skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My weekend project will simplify your lunch decision
http://grubfor.me

Don't forget to share your location when prompted. On Android, a browser settings switch may need to be flipped.
Despite fears, NSA revelations helping U.S. tech industry
Unless I'm not understanding correctly, I think you misspelled £60
Thwarting the security state's ambitions has much greater risks than plunking down some money for a "fantasy phone"....
I give up on hackathons. The last one I went to -- the winners presented a power point slide and won. They didn't even make anything. They were just there for marketing their startup, and even brought like 10 team members on stage. And this was a really big hackathon too. 200+ competitors. Such a shame.
At least native app forms don't look so much like the authentic website. Harder to phish, but still possible I suppose.
Exception Notification v4.0.1 has just been released
Exception Notification v4.0.1 has just been released, with HipChat notifier and more great stuff. Get it now! https://rubygems.org/gems/exception_notification/versions/4.0.1
>I'm not sure, but I think that C and C++ ecosystem has at least the same amount of libraries available as Java.

Uh, no. Not for the kind of applications and systems that get built these days.
The first video I remember in this style was "The Website Is Down".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_Kfjo3VjU
Did you complain?
Counterintuitive lessons about people
"I have one small piece of constructive feedback: your use of commas was a little confusing at times, and it slowed down my reading.

Commas can be tricky, and I sometimes struggle with them as well."

I'm not saying you're wrong. Yes the sentences are complete but how self-sufficient are they? It's a sliding scale from no comma to comma to period. Some of these rules are not hard and fast. The art of writing is slowly evolving and to a degree it's a matter of taste. Some people love hyphens. In this case there's a strong enough correlation, conceptual link between the sentences such that the reader doesn't need a comma to read what you're saying in one breath. If it sounds good in one breath, that's a strong signal you don't need a comma. Knowing the basic rules is just the beginning. I'm dead serious.
> "What shines through is that you believe in segregating ethnicities because they just can't live peacefully together."

Some can, some can't. I do think that Democracy is more sensitive to national separatism than other forms of government. The great multiethnic empires of history weren't democratic. The Chinese have held together a multiethnic society for 3,000 years without holding a vote.

The Northern coalition in the Afghanistan civil war was composed of many ethnic groups fighting together against the Pashtun south. There is enough common ground between the groups of the north that a two state solution may suffice.

Nationalism is a powerful force that has great appeal to human psychology. Every successful multi-ethnic, multi-religious, or multi-lingual empire has to address it. Even the Canadians have struck an uneasy balance between the French speaking Quebecois and the rest of the country. Separation was a close thing.

And nationalism doesn't skip Europe. Try to find Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia on a map. And soon Spain might be joining them in the historical deadpool if the Catalan independence movement gets its way.
I never see this word anywhere but here

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=conflate&start...
They might use it to train for urban combat.
The biggest problem I see here is that many companies keep their bug-lists to themselves, and actively do not wish to publish them in an externally visible fashion.

Open source projects benefit from having a public bug-tracker, but commercial entities like to pretend their software is bug-free and so they do not.

I wish you luck.
There were search engines before Google came along. Lycos (1994) and Alta Vista (1995) existed at the time this article was written.
The issue of ethnicity will still rear its ugly head from time to time. Take Mali as the latest example. The Tuareg rebellion didn't come from nowhere.

The US went through some real nasty war to live together. Regarding India, check out Pakistan. Australia has some really dark history. For Germany, check out the holocaust.
You can't see any menus, any content, anything but a login page.
A 3.8 megaton H-bomb exploding at ground level would have created a lot of fallout - most tests were careful to explode high yield weapons high enough that fall out wouldn't be a problem.

Where tests of large H-bombs were done at ground level there were huge amounts of fallout created. However, these tests were usually in very remote places with nobody around in the few hundred miles downwind. However, there were still serious problems with fallout:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
On the one hand, I can understand all the complaints here that traveling makes hard work since you often have to forego all the creature comforts you have become accostumed to, and might rely on to a large degree in order to be productive.

On the other hand, programmers are notorious for their binge-coding-marathons, living off less-than-optimal nutrition and little sleep. I can imagine that this type of person could sustain to have a few bumpy days when settling into a new location (of course, even if one can manage to sustain some binge-coding now and then does not mean that you can do it often. So I guess you still might have to find a comfortable setup and routine while away from home, eventually).
I agree with you, but I am not looking forward to the day when we see high-schoolers run around selling chocolate bars with "100% of profits go to Watsi" as the selling point, and then sending more than half of that money to some overpriced "run-your-own-fundraiser" chocolate middlemen.
A lot of things that people are writing about the future of technology today will probably seem equally ridiculous in 17 years.
If the question of what it's like to be a plant is the most egregiously pointless thing a school of philosophy has ever considered, I'd say they're doing pretty good. Apparently the book being reviewed isn't terribly good -- maybe it needs to be approached from the direction of fiction, like Watership Down but with plants.
I do not believe Afghanistan can remain one country unless outsiders keep the balance of power through direct intervention or heavy arms subsidies. My reasoning is that they were still fighting a civil war when the USA invaded.
I think Go is in a bit of a chicken-egg problem right now w.r.t. crypto. I recall one of the core devs saying you shouldn't use it for anything where security really matters, because their implementation hasn't really had the tires kicked. The tires probably won't be kicked as much with that sort of suggestion though either.
By the time it's really obvious most people will already be plugged into the Google Matrix with no recollection of anything :)
Read the comments in the article! Ben participates and argues with people - quite fascinating.
Isn't Murphy's book more up to date and comprehensive as a reference?

Edit: Andrew Ng's Coursera course is CS229A (http://cs229a.stanford.edu/), not really watered down.
I'm not sure if I believe this, but the US argument for retaining the triad is this:

We need to at least retain the land ICBM because they are responsible for most of the aim points for an enemy counter force strike. They are basically the size of several states, and sink hundreds or thousands of missiles, making a first strike implausible for anyone except the Russians.

With the SSBN force, they are pretty safe while at sea, but supported from two bases, each of which could be destroyed by a single missile. If you had 10 weapons, you could basically take out all long term US strategic forces, except for at-sea SSBN, if you got rid of the land ICBMs. The submarines would then be in a horrible position of "use them or lose them."

I think you could accomplish this by keeping the entire force on lower alert, which has largely been the case since the fall of the USSR.
can you decode back whitespace-encoded code to its original readable form ?
St. George, UT, downwind of the Yucca Flats test site, had a markedly increased cancer rate among the people who lived there at the time. A friend's aunt had her thyroid removed as a teenager, presumably consequent to fallout exposure from nuclear weapons testing. (Naturally, the government made her and her family agree never to say, or even speculate aloud about why it was done when they paid for the surgery...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George,_Utah#Nuclear_conta...
Which language would you have preferred? Most other languages where such bugs would be handleded by the language tend to be a lot slower. (I'm saying that as a Perl developer who occasionally has to write C because Perl won't cut it for a decent algorithm.)
Data Mining and Analysis: Mining across 45 million names.
Pretty much agree with most of what you say above but this:

"Many people have little difficulty opening up their laptop and forgetting the rest of the world for an 8 hour stretch"

I haven't come across anybody who can in-the-zone code a straight 8 hour stretch during the daytime (nights are obviously very different). I'd love to hear from people who've managed to do this.
You mean like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_atomic_experiments#Afte...
That mac clock screensaver everyone asks about.
I had a whole bunch of stuff that I typed but then I realized it all comes down to this: You're demanding that everyone be entertaining but forgetting that listening is a form of entertainment too.

So, please don't do what you're advocating, humans have not fundamentally changed; you're going to hurt people.

...

Also, dismissing things because they're old is going to ill-serve you, especially as a technologist.
Excessive travel is terrible for the environment. You can easily generate many times the amount of carbon dioxide you would emit by driving for a year, simply by taking a long plane flight or two.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest-...

Travel is nice, but not when you do it just to brag about having gone to X countries in Y days. Then it just becomes a status thing, and is, as the author notes, "kind of douchey." The internet, good news sources, and documentaries can broaden your horizons even without leaving the house.
Then I should stop using 'eh' on account of me not being Canadian, eh?
They're no more secure, but from a certain perspective they're more honest. I suspect there's a decent number of users that will never consider that the app could trivially get their password if the login screen looks like the website's login screen, but would if it looks like the app.
How to Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree
I've been talking with Semantics3 about using their API to give more results in a Google Glass shopping comparison hack I did recently:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f9fh6vq6zs

It does look good and they've been very responsive. Some other APIs I've seen, though:
http://www.scandit.com/
http://www.simpleupc.com/
https://developer.getinvisiblehand.com/
http://prosperent.com/
http://www.retailigence.com/

Some other APIs I've used are ShopSense ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwlABP0z_ms ) and Gilt ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYprO-9rrmQ ), although those are fashion and home. Others have mentioned using the Sears API.
There are many US military families who receive SNAP benefits.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/food-stamps-militar...
You realize [that] you just re-invented the Language Log, amirite ?
Major news outlets have turned gaming social sites into a huge business - years ago it was revealed HuffPo A/B tested their headlines based on how much traffic they pull. These days I suspect that's entirely standard but even if the tech rags are still lagging behind you can see them desperately pandering for pageviews pretty transparently - like Ars syndicating StackOverflow, or the sheer volume of viral-hit-or-miss garbage that AOL's giant content farm spews out across their network (eg 39 x iPhone 5c/s articles between just TechCrunch and Engadget since being announced!).

Business Insider uses Optimizely to optimize the stream of pure shit they emit.
Tested this on vanilla Win8. Swiping from "beyond" the right edge of the trackpad to ~1cm left from the right edge opens the Charms menu (same thing as Win+C shortcut or doing the same gesture on the touchscreen). Similar results (app switching) happen when swiping from the left edge.

This is a built-in Win8 feature, not a custom driver feature. The gesture recognition is quite decent though, so I've never had these gestures activate accidentally.
Be the best?
What do you think about being "the best one" in your field?
I noticed this: I don't start things because I know there is someone else who comes up with a better approach (oh, does the idea exists? search on github, find a repo, stop investigating). - think what you want about this perfectionist all-or-nothing, but
please comment some cases where you did exactly the same so I can feel a bit better ;)

link: lifestoogood.net/why-you-dont-have-to-be-the-best/
Noted :)

Draws you in by sounding like a nice steak...
Ad hominem https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=ad+hominem&sta...
I have a feeling, usage of this phrase is inversely proportional to the poster's age. I don't think I see this as much on Slashdot, but I do see it a whole lot on /r/programming[1]

[1] Completely subjective assessment.
True, but pretty much a tautology.

Zambia has been growing at 6+ % for 6-7 years, raised a massively oversubscribed bond issuance to invest in infrastructure, and a Transparency International corruption perception index score just shy of Italy's.

All of the things you mention are relevant, but things are changing more quickly than you would expect.
Mandatory Star Trek clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPBzj90Su8A
That TOS is worth $10 at least, made me chuckle. $100 is a little steep though!
Thank you for linking this. English is a second language to me, and reading that list i found i've been following those rules a lot and have been getting grumpy about people who didn't and made it difficult to understand them. Now i can point those people at that essay.
Ad hominems make me a mad hominem.
Ain't It Time To Say Goodbye To Angie's List?
I fly almost every week and, honestly, I get a lot more work done those weekends I stay in one place. Even ordering cars ahead of time you aren't going to get as much coding done when you are hoping in planes and out of cars and waiting for departures, or arranging the next week's hotel stay or other stuff.
I really liked your talk. Thanks so much for your work in helping to nurture hackathons.
Why do some monkeys like to climb to the tallest branch to make the most noise?

At best, you can only be the best for a short moment. What will you do with yourself after that moment?

I agree with your post, it is not that important. It is just the need to be the highest monkey in the tree.
In my previous comment I mentioned that the colonizers first destroyed the existing structures, so if the Europeans first hadn't colonized the continent, then there couldn't have existed any bad transition _from_ colonialism either.

In other words, the first sin was to colonize the continent in the first place, destroy existing civil structures, and exploit the land and the population as they did. The second sin was to very abruptly abandon them and leave them without even the structures that had replace the original ones.

In current Iraq and Afghanistan the US at least try to make sure that there is some kind of stable regime before they leave. Of course it might have been better to not invade in the first place, but since they did, it is their responsibility to try to make sure that some kind of civilian society have a chance when they leave.
Unless Chris Fisher (cf21) was the original registrant, I imagine it cost him quite a bit to buy this domain. He's probably just trying to recoup the potentially crazy amount he spent on it.
This isn't really in the spirit of what you're trying to do, but you can set the --date of the commit, or even amend the commit after the fact if you haven't pushed.
I absolutely agree we should be talking about it.

I found the line about "stinking up the place with her pork dumplings" a little over-the-top and unrealistic. I don't think I knew anyone in school who would have said something like that, though I'm sure people talk like that somewhere.

The stereotype about studying more than average is something I've heard plenty of people say about Asian students. Being a stereotype, it obviously cannot be 100% true, but there are decent reasons it might be partially true. For example, international students may have more at stake in getting an American education. And of course cultural differences in parenting that are a cliche to mention at this point.

I disagree with the other commenter that the protagonist (if you can really call the unsympathetic main character that) dismissed the racist remark. He seemed to agree, though the character was sort of sycophantic -- I can easily imagine him agreeing with everything she said just to please her.

Finally, yes, negative attitudes toward studying are extremely common in college. There's plenty of variation between schools and within schools (as suggested by the character's remark), but the idea that teenagers are lazy about schoolwork is ubiquitous in pop culture. I'm surprised that you're surprised.
Get you@microsoft.com email for a limited time only.

$10

Pay me via Paypal.

Anyone? :)
"Technology is hard, let's go shopping?"
Zambia was a relatively wealthy place in Africa around independence, but the economy relied almost exclusively on copper, which is one of the most volatile commodities around. The pseudo-socialist government led by Kaunda helped unify the country but also drove the economy into the ground by providing massive subsidies all around and failing to create institutions to support long-term growth. The economy declined massively through 70s and 80s. Impending bankruptcy and structural adjustment programmes forced the government to pull back support, and then people protested and rioted to bring down the government and introduce multi-party democracy. The rebuilding process has been continuing (the first democratic handover of power happened a few years ago) and copper prices have been great, led by incredible demand from China.

The politics isn't perfect and economic diversification from mining is still only in it's infancy, but the trends are pointing in the right direction.
"comparatively little concern"? The US and USSR stopped above-ground testing in 1963 and there has not been an above-ground test anywhere on earth since 1980. 159 countries have ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty [1]. There has been a hell of a lot of concern over the past 68 years over nuclear detonations (and rightfully so).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_...
It's easier to live peacefully with people who are different than you when you are all relatively prosperous. Look at the rioting in France a couple years ago, or the rise of far-right politicians in many European countries that have become more ethnically diverse in recent decades. Additionally, race and ethnicity are still strong factors in the US. People don't kill one another as often in wealthy countries because the rule of law is stronger and there is more to lose, but the divisions exist.

Regarding India, my understanding is that Indian states have a great deal of autonomy, but I'm certainly no expert.
I've seen no shortage of uncontested bad and outright incorrect advice given on this site. We mustn't be so quick to trust the discussion here as perfect, especially given the growth over the past months.
A golang multiarmed bandit
I've been to a few hackathons but I've never really enjoyed any of them so I decided to run my own a few months ago.

Some things I didn't like:

* Big prizes encourage sucking up to sponsors

* Crappy work environments (plastic tables and folding chairs)

* No camaraderie between participants and teams

So I decided to run my own. My idea of a good hackathon was just a bunch of geeks in a room building cool stuff for a day. I didn't care about commercial viability or any business concerns, I just wanted to see people have fun building something neat.

* 8 hours on a Saturday, not overnight. This does lead to smaller projects but also brings in more people who don't want to spend the night.

* Have everyone introduce themselves at the start and talk a bit about what they want to work on. I only had 24 participants, this wouldn't scale to larger events.

* Keep everyone in one room so everyone knows what everyone else is working on.

* Keep the prizes small. While I had a sponsor, I capped the prizes at $50.

* Don't allow the sponsors to run the event. I let them give a five minute pitch about their product and put their logos on the website but I didn't give them control over prize categories or let them bother the participants during the event.

* Keep prize categories vague so that participants don't build for the prize. This is easier when the prizes aren't worth much anyways.

* Since the prizes were so small, I didn't mind if people worked on something they'd already started on prior to the event.

Overall, I think my event went pretty well. I charged $10 to get in which barely covered the T-Shirts, my venue was a coworking space I use so I didn't have to pay for that (and they paid for the pizza) and my sole sponsor (thanks BazaarVoice!) paid for the prizes and a keg. The dev evangelist they sent did a pretty good job and even worked on some code himself.

None of what was built was commercially viable in any way but that wasn't the point: people had fun building cool projects and that was my only goal for the day.

Some of the projects:

* A Lego Mindstorm robot that played the drums (one of the participants brought his son, this was their project)
* A MakeyMakey project that used pizza crust and a keychain as input devices (seriously)
* A Raspberry Pi based SNES emulator complete with HDMI output
* Voice-controlled lighting
* An Arduino-based step sequencer
* A virtual world simulator
* A naive chess AI in Scala

Personally, I thought it went really well. No, it didn't make any money (in fact I lost money since the shirts cost more than I expected) and no one was able to pitch their startup but that wasn't the point. People had fun. If you're hackathon is oriented towards anything else, don't expect the participants to have a good time.

shameless plug: If you're near San Antonio and this sounds like an event you want to go to, we're holding another one sometime soon, probably December. Email is in my profile if you want to get on the mailing list.
Autocompletion: Can we reduce a web form to just one text box?
As web designers we have learnt to strip out the unnecessary elements.
We know that any simplification reduces cognitive overhead.
But can autocompletion be implemented in an incremental way so that filling a form becomes like writing one's intention.

I would like to have a cup of tea/coffee...

enjoy
L
So you are saying it's not a real effect that is observed? That's a surprising statement to me.
I travelled and worked for over 3 years with 1 month at a time. After working on my time management skills I found that it did not decrease my productivity that significantly (maybe 10% reduction?). This is mostly from things that you cannot get when traveling for example: Multiple big screen monitors, regularly stocked fridge with easy to eat food, extra time taken to find locations to eat and wash your clothes etc.

This is assuming you're switching locations every 1-2 months. If you move locations every week it's a huge drain in productivity as it takes time to get set up and to travel etc.

Have now fixed in one place just because I have a baby, but otherwise would be possible to keep traveling.

I think a bigger problem of constant travel is the lack of a regular community.