in an attempt to learn JavaScript. It's not complete yet. I plan to finish the first version by 30th September. All feedback welcome. Thanks!
Europe New Reforms: No More Roaming Premiums, Enforced Net Neutrality, And More
> As someone who already owns a Nexus 4 and a 1st gen Nexus 7 they are already a
> commodity, I bought my N4 for half what an iPhone 5 costs.

Good for you. Premium products are not for everyone. Part of the Apple premium products is for example that I can simply walk into the next Apple Store to get support in case of any problems. From my home, I can reach two Apple Stores by public transport in about 30 minutes, form my office, it's a 10-minute walk to one of the two Apple Stores.

Last year for example, I dropped my iPhone 4S and the screen was broken to uselessness. A stupid mistake on my side. I immediately scheduled an appointment with the local Apple Store and 2 hours later, I was talking to a 'genius'. The offered to replace my iPhone 4S with a new 4S for about 280 USD; I had bought the iPhone 4S for about USD 960. OK, perfect, so I walked out with a new 4S 10-15 minutes later and thanks to my iCloud backup, my new iPhone 4S was up and running a few hours later.

Where's the Google equivalent?
Reminded me of "Screw you. Pay me.", a video that advices to get a lawyer before you sign anything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450424
Ask HN: Performance of backend-as-a-service providers?
I'm considering building a SaaS based service for something many developers use within their own infrastructure. Think of things like memcached, redis, etc.

The customer base for this product will likely be similar to those that would use Parse, Stackmob, etc.

How well do these backend-as-a-service providers perform? And where are they hosted to reduce latency for their customers? I'd prefer to stay way from EC2, but it is attractive since it would work well for customers hosted on EC2 or Heroku.

Thanks for any responses!
Grandma probably doesn't text and won't use much data. Some members on my family plan use < 100MB/mo.

More realistically, she already has a plan with a monthly payment. Which she is not even considering at this point. All she cares is how much it will cost her right now. $100 could make a difference.
Maybe using section there would be acceptable, it's the closest thing I can think of at least.
"The market is telling Apple that it is not innovative enough and that its need to do much more"

The stock market might be saying that but the "people who buy phones" market seems to be pretty happy with what Apple is doing.
Apple stock dropping after a keynote is not uncommon. I hear this dismissal of Apple products from techies nearly every time they announce anything. It's such a common phenomena that John Gruber calls it "claim chowder". People at one time thought the iPod mini was too expensive and that nobody would want it, and they considered the iPad little more than a "big iPod touch" that sounded like a feminine hygiene product (seriously). Apple is pretty good at understanding what regular people want, and techies tend not to be so understanding. The claim that reaction to the presentation was a "collective meh" is unfounded.
I think the previous commentor's thoughts may have been correct a few years back. The most recent generation of Android phones and tablets are fantastic. At $230 for the Nexus 7, both the iPad mini and iPad just don't make any sense to purchase, short of the buyer already having a huge library of iOS apps.

Apple still has great potential. There should be a formidable alternative to Android even if it is a closed platform.
I use postgresql + listen/notify to share and push configuration out to applications.

Each application starts a thread that LISTEN's for NOTIFY's from postgresql.

I have a settings table (name text, value text). Configuration data is stored there.

insert into settings (name, value) values
('sites.my-site.authnet.api_key', 'asdfasdf');

There's a trigger on that table that issues a NOTIFY to all the clients. When the clients receive the NOTIFY, they query the table and store all of the settings in memory.

It works great.

No additional moving parts. All my configuration is stored in the database, they aren't checked into files that need to be protected. No security concerns about api keys stored in a separate service. My settings are backed up along with the rest of my data.
I'd rather take a random uniform distribution from 0 to pi and take it as the arc-length.

Why is your construction 'uniform' on the circle?
How Startup Culture Is Killing Innovation
For a much better source:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2013-Sept...
It's now written on the wall for everyone to see that devices will fall in price in the next decade and with it will go profit margins, money will be made by volume of sales, Samsung is just where like Nokia once was in this place, Google just want to accelerate that because it makes business sense to them.

Apple already realized that as their recent announcement demonstrated.
Show HN: Control websites like Pandora, SoundCloud, and Vimeo with your phone
The pie we are looking at is in percent, the article stated that the top 1% took a bigger share of it than before. This means they took a bigger share of your productivity gains. But why argue about such things, it would be easier if you can show me a mathematical example where the top 1% take a bigger percentage of the pie yet the median increases. Let me know if you like the results you come up with.
Where's the insult? jackgavigan is actually being charitable toward those using the new version.
IPhone Fingerprint Authentication
"Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me" People honestly believe the government can be fully transparent ? The way they set up the FISA court is a clear indicator of its intentions from the get go.
I don't use it, but I came across Base CRM today. Looks useful.
https://getbase.com/
cat file | grep string

It's a gratuitous use of cat, it's not useless.

gratuitous - uncalled for; lacking good reason; unwarranted

grep string file

Is all you need.
And before that, the author of the best postgres library on the planet: Postmodern.

http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/postmodern/
I'm stuck on Challenge 3.
Vim...
I don't think it's fair to get awk involved. It's a scripting language, not a single-purpose utility.
I agree. It's a pity Doozer got to this point. I was happy to see that still this years Febrary proactive developers in the google groups (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/doozer/fVcS0y3KuHQ) tried to get the project active and coordinated, but I guess merging different codebases from different forks was too big of a challenge.
Probably. Will the contractors who'll still chime in be more likely reliable, after considering what they're agreeing with?

I doubt it. They're just as likely to be selecting for future contractors who are overly confident / cocky by nature, and/or ones who don't understand how to estimate software projects, and who don't have a good feel/understanding for the risks involved.
Yeah I can confirm this through my experience as well. In my circles, 5C is the girlfriend phone.
> Quantitative trading seems interesting because I would hazard that you need strong math background along with solid hacking skills.

Strong maths knowledge can be good for general developer roles anyway. It's one (small) reason why I did a maths degree part time (Open University in the UK) to complement my existing Comp Sci degree.

I'm sure you could get a better bang per buck picking and choosing specific areas rather than an entire degree but that wasn't my motivation (I'm equally interested in both in general).

A good number theory course (even just plowing through Crandall and Pomerance, or Apostol) will definitely help with understanding/analysing asymmetric encryption.
The Only Five Types of Messaging You Need
Maybe it was worth it. I once worked for a company that wanted to launch a new product called whose initials were A.I.D.S.

I was lead dev of the Technical Information Team System too.
Using cat with pipes typically linearizes $x operation in our minds, it makes it easier to come up with solutions, and makes it easier to change them as modification is needed.

Yes, definitely. Also it's easier to build up from simple to more complicated pipelines that way, testing whether each iteration does what you expect it to.
I like MG's take. The iPhone 5s is evolution of a pre-Ive design.

The iPhone 5c is Johnny Ive's first shot at a decidedly Ive version of the iPhone.
Another handy bit of syntax:

$ command-name 2>&1 | less

This combines standard out and standard error into one stream so you can read all the output in less [1]. Piping just standard out leads to stray error lines popping up on the screen while less is running, and they aren't kept in less's buffer so you lose track of them.

[1] http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/redirecting-stderr-to-stdout/
Part of the situation is that the output of a lawyer cannot be measured clearly. The same is true for programmers but more people seem to be okay with shoddy code than with shoddy contracts. If the consequences of bad code were equally drastic as those of shoddy contracts, I'd imagine a lot more time being spent on code quality.
Right, I realize it isn't a "pure" function in the direct sense, but at the abstract level it can and often is presented as such. In programming this is trivial to simply return a new one that is diced. (Consider the typical "cons" example, where the trick is to actually return a new list, not modify the existing one. Something that is not exactly intuitive for most folks.)

And, I do strongly believe that declarative works best to start. This is mirrored in the physical world where people say to focus on easily specified goals for tasks. (And why my examples started high level.) Similarly, I suspect once you get down to the nitty gritty, it is again nice to be in the declarative realm. It seems that "somewhere between" these layers is where the imperative really belongs. I just don't know where that is.

I will probably take a while to digest your post. Thanks for sharing it!
I dunno...assuming the original iPhone 5 would have been bumped down to the same price as the 5C is releasing as... I would rather have the iPhone 5.
I disagree. Apple traditionally doesn't budge very far from the price points they establish. When the MacBook is getting long in the tooth, they would rather replace it with a model refresh than let the price sink.

IMO what we're seeing is only relevant in the developed world. The 5C is being priced as the slightly-cheaper-but-not-by-much alternative to the 5S. But this isn't why the 5C exists - IMO the 5C exists largely because of the developing world, where Apple has the freedom to separate the price points by a much wider gap than in the US/EU.

I'd expect that the 5C-5S price difference to be much more dramatic in China than in the US.
> Why is your construction 'uniform' on the circle?

That's a very good question, and the sort of thing that would need to be in a comment somewhere. The answer is that the bi-normal distribution is rotationally symmetrical, a fact that is not immediately obvious.

> I'd rather take a random uniform distribution
> from 0 to pi and take it as the arc-length.

That's a good solution for the simple one-dimensional circle in two dimensional space, but does not generalize to higher dimensions. The technique of drawing points from a normal distribution and normalizing works for any dimension. That's the usual follow up question when the candidate gives your (very good for the given question) solution.

How would you generate points distributed uniformly on the surface of a three dimensional ball?
Internet has made a big difference for kite boarding, but I would say it has had the same effect on windsurfing recently so I don't think the comparison is necessarily correct. Rather it is the differences in the sports themselves that are making windsurfing lag behind:

1) windsurfing is much harder to learn and not as enjoyable at first (in fact it can be a pain) so people give up quicker

2) kitesurfing, for the new guy, is a lot more spectacular and gets a lot of "wows" on the beach, so it attracts more people

3) I must admit kitesurfing equipment is a lot lighter and easier to carry around

4) Windsurfing, being an older sport, has an "old" image. People generally think its slow and boring, and that you need huge waves to have fun. However things have changed drastically. Take a look at a few videos on http://www.continentseven.com to see what I mean