skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congratulations to SO!! In addition to being a great resource for developers worldwide, I think the most powerful impact that it has made can be summed up by the following in the post:

"An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger"

This. The idea that you are able to help someone across the world in a matter of seconds is incredible. In case of SO, it applies to programming and technology but imagine if we had other SOs that did the same for poverty, hunger, education and world peace. Just a thought!!
With regard to (2), I think it's more like, "Don't go to school in one of the most expensive places to live on Earth." :P

(I go to school in Boston, and while I live closer to central Massachusetts, plenty of my cohorts who live around Boston don't seem to have any financial issues without doing an internship.)
Going viral is simple. You send X people to your site, and they on average send at least X+1.

For example, you link to your site on HN, and receive 100 visitors day one. It's a great service, and those 100 people share it with enough people to receive another 150 visitors the next day. Your new visitor traffic per day goes...

1. 100

2. 150

3. 225

4. 338

5. 506

6. 759

7. 1,139

8. 1,708

9. 2,563

10. 3,844

...

20. 221,683

Within a few weeks you're receiving a quarter million new visitors a day.

Now, if HN sends 100 visitors day one, and those users generate 80 new visitors day two, you get...

1. 100

2. 80

3. 64

4. 51

5. 41

6. 33

...

20. 1

Now you end up with only one visitor after three weeks.

In one case you're at the top of the world with the next big hit, and the other you have absolutely no traffic.

You see situation number two happen all the time. You get a spike of traffic and it fades away over the following week. As you can see above though, the difference in a spike of traffic fading away, or going through the roof isn't that large. We're not talking about one site being awful and the other being the best thing since sliced bread. We're talking about 100 people referring 80 people and 100 people referring 150 people. Not a huge difference in interest, but the traffic results can be staggering.
So right after I get a work visa in the US and start working and paying taxes I should get citizenship?
I'm confused. I've seen this a bunch of times, and I don't understand why Canonical submitted a patch to a video driver to "support" their Xmir window server. Why does a video driver need to have code in it to support a window server? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? Isn't the window server supposed to work on top of the video driver (and all the other hardware drivers)? What's going on?
> Amazing it is only 5 years old, it feels like it has been around forever

Indeed, it seems like every programming question I input on Google gives me a (helpful) StackOverflow post. It and Wikipedia are probably my top two most common results on Google.
> ... we are becoming enslaved by science and technology ...

The standard remedy to avoid enslavement by X is to learn how X works.

> ... so the rich elite and governments can control us better.

Education works for government too. You may not be interested in politics, but politics is certainly interested in you. The most powerful obstacles to a working democracy are people who think it's all a conspiracy beyond their understanding or control.

Meanwhile, in reality:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/yorktown.html

Quote: "The [Navy ship] Yorktown has been completely networked using Windows NT as part of the Navy’s 'SmartShip' program, to try and reduce the manpower requirements for large warships. However, because of an operator incorrectly entering a zero in an entry field, the system crashed and somehow corrupted the central database—as a result, the ship was dead in the water for two hours, and had to be towed back to port."

Wait, what? Someone types a zero into a database, as a result of which the system goes crazy and disables a U.S. Navy capital warship, rendering it inoperative and adrift at sea? This is your enslaving technology, your all-powerful technological cabal?
No, I mean the other Singapore.

Of course I fucking mean the former British empire trading post. Do you have a relevant point to make, or are you just desperate to show that you've heard of foreign countries?
The efficiencies that NFC brings are worth the possible security issues that exist and can be dealt with afterward.
Congrats to the Bump team! Would be interesting to see where the future leads with Bump & Google and how it integrates into Android!
I hate these in depth "Here are the 50 reasons that Detroit is bankrupt ..." that try to parse every speck of dust on the city payroll. Here's why Detroit is bankrupt: because anyone smart enough to get out left a long time ago. The schools are terrible, the crime is terrible, the racism is terrible, the infrastructure is terrible. Why would anyone willingly stay? It's like a sticking around Carthage after the ground has been salted. You can argue a thousand different reasons about why it's the way it is, but it doesn't change the facts on the ground. Smart people leave and don't pay taxes to keep the corrupt apparatus afloat.
Comparison between ConTeXt and other typesetting programs (2012)
>Anger spreads faster than joy on social networks.

News like this really pisses me off.
For the true Detroit experience, stay the weekend at the Motorcity Hotel and Casino.

It's just a few blocks outside of what is considered 'downtown' Detroit. It's not an overly fancy or even large hotel but it has the weirdest vibe to it, it's as if you're in this dystopian movie about the future where there's a 1:1000 difference between the haves, and the have nots.

Inside the hotel there's food, booze, gambling, and bright lights. As you leave the hotel you see security forces (hotel security as well as a fairly large presence by the Detroit PD). But once you're outside, that's it.

Barren wastelands. Empty city blocks, fields of grass and weathered concrete, and the ruins of entire neighborhoods. Exactly what you see when you Google 'Detroit slums'.

In the daytime you'll see people walking around like zombies, carrying grocery bags, walking between stores (despite what you read on the internet, there are grocery stores in Detroit). You'll see them talking to each other on the corner, sitting under trees, or hunched over on a curb.

They have nothing. They do nothing. There is nothing for any of these people to do. There's nowhere for them to work. There's nothing even for them to have. Everything is gone or destroyed.

At night time you won't see anything. Almost all of the streetlights in the city have been turned off, because Detroit can't pay the bill! The city is pitch black at night. You can drive around with the highbeams on. You can't see the roads, you have to make sure you don't run over anyone who's in the street, it's incredibly unsafe but it's just so dark it's unbelievable.

And then in the midst of the darkness you see the multi-colored lights of the hotel, and you know you're back to your version of Detroit. The police let you back in, you park your vehicle in the guarded garage, and you walk back to your room to eat $4 bags of M&M's and $5 bottles of water.

And once you think about how fucked up that is, you almost lose your appetite.
Have you ever tried FreeMind? Not an "outliner" like this, but a good way to organize content, and it's Java so it Runs Everywhere™
Google Acquires Bump
Great story, and some useful insights on the logistics of translation...but a couple of questions were raised for me:

1. How long does it usually take to launch a foreign language branch of Airbnb? Is the actual language (and its characteristics) the primary factor in the technical work involved?

2. I take it that the Japanese localized site was aimed at Japanese wanting to travel overseas...but Airbnb (US) was already handling foreigners-to-Japanese translations, right? What was the amount of Japanese text that had to be translated to English?
Docker tutorial: Master the Dockerfile syntax (Level 2)
That's a good point. I never really got the 'not relevant' bit. After all, if a question was worth asking it was worth answering (there is no such thing as a stupid question or an irrelevant one, there are stupid answers though. The closest thing to an irrelevant question (or a stupid one) is a question that wasn't asked...).

SO would not suffer unduly from letting these not relevant questions be asked and answered anyway. Relevant Questions are like beauty, they are in the eye of the beholder.
I think the analogy is useful, because the financial problem has some of same roots. That the federal government has more solutions available to it doesn't excuse following the same path. It's useful to to look at Detroit to try and avoid the problem, it's not useful to look at Detroit for solutions once it hits critical mass.
It's not likely to ever produce another massive category product hit like Stackoverflow. Such success requires very high levels of specialization and dedication (not to mention a category big enough to begin with; all of which are already dominated by very large competitors, eg cooking / recipes).

Why would cooking experts or financial pros be drawn to Stack Exchange? They won't be. They'll stick to sites dedicated to those things that possess a very narrow focus, where the quality of content is likely to be higher.

It was an interesting attempt on Stack's part to spread out, but who really thought the end result would be them taking over every category?

Just take a look at Personal Finance / Money. That's a huge category that is very lucrative. Yet they're getting a whopping 5 questions per day for a three year old site, and a mere 7,200 visits per day. Why? Because "money.stackexchange.com" can never be promoted properly as a brand, it can never carry any kind of reputation as a separate product. An average person isn't going to buy into the notion that that site possesses authority on personal financial matters.
That'll be a fancy MS Word-compatible editor with integrated diffing. The problem with using Git(hub) is that line delta change model - perfect for code - doesn't make much sense in the context of freeform English. I care about changes to words, sentences, and paragraphs. I need to see changes in-line, most of the time.

Draft (draft.io) has the right model, but I need a native app with local storage and, again, MS Word compatibility.
Concepts Lite: C++ Template Constraints (Sutton, Stroustrup, Dos Reis)
> As I've gotten further into the degree, I've realized that academic research is as plagued by corporate-style politics as any other venture. The fun started to die.

I've actually gone through precisely the same realization, but it hasn't ruined the fun for me. Namely, I seem to be an observer while the messy politics are played by the faculty members.

I entered graduate school with the intention to become a professor, but am now leaning more toward taking my chances in industry. But I'm happy with my destination being unknown for the moment. :-)
In the eternal wheel of IT nothing is ever new. NFC is just IRDA without line of site problems. As if that was the main user problem with IRDA LOL thats probably the only thing that wasn't broken with IRDA. Everything is playing out exactly the same way, as it always does.

I would be willing to bet, in the eternal rotation of the IT wheel, that the next revolution will be something very much like IRDA in your google glass glasses.

Of course it'll be hampered by incompatibility, relatively low uptake, unreliable software, insecurity, probably only supported by certain platforms, and probably an awful and difficult to use UI, so it'll die out. To be replaced by more or less identical short range RF "solution" (and guess how that will turn out?)

There's no reason short range IR or RF can't work at the hardware level. No reason a unified, generic, stable standard can't exist. Other than the whole, lack of need thing.

Look how well bluetooth and wifi work using basically the same technology... because they solved actual problems.
This story doesn't do a good job of explaining exactly how the drones are helping anyone in particular do anything in particular.

"So yeah, it seems like that would be kind of handy to have..." Well, yes, it does seem that way. Is it? Has it been?

It may be the case that gathering information is easier than putting that information to use, particularly if the organization that receives the information isn't designed, trained, or otherwise set up to act on (from the organization's point of view) random inputs like this.

It may also be the case that having lots of pictures of a raging river is actually a lot less useful than you'd at first suppose. You may be able to see that flooding has inundated a neighborhood, but it may be a lot harder to tell if the residents are safe or if they're in trouble, how many are in trouble, and what you could possibly do for them.

I think FEMA's threat that certain volunteer efforts would be met with arrest is unnecessary, mean-spirited, and tone-deaf. And according to the story, it didn't work, anyway.

But the vibe I'm seeing here - "OF COURSE the drones would be helpful" - seems to be more or less faith-based.

I'd guess a drone that would be super useful would be one that hauled a temporary cell site over a dead zone. People in trouble could just call for help directly. That would skip over quite a bit of slow photo interpretation, sticky judgement calls (where do we fly the surveillance drone next?) and other guesswork. That would create a network of human brains to tackle the problem together, using tools and techniques that are familiar to everyone.
No decent outliner on Linux? http://orgmode.org/ is by far the best i have seen so far, so could use outline-mode if you do not use any of the extra features. There is something similar to outline-mode for vim users if i remember correctly.
I suppose I am part of your Ph.D. 'attrition' statistic. It's less atrocious than you'd think.

I enrolled in Brown's Ph.D. CS computer program immediately after undergrad. In retrospect, I was too green to do proper due diligence to find the right fit with advisor and research area. The advisor relationship is extremely important. Within the first year I realized two things: 1) there was no way I'd be happy going deep with this particular research area and advisor for another 5-6 years, 2) I would complete my masters in the first year, fully paid for (with a research assistant "salary" on top) by being on the PhD track. I returned full-time to the company I co-founded while in undergrad after that first year.

No two PhD paths are the same, unlike with JD/MBA. Some folks come in and earn a master's along the way. Some come in with a master's. Some don't pass the (widely different depending on school) bars to advance to the Ph.D. candidate stage (I imagine there's a good bit of attrition here). Some don't find an advisor who can fund them. The requirement of contributing something novel to the body of research, no matter how long it takes, is a higher bar than completing coursework and projects. 6,7,8 years is a lot longer than 2-3.
And of course for the curious, no the moon was not 'skimming the surface of the earth' a million years ago as would be implied by a 'continual' increase of 3.8 cm/yr in the orbit.

The earth is not homogenous, and so the gravitational force experienced by the moon is not constant. This results in a transfer of angular momentum between the two, speeding up the moon slightly (and slowing the earth even more slightly as the transfer is proportional to mass)
Good news: Mobile Privacy Is on the Upswing
Jonah Berger at Wharton has done research on WoM and emotions that spread: "But content that evokes certain specific negative emotion, such as anger or anxiety, is also more viral." - https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/berger/
No, the customer emailed the CEO directly. https://twitter.com/Erin_Boudreau/status/379294594866741249
How we made Zoom on Mobile using CSS3 & JS
A few points:

1. My mentor is not the same person as my advisor. (I use the word "mentor" to describe a professor who is both my friend and someone whose advice I value deeply.)

2. My advisor is not the same person as the advisor I was assigned to when I entered graduate school.

But I agree with your main point: your advisor (and the way you receive your advisor) can play a big role in the level of misery of your graduate student years.
Is that a very difficult problem? I thought they just grab the location from the phone, send it to their service, and their service looks for other bumps in the physical and temporal vicinity. It's a rather clever solution, but not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring, unless there are some patents or tricky performance optimizations I'm missing.
Isn't that enough?

Well, yes, it can be. During my PhD studies I met a couple people who could be considered "lifers" who were clearly very happy doing graduate-level research work. Maybe you are one of them. Their optimal career path would be a cushy postdoc job so they continue to keep doing what they are doing but without paying tuition fees.

I'm sure you know, but for others reading, there are reasons why most people don't do this.

1. There is a strong psychological toll on doing original research. It's liberating and exciting, but also intensely frustrating and isolating. Writing papers, and their inevitable rejection, is a very disheartening venture that can't be accurately described without doing it.

2. If you're in the sciences, which I assume most people reading here are, you stand to make significantly more in industry research than post-doc research.

3. Research takes over your mind, you can't turn it off. When I was doing my PhD, I was essentially "on" all the time, it can never be a 9 to 5 job. Despite your best efforts, research will always have a toll on your family.

So if these things aren't a problem for you, then it certainly is enough. Research is a uniquely rewarding career path. But your mentor uses that line as a way of helping/warning others. You aren't the stereotypical PhD student, and PhD students are already skewed all the way down the spectrum of "normal". The majority of the population, and most PhD researchers, struggle with these problems. If you're not committed to it for the long-haul, which is what your mentor is alluding to, it's not worth doing it.

EDIT: Now I've done my PhD, people often ask me "Do you think I should do one?" and the unsatisfyingly true answer is "I don't know, I'm not you" (and, perhaps even worse, is that you aren't you when you finish the PhD from when you started, you change and grow a lot, which affects your viewpoint dramatically). That's another reason why your mentor has that saying, it's more easily digestible by those who are unsure.
The problem with your two-method suggestion is that it's usually not /me/ I'm concerned about. The problem is usually things like "I need to open this file from a synchronous context in a Windows Store App". The problem is that with Windows Store (where async is suppose to shine), async is the rule, not the exception

Also, two methods sharing the same code sounds absolutely horrible.
Note that some clock reads that appear to go through a file system actually don't on some architectures. On x86-64, there's a special page that's mapped read only for all processes. This page includes time data that is updated by the kernel. When you call the glibc syscall wrapper to get the time, it doesn't actually invoke a syscall; instead, it just reads the correct bit of data from that page. I don't know if that applies to nanosecond resolution clocks though....
For awhile, I've thought that the problem with Bump is that it requires that the other person shares the same app (although recently I discovered that you can ask the other person to browse to http://bu.mp). So I have been working on the side on an HTML5 mobile solution that allows sharing contact information and messages with people nearby by just asking them to go to a URL.

The site needs a big UI and workflow revamp (already worked out on paper) and won't scale right now (it just uses a single instance of Meteor and a MongoDB database and doesn't handle Internet-scale abuse.)

You can see the current iteration at http://www.near.im/.
Because the hardware and OS companies are working together on this, and the hardware doesn't ship until it works in its target OS. In Linux, volunteers are poking around blindly tryign to get the hardware to do what they ask while the hardware vendor has all the information and isn't sharing it.
No, but the Racket OO system is based on BETA's implementation of OO, and Racket has some actual users. There's definitely some interesting ideas there.

For example, `inner` being the opposite of super (e.g. call the subclasses implementation of this method). Some others, but I'm not sure I remember them (Augmentation?).
Lights Go Out for Yahoo Fantasy Football
This has nothing to do with tracking, it's the dashboard that won't support IE8.
Ask HN: Graphical OSS code editor for Linux?
I have tried to find a good general purpose open-source code editor for Linux, but am having difficulties finding one. Vim and Emacs are out. What graphical editors are there that you would give your vote for?

Features that I seek are:

* Syntax highlighting, Auto-indent, In-/deindent with tab, Tabs to spaces
* Code block visualization (and folding), Variable highlighting
* Changing of eol(crlf/lf/..) and encoding
* (Column mode editing), (Multiple views)
* Font selection
I will buy a 5S for the fingerprint sensor, as soon as its functionality gets exposed to LastPass, and assuming it's as secure as Apple says it is. Apple all but enforcing weak password security has made browsing on iOS unworkable for everything except quick Wikipedia lookups. It was to the point that I would have switched to Android otherwise.

As it is I'm skipping the iPad Mini and getting a Nexus. Unless Apple suddenly comes out with one tomorrow with both Retina and fingerprint sensor the Mini is useless for everything but as a Kindle reader.

I am less worried about the NSA having my fingerprint as I am about crackers getting my passwords. If I was worried about that I'd go all Snowden and keep my phone in the freezer. But if even one instance of fingerprint information leaking out of the box Apple's keeping it in on the CPU surfaces, I may never trust Apple with that information.
This. It's the only avenue that a competitor could use to subvert Stackoverflow. Make a copy of SO, but allow subjective questions, and make it easy for people who are trying to discuss them to migrate from SO to your site.
Also known as the internet. j/k

It's a great idea. What I'd love to see is a way for you to be able to check out physical books in ebook form, maybe by scanning their ISBN while you're browsing the stacks.
>> for new comers it's frustrating experience to have your questions closed because existing members like to taunt newbies.

Isn't that the entire internet?
> is it a natural distinct difference when talking about licenses, and when picking software licensed under one of the two types?

Of course there is. When I write some software project, of course I want it to be under a specific license, for example BSD. If I chose a BSD license I can't accept GPL patches because that means I can't chose what license I distribute my own software, I have to make it GPL.

As the author, I don't mind if GPL or commercial entities import my software. I am very happy if they do that, I want them to have the freedom to do so. However, I most certainly don't want myself to be forced to change my own license because I import some code. Then, I won't be able to give the freedom of choosing the way they use my software to other people anymore.
It was around when I started coding. So it literally seems like forever to me.

I have definitely hated the attitudes of a lot of people over there and also the unusual closing of questions, but its inarguable that this site is probably one of the most important things on the internet for programmers.