skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RMS is basically offline most of the time and gets a crap ton of email -- from the general public, from the GNU project and from his colleages at the FSF.

He spends most of his waking time running GNU, the FSF and answering people who have questions about free software. When he's not doing that, he's giving talks or getting a little bit of sleep. He spends a lot of time on a plane.

Other than working through mail in batches, including offline copies of webpages, would you suggest he get this same amount of work done in the time he has?
Tell "Show HN'ers": Please setup a demo account or require no sign-up 
I hope this is constructive and not just a rant but whenever I see a Show HN, I am always curious to check it out and it really is disappointing when a sign-up is required without telling anything about what the app/site does. Even worse, there will be a button that says "See it in action for free" or "Try us free" etc but clicking on them takes you to a sign-up page.

I mean I understand that app might require login functions but can you not setup a test/demo account and let us play around ? How hard is that ? Even better would be to not require sign-ups at all.
Your post did a good job of showing examples of software that does both, and making an argument that open source improves the chances of working.

But your very first line, the line I quoted, directly states that davidedicillo was calling them mutually exclusive. That line is what I was objecting to.
Ok, so now we need a new word for people that actually know stuff.
I did a year at DESCO in Systems (didn't go so well, I made some mistakes) and everything that I hear about Two Sigma is that the place is awesome. The number of postings you've had recently has _exploded_ since I last looked at you guys around 2009-10.

I would definitely recommend people look into this place and might consider it myself if I thought they'd ever hire me (not likely).
If your business logic (Models/Controllers) are strongly decoupled from your Views, you still maintain a pretty large amount of code that becomes easier to port.
Half-way through the article uses the term 'mdot' and never defines it.

Anyone?
Be careful when redirecting STDERR to STDOUT if yo uare also planning to redirect STDOUT to a file. The order in which things are done affects the outcome. These are not the same:

# Redirect STDOUT to file, and STDERR to file
command >/tmp/command.out 2>&1

# Redirect STDOUT to file, and STDERR to screen (as STDOUT)
command 2>&1 >/tmp/command.out

The important thing to remember is that 2>&1 is redirecting to what STDOUT is currently pointing to, not redirecting to STDOUT itself.
Thanks, this is exactly the kind of feedback I need. I'll work on clearing that up!
So awesome. One of the best scenes from that movie.

Jim Young: There's an important phrase that we use here,
and think it's time that you all learned it. Act as if.
You understand what that means? Act as if you are the
fucking President of this firm. Act as if you got a 9"
cock. Okay? Act as if.
Yeah, for what it's worth I do agree with you. To my way of thinking this is something that's aimed much more at easing the social interactions surrounding a startup than the hard work of actually delivering the value. But, I think to really be successful you need both.
never heard of the "read the Bible in a year", good to know
Lab Grown Brain To Open Doors For Disease Research
One of the best tech minds and lawyers I know: http://bradykrissesq.com/

Don't be thrown by the references to MA, she's been in CA for the past couple years and is within a couple hours of you, I believe, so wouldn't be horrible to meet in the middle for a face-to-face if need be.

Good luck!
CUPS was already great and widely used in Unices before Apple bought it.
Disagree. Intel looks to be getting better at low power faster than ARM and partners are getting better at perf/watt.

The ARM universe has a flexibility advantage, but Apple might not care, since Intel will surely make them the SoC they want if it means a spot in the iPad.

I don't think the outcome here is ordained, nor would Apple want it to be: Competition for supplying them fast, efficient CPUs is exactly what they didn't have in the PowerPC days, and it nearly killed them.
But lawyers working in private practice, or partners in firms with a lot of power, will presumably be willing to balance risk against reward, and try to optimize accordingly.

Lawyers: please correct me if I'm assuming incorrectly here.

I am not a lawyer, but you are certainly assuming incorrectly.

It is a lawyer's job to not only get you a good contract, but also to maximize their billable hours. They do not gouge too aggressively - after all they want future billable hours as well. But the risks and rewards that the lawyer is balancing are their risks and rewards, which are not the same as yours.
Cooking a hobby or a duty
It kind of astounds me how many previous sponsors are anonymous. (Well, sponsored features, I should say. I guess it could be the same one anonymous sponsor.) I'd be interested to know, just in general terms, what kind of real-world situation(s) there are where the downside to being public about this is greater than the goodwill/respect they would get for doing it. Maybe they do not want to be known as a company willing to sponsor development that they don't "own"? Could there be legal ramifications?
> How can any government accept a situation where communications are so secure that none of their agencies can break it?

A government by and for the people accepts it because the people accept it.

What a government _is_, of course, a philosophical question. The American Constitution treats government as an agreement among people, and structures that agreement to withhold particular powers from that agreement.

It does _not_ withhold these powers in recognition of some divine grant or innate possession of 'rights', but because it anticipates these powers make the government dangerous to the people governed. Given those powers, the people in government would inevitably abuse them, and would over time evolve into a faction or class to themselves, striving to retain control of the government for their own purposes and to the neglect of the people's.

A government that can consistently and without consequence exceed the powers allotted to it by the people governed will inevitably become an aristocracy, and a tyranny, unless those excesses are checked.

(There are other visions of what a government is. vidarh's comment on this subthread is the best account of anarchism I've read -- really smart -- saying that government is necessarily a class instrument that ought to be weakened or destroyed because it inevitably serves the strong economic interest.)

Of course, those limits make it harder for the government to pursue the people's interests. But the point is that those short-term deficiencies are a wise trade over the long-term, over which an unbounded government would transform into tyranny.

Surely the government can do a better job preventing the next 9/11 bombing if it has all these surveillance powers. But I'm not nearly as worried about such bombings as I am about how the government has already transformed beyond our control, and how much further it could go. I am very sure that 99.99% of us opposed to political terrorism can defeat the 0.01% using it, even while we tie our own hands in some ways for our own long-term protection. It's true that the technology of WMD have increased the potential leverage and destructiveness of that 0.01%. It's also true that we haven't hardly started thinking about how we, as a society, meet and check that expanded threat. I'm confident we'll figure it out. And even if we don't, the possibilities of that violent minority aren't nearly so dangerous or likely as those of an unchecked government.

So how can any government accept such limits? Because it is _us_, and we recognize that those limits best ensure our safety and that of our kids.
It seems pretty clear that you don't have enough experience on your own to resolve this properly, so call in some help. It may be possible to make an architectural change that significantly reduces the resources you need, or perhaps you'll find that you unavoidably need more resources to do what you want. Someone who knows how to diagnose and analyze this properly can tell you that.
> This lesson in total disregard for risk served me well. They say entrepreneurs are risk takers. I think of myself as too lazy and irresponsible to fully understand the risk.

I recall a study somewhere (can't find it now, unfortunately) that concluded: it's not actually that entrepreneurs are people who intentionally take bigger risks than others. It's that they have so much self-confidence that they believe things are less risky than they really are -- somewhat self-delusional, perhaps? But hey, that's how things get done.
Are you a morning person yet - why early to rise is still important?
Software Engineer.

I find funky titles superflous and unnecessary. It would be ridiculous if other professions adopted this too. For example, imagine a limo driver calling himself 'captain of a chartered car'. Plain titles give you a general idea of what the person does. In general, Sofware Developer II/Senior Developer has greater responsibility than Softare Developer I etc. I think people will find it difficult to differentiate between a hacker and software ninja. Really, what is the difference?
Taming the cloud with Juju and raspberry pi
I don't think that's what this article is getting at. My interpretation was that if you get put into an intimidating situation, you should act like you belong even if you don't feel like you do.

This has nothing to do with impersonation, but rather moving up a level in something you already do.
Huh. That H9RBS.js sounds pretty neat. Can't believe I hadn't heard of it yet. I'll see if I can use it for my next enterprise thing.
I think you are taking the advice to the extreme, well past what is intended.
The limitations for distributing GCC compared to Clang:

Patents. A company need to know if they have patents, or patent agreement covering the GCC compiler.

Binary only modifications to GCC need to have corresponding source code.

If you include a GCC compiler in a router/hardware device, users need to be able to run their own modified compiler.

Thats about it. Cant really figure out any more use cases where GCC and Clang would differ.
it's a transposition cipher where the Qs are spaces.
Probably a two way sharing agreement.
Apple VP Greg Joswiak thinking behind iPhone 5c with employees
I see this all the time. people harp on about 'fake it until you make it' when I think the bigger unspoken problem is the tendency to overvalue confidence over competence. I would much rather work with someone who values both confidence and competence.
This is a strange article.

Let's address his complaints in two basic areas:

1. Community.

The Lisp community as typified by #lisp and comp.lang.lisp can be remarkably acerbic to the point of toxic, depending on who feels like contributing at the time. Part of this are the annoying trolls that show up; one's patience wears thin. A FAQ document might go a ways. However, there are a large number of people who don't ream newbies out and really are helpful. lispm here on HN is one of the friendliest Lispers out there and actually has helped me out tons.

Addendum: r/lisp on Reddit is good for generalish Lisp questions. StackOverflow's common lisp tag almost always gets an answer to most any reasonable question. sbcl-devel mailing list is useful if you want to take the time to posit in-depth technical questions to the SBCL developers. Lispforum, oddly enough, I haven't used much. I simply don't go there much. I should, I suppose. :)

2. Technical. I can do no better than quote my /r/lisp post on this (r/lisp is really good for lisp help).

---

First of all, consistency. A variety of things are peculiar in how they are named. TERPRI? Really?

Second, Common Lisp is a (the?) programmable programming language. CLUEL-esque platforms could be used to drive CDR adoption and cleanups of the original language.

My primary gripes with CL are the lack of CDR-2, lack of CDR-8, the lack of hierarchical namespaces, the funky naming conventions & expectations[1], and the lack of deeper CLOS integration[2].

[1] ELT vs AREF vs NTH, for instance. Or, LOOP for lists vs arrays vs (your data structure here).

[2] See CDR-8.
The amount of misinformation on the 5S's 64-bitness is hilarious. I've yet to see a single person get it right aside from people I know personally.
This reminds me of my experiences with Plan 9. A very cool system, but it's managed to attract some of the absolute worst people in computing. Dare to criticize something and they'll leap down your throat. In the end, I just gave up. We tried to drag things kicking and screaming into the 21st century with source control, 64 bit kernel, automated builds and testing, etc. but nobody wanted it.

On the other hand, the mailing list did get a lot of posts that kind of remind me of this: "Hi, I just started using Plan 9, where's emacs? Anyway I have a lot of great ideas on how to fix this OS so you should all start doing these things... I'll set up the wiki and write the newbie guide"
I find those kind of examples a little unfair as what you're actually doing is comparing the syntax of different shells/languages (the Bourne Shell vs awk). You could write examples in Perl or Python as well - to prove how pointless awk and sort is as well if you really wanted. In fact you could even rewrite sort in awk.

While I disagree with most of the comments on here about how:

cat $file | grep "pattern"

is easier to read than

grep "pattern" $file

(in my opinion, if you're a sysadmin then you should know how grep works and thus the optimised solution shouldn't be any harder to read. But at the end of the day, whatever gets the job done).

However I do draw the line at your example because you're now comparing apples to oranges and suggesting that everyone should learn an additional programming language on top of memorising every standard Unix/GNU/BSD command and their flags.
You should try using http://sleepyti.me/
A look inside Motorola's Moto X factory
If you take <a href="http://databanksearch.worldbank.org/DataSearch/LoadReport.as... World Bank net migration data for 2010</a> Russia is still near the top while the second place is taken by UAE which seem to be just a little worse than the USA J
United States 4 954 924,00
United Arab Emirates 3 076 634,00
Spain 2 250 005,00
Italy 1 998 926,00
Russian Federation 1 135 737,00
EBook:The Designers Guide to Freelancing
Almost every recruiter I talk to says they need an expert on some technology, and every time I says I'm not really an expert, and explain in minute detail everything I don't know about it. They're invariably impressed.
It really doesn't, though. The 32/64-bit divide is not all that consequential for this.
That's "governance", not "lower-case-g-government"
first look at the 3rd one the ciphertext looks consistent with random data at least for single byte frequencies.
I don't believe the article defines a magic square (nor was I aware). A magic square is a n by n grid of numbers where each individual row, column, and diagonal add up to the same value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square
The role of accuracy in photography
Nope. It's not global cooling. The whole point of global warming and why people (fox news) are so stupid about it, it because it's not about the temperature that day or even that year. It about a slow and general tread. People are notoriously bad at probability and pattern over time, thus the existence of casinos and the lottery. So why would they get subtle movements in temperature over time, covered in erratic quick movements that appear as noise. (It's very cold today, therefore global warming is BS.) The entire media industry is guilty of this.
I'd argue that startups that can be killed by something Google releases aren't businesses, they're products.
I don't really think you can say that. It's not because they did something particularly positive, but more because they did something negative that had positive side effects. A positive externality maybe?
"Realdesign" - let's look at ideological notions in design
IPhone It In Cartoon
I think this misses the point of the article. The author says something like "even though you're successful you feel like you're not" (on my phone so sorry for paraphrasing). I think the idea of rhe article is that if you're already making it, act as if you're making it. It's not like Conan doesn't put in hours and hours of hard work offstage to make his show happen. Acting "as if" is just a way to psychologically get himself in tune with his success and project an air of confidence.
Theoretical maximum is not talking about manufacturability, we're talking about within the laws of physics conceivably possible.

Theoretical max efficiency of PV is about 40%, in the same way that theoretical max transistor density is one per atom. It's about the characteristics of sunlight as much as anything, and advances in manufacturing may bring us closer to the limit but not beyond it.
I got a better way stop idolizing these people they're all on this spinning dirt ball.
Just do it and don't make a big deal out of it.
Yes I obviously did mean 2*pi but I always get confused with these two numbers...

Not that it matters much, being a lecturer in Mathematics...
Ask HN: Need some feedback on this site I have been working on before continuing
Here is the link: www.simidia.com Yes it doesn't look very good, as you can see, and it is far from presentable. Just need some feedback from you guys, before I decide to dedicate any more time.
Thanks.
I agree with your point, but I don't think that's what the article meant. I don't think it meant pretending to be something you're not, but instead pretending to be something you feel like you're not when you actually are but haven't internalized it due to impostor syndrome. It's for people that feel like they have no idea what they're doing, but they really do.
I think he meant radical for the iPhone brand, not the apple brand.
Your server barely has more RAM than my phone. Your disk almost certainly has less reliable performance than my laptop's.

If you're doing something that makes any money you should get a real server before wasting days of effort or intentionally causing repeated outages.
Surprising Stats From Mining One Million Tweets About #Syria
Video game controllers.

DirectInput joystick data outputs a square range (0,0)->(65535,65535) which is usually uniformly remapped to a circle to be used by the game. Then you have to add in a dead zone to eliminate the noise from the controller around the neutral position.
Intel launches Bay Trail tablet processors: here's what you need to know
OK - I've updated that section. I hope it helps!
I want to take a leap and talk about 2 core concepts that I got after spending last week learning Clojure. I'd love some comments about them.

I've been writing javascript for years but functional programming didn't make sense until I realized:

1) It's essentially inverted callbacks. You can read and reason about your code by working from the inside out. The results of a function are passed up to the outside.

2) When you stop modifying variables and just pass them around, it becomes a lot easier to think about code in abstract ways. There are of course some situations where modifying a variable is needed, but it really feels icky and you think twice about doing it.

The problem I found trying to learn this stuff is that once you learn to think functional its hard to think like someone who doesn't get it. That makes it hard to translate concepts in ways that non-functional people can get easier. I'm keeping mental tabs on ideas as I understand them to hopefully help with this problem.

Also, macros. Clojure people love talking about them. They aren't explained well most of the time though.

Simplest explanation is that you can write a bunch of your own functions, even ones that will override native functions, i.e macros. Since clojure is a compiled language, at compile time all the source code gets read in and pre-processed. When the compiler reaches some code that was defined in a macro, it keeps rewriting that code until all the macros are processed and the code has been re-written. Then everything is compiled to bytecode for the jvm.
Using a chrome extension was a brilliant idea, man! I don't recall the name of it, but there was another app that was along the same idea of using your phone as a remote. It was a neat idea, but you had to install and maintain a separate Java server on your computer to listen for the phone's commands. It made it far more pain that it was worth.

Do you have a write up on the tech behind it? Are you guys looking for help on adding additional sites? :)

Nice job!
I always had the notion that LLVM is faster than GCC. I don't feel qualified to interpret this benchmark comparison, but they appear to have roughly the same performance?
IOS 7 Ships Sept. 18; New Look, Potential Frustrations
Obviously Apple is trying to turn the iPhone 5C into the plastic Macbook of 2006 - the best-selling laptop ever.

The MacBook was also more expensive than the competition, however consumers (even students) paid up.

Arguably the price difference wasn't as extreme, but I'd be surprised if Apple didn't lower the price to $499 or less, and announce a white+black models of 5C very soon.

However, I'd argue that the main reason consumers bought the Macbook was not the Apple brand, but the vast gap between OS X and Windows XP. They bought into the operating system, and that's what drove sales of other Apple products from then on, because after all, that iPhone/iPod works better with a Mac.

Fast-forward to now, Apple's competitor isn't MS Windows. It's Android, which doesn't cost a premium the way Windows did, and is arguably not inferior to iOS.

OS X was more "open" compared to Windows, and not just due to its Unix underpinnings. It didn't come with pre-packaged software and DRM restrictions, but it did come with better software. It didn't force you to consume content the Microsoft way, it embraced developers creating great apps like VLC without charging them.

No more. iOS is a walled garden, even more so than Windows ever was. Sure Google isn't a saint in that regard, and yet Android encourages competition. It has no issue with Amazon's Kindle app selling e-books. It has no issue with developers writing apps to replace "core functions". It knows that selling 10 units with a 10% margin is better than selling 1 unit with a 20% margin. It's thinking long-term.

I still love Apple for its design and attention to product detail, but if their greed and hubris continues to escalate, history may just repeat itself.
Did the FBI Lean On Microsoft for Access to Its Encryption Software?
The first paragraph qualifies the rest of the article:

> People suffering from and trying to overcome Impostor Syndrome are somewhat endemic to startup and tech circles.

I don't think this article was written for the person with more confidence than ability but vice versa.
> Pornography is evil in concept and in practice. Building your business through it is considerably worse than, e.g., using huge email spam networks. It beggars belief that--in a community that can at least entertain the idea that it might be wrong to create a business by exploiting people's lizard brains with notifications, gamification, and misleading social ads--ninety-eight percent of comments on using porn to promote your business either avoid considering morality at all or go out of the way to indicate that everything's a-ok here.

Kind Sir, you made my day.
For a moment you had me going:D