skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an idealistic view of things. What's really happening is that human beings banded together to protect their mutual interests on multiple, fractal levels on the way up. Individuals formed families, which formed communities, which formed towns and neighborhoods and cities, all the way up to nation-states. The difference is, there's no stable mechanism, other than humanitarian good feelings, for the people of the United States and the people of Pakistan to respect each other's mutual interests, so they pursue their interests in opposition to one another.
I'm not saying linux can't be compiled for ARM. I'm saying it's easy for Apple to just declare all new hardware that runs OSX is now ARM. It's not possible (or remotely desirable) for Linus to one day say, that's it, ARM only.
Making Friends and Increasing Business Contacts is Easy
I'd say if you can work through LearnPythonTheHardWay you're good to go. It also includes some basics about creating a site in Python through a fork of web.py.

I would advise you to read up on a few Python specifics like WSGI. You won't directly need it in Django but it's useful to understand what its purpose is.

The nice thing about Django is that since 'magic removal' most of Django is pure Python with some cool meta tricks on top of it. A few of those will confuse you a bit at first but once you get them it's awesome.

If you don't feel comfortable digging into Django just yet start out with Flask (or bottle or web.py or...). It has a routing system and a template engine but doesn't bundle an ORM by default so you can start out with building something simple and chuck in the ORM when you need it.
I assume this is the source code? https://github.com/joemellin/nReduce
> I kept reading, but half-way through, I skipped portions of it.

If you're going to take the time to write such a long essay disagreeing with someone, the very least you should bother to do is read what they wrote.

You're less likely to make a fool of yourself that way.

> The OP says it is easy to take Thoreau out of context, because he is so quotable, yet continues to do this very thing!

See, there you go. If you'd read the talk, you'd understand how silly you sound. I'll reduce it down for you:

Walden is a layered work. You can't just go in and strip-mine it for a bunch of Tim Ferriss-style life hacks, or inspirational quotes, without missing the entire point of the book.

Since we have limited time, though, I've gone and picked out some Tim Ferriss-style lifehacks and inspirational quotes, which I will present as a set of bullet points.

Can you see the joke?
Good idea. Anyone want to take the opensource code, launch a new site, and fix the check-in day?
Ok, I have to say this: there are too many people out there holding themselves out as designers, and truly good ones are very hard to find. I have spent thousands over the years on design I never used and have spent thousands more on items that were usable, but sub-optimal (i.e. I settled).

Portfolios aren't enough. Conversations aren't enough. And, the standard payment plans of a third up-front leaves the client holding the bag if the designer can't deliver. It comes down to whether the designer can understand what the client likes, add his/her experience, design principles, creativity, artistic ability, etc., then execute in a way that is compelling and professional. But, frequently you don't know if the designer can truly do this until you have committed and get that initial revision.

Here's how it goes: After the initial revision, you then give feedback and the designer begins to iterate, frequently getting further and further away. From there, it devolves into a frustrated designer who then puts the onus on the client to tell him/her exactly what he wants. This means the client is now effectively designing and the designer is just putting the pixels together in Photoshop. Game over. Of course the client doesn't know what he is doing or how it will look ("maybe if you move this over there" or similar is frequently heard). But, the designer then takes the position that "this is what you asked for."

I have seen some variation of this happen far too many times, and not just with my own projects. It seems to be the rule, and not the exception. The designer either gets it or not, and too many don't.

So, something needed to change about the process or otherwise, and I think that is the entire impetus behind these contests. Maybe they are not perfect and have their own downside, but they shift the risk squarely to the designers' side. Too much? I don't know. But, sites like 99designs are a market-based solution to a real pain experienced by clients in the design space. Think about that: It is not just price. It is the total experience and the risk profile on the client side.

If more designers were taking better care of their clients (as you may well be doing), I would have no interest in seeking such alternatives.
I think replacing the traditional 4-year college with MooCs would be really tough, but at the same time there's a lot of value in them. Giving the common person access to education from some of the best schools in the country is really terrific. The fact that so many world-renowned universities have participated at Coursera and edX says to me those institutions see value in the endeavor. In fact, some of those top-notch institutions are not only participating but leading the effort. E.g., Stanford at Coursera and MIT/Harvard/Berkeley at edX. The other day I read an interview(can't find the link now) with Daphne Koller, one of Coursera's founders. At the end she says that much of what is written about MooCs tends to be hyperbolic one way or another.
When I was going through a dark period financially and emotionally, I specifically looked for life insurance policies that did not exclude suicide and had only a two year exclusion period. They do indeed exist in the US; I hold such a term life policy at the moment.
From Paths to Sandboxes
I think its a little naive to think that users wouldn't jump to another network, if they started to charge. I think what mobile has proven is that the micro social networks are easy to start and can get big fast because of people reluctance to stick with a single solution.
Yeah, as I said, it wouldn't be ideal. Valve would pretty much have to change the whole interface to make it more controller friendly.
That sounds like such a scam, the wording is the same as every "With these easy steps, you'll feel better and be more fit!" program I've encountered.

Not saying it is a scam, but I'm weary of clicking through.
What's the point of this? Visualizations usually have a goal to display some data or relationships/connections in a useful way.
The Steam controller gives up the physical buttons platformer games are designed for in order to provide higher resolution input for other genres, such as FPS's. This review is therefore looking at one of the Steam controllers weak points, so a positive verdict on a prototype is very encouraging.

Another interesting feature of these touchpads is that they may prove more durable than traditional joysticks. Even though I don't game much these days, I've still managed to wear out the sticks on one Xbox360 controller and the D-Pad on another. If the clicking mechanics on the Steam controller pads are made bomber, they should be very durable!
They're easy to find, though -- I'm not a smoker or, uh, e-smoker, but I'm in rural central France, and there's an entire shop that seems to be dedicated to e-cigarettes in the closest major town (population 7K or so).

The name "vaping" is something of a shame, though, for something that's a much less harmful alternative for smokers -- it sounds to me like a combination of "vapid" and "gaping".
> "It works by testing whether each integer is divisible by any smaller integer, apart from itself and 1. This is similar in principle to the Sieve of Eratosthenes."

How is this anything close the the Sieve? The Sieve is forward looking eliminating number that are multiples of a found prime, forward looking and eliminating. This, from the description, is just the classic prime test of looking at all smaller numbers to find divisors.
How so? Switching is just an URL away...
While I agree, I think the bigger aspect of maturity is people understand their own usage. In the beginning it was cool to pay a dollar to try a new app. Now people have learned their lesson and understand the value these apps are quickly fleeting. They will open an app maybe 1 or 2 times and never find it useful again. This goes for games as well.
All of these are also apps for businesses, not casual entertainment for consumers. Also, they are mainly delivered via web, not Apple or Google app stores, which makes it possible to offer a time-limited free trial with no free plan.

I'd hypothesise that both of these are more important factors than being started in 2003 vs 2013.

For a freelancer, $100/month is a good deal if it allows you to get a few more billable hours per month. For a larger established business, $500/month is pocket change that nobody will even notice (and the customer who signs up isn't even spending their own money).
Notice to startups: You are doing data science wrong
Oh Gosh, that was all done in Inkspace? Pretty impressive, I'll have to check that program out.
Hard to say, until someone gets indicted. The courts in the USA have traditionally limited themselves to letting someone with "standing" sue over a particular law, or letting law enforcement charge someone. There's no real way to pre-emptively say "illegal" on some law or action.

If one branch of the Federal Government doesn't prosecute members of another branch, we've got no way to say.
What is your greatest tech failure?
app? web-app? why did it fail? what did you learn?
Persistence of a Neophyte
And a couple of alternatives:

https://www.debuggex.com/

(for Python flavor:

https://www.debuggex.com/?flavor=python )

and one more Python + regex:

http://www.pyregex.com/
The statement you are bizarrely quoting quite clearly does not equate dependency injection with module systems.

Again, read HN guidelines, your account is quite new and it's very obvious you haven't done so yet.
I was working on mobile app that helped with spaced repetition as a side project. I built a pretty good looking user interface but ran out of time to work on it between school and my company. If anybody is excited about spaced repetition and wants to join me on my side project, I'd love to try to make a little bit of extra time to get it live. I really wish that the application already existed - my midterms would be going much, much better :)

Email me at sean@einstein.com
100% of what? The parameter value space?
It doesn't make you inventor of the concept; it makes you inventor of the improvement.
Flexible self-control
I really like the story. I recognise it, partially.

Downvoting you because your link is to unrelated "Patriarchy 101" nonsense.
This was not at all what I was expecting from the title. I thought I was going to read an article about the importance of taking one day a week to not write any code. I'm sure that between startups, work, side projects, etc. some of us are coding every day on something or other.

As someone who often works alone, one of the best things I've done is to find someone else to share code, problems, and ideas with on a regular basis, even though we're not working on the same projects. It's helped me grow as a developer, has improved my mood, and has also just been an enjoyable.

But I still really do think it is important to make sure there's one day a week where you don't touch anything related to work or code.
Yep entirely in inkcsape.

It's a fantastic program even to a developer type like me, it also has really really good PDF import which is useful sometimes :).
Funny thing - I still buy all my mobile apps from iTunes and Google Play on the desktop. Old habits die hard.
Describing a hack that uses a varying number of bytes for different characters as elegant makes me cringe. However, I have no better proposition.
as someone who launched a marketing firm on the basis of copywriting I'm going to give you a spot or two of advice.

it's a service that's one of the first to cut when expenditure budgets get tightened.

the best skill you can develop is the ability to quickly write (and justify) scalable copy.

you'll get a lot more mileage out of just submitting copy corrections to established entities.
> I worry that I'm doing the equivalent of writing pointless unit tests sometimes.

Unit tests never go away, though. Eventually a card will get scheduled for years out, and it takes a trivial amount of time to review, so it shouldn't be a problem. I'd imagine.
It's already the case with some stuff from the '90s: there was important stuff announced and discussed on CompuServe and AOL forums that has not been publicly archived. There are some personal archives out there, but they are pretty spotty. Often the only surviving (or at least accessible) record comes in the form of occasional quotes in other venues, like an academic paper from the 1990s that included a blockquote and a citation to a now-unreachable network address.
I might be interested in helping with something like that. Shoot me an email offline if you'd like.

Would it be worth setting up a quick Google Group or something, for interested parties to communicate with each other?
UTF-32?
It's not really a 'hack', but making it backward compatible with ASCII while maintaining a lot of other desirable properties is quite elegant.

A lot of people complain about not being able to easily or programmatically manipulate UTF-8 strings on a character-by-character basis, like it's a typical programmers daily business to go messing with natural language, but I've never seen the great loss.
Don't confuse the Ripple payment network with ripples, its native currency. You can use the payment network to transact in currencies like dollars and Euros.
Hm, I think I recall some install of something that had only dash by default, but I could easily be misremembering. Regardless it has made bash slightly less central, and there are probably other examples of GNU code being displaced.
I thought 7 bits were used in ASCII because terminals needed the 8th as a parity bit, not because machines dealt much in 7bit entities.
You don't even have to work for a social media company to see the "community building" pressure; any modern, web-friendly, "agile" firm is trying to get its employees to invest themselves into the company. If you are part of the community, its harder to switch jobs.
Cheaper with bitcoin; group buying takes on eGifter gift cards.
They had a great team. I think it may have been too distributed. If they selected groups in one location and connected them with the right people it'd be interesting.
assuming that space traveler had the incredible amount of energy to accelerate long periods of time, interstellar medium would be the limiting factor. There would be upper limit (say 90-99% of the speed of the light) and after that particles, molecules and dust in the space would bee too energetic for the space ship to stay intact.
Scholar Says He’s Found New Photo of Lincoln at Gettysburg
Seems perfectly sensible to me. Why should characters be of fixed size?
Brady Haran's videos are in general very good. All of his videos are in this style, concentrated on a single topic and in general shorter than ten minutes. I especially like the SixtySymbols channel (Physics and Astronomy). He seems to have a talent for asking the right questions and/or finding the right people to answer his questions.
One really cool property of UTF-8 I never realized before is that a decoder can easily align to the start of a code word: every byte that has '10' in bits7,6 is not the beginning of a code. That's really useful if you want to randomly seek in a text without decoding everything in between.

Between that and backwards compatibility with ASCII, I'd say it's a pretty neat hack.
Engineering challenges at Stripe
I dropped you an email but just in case http://i.imgur.com/k6elBCU.png
Well no, Torvalds had a kernel and all the tools GNU had created.

And Linux is (entirely legitimately) the name of the kernel - the dispute[1] is over the name of systems running a bunch of GNU code on top of a Linux kernel.

[1]: Elsewhere it has been contended that RMS has pushed for the name to apply to the kernel itself as well. I don't believe that was ever the case (though will certainly update my beliefs if presented with evidence) but am far more confident that it is not his current position.
I went a really mediocre, boring restaurant yesterday that had a score of 98. Didn't change my mind on it.
The part where the author picks out a subset of "unforgivable" violations is arbitrary and unsupported. It's like "what sounds the grossest" with a bunch of Data Science Analysis layered on top.. Because boy do we nerds love our charts-n-graphs. But the assumptions are faulty.

Improper storage and refrigeration (not on the "unforgivable" list) are undoubtably some of the biggest causes of food borne illness.
For entrepreneurial success you need to deliver something many people (or a few people who will pay a lot) want.. in the way they want it.. when they want it. If you figure out what that thing is, then it's all about doing it (or presenting it) well enough for them to want it, then getting it to them. There is no entrepreneurial success if you don't deliver what they want.

1. Find out what they want.

2. Find a way to get/make it at a cheaper price than you'll charge for it.

3. Ensure that the product is good enough to be desired.

4. Get the product in front of those people that want it.

5. Sell, sell, sell.

5a. If the product is good enough, then you will mainly be eliminating fear, uncertainty, and doubt, because the product will sell itself.

6. Profit.
This is pretty mind blowing. Computation without ever incrementing the program counter.

Link to the code by the same guys: https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc
Take a look at http://fent.github.io/randexp.js/ if you want something that will do this
Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Most folks still haven't figured out the privacy and security implications of using social networks.
Simple REST API using Express Node.JS framework
Science Historian James Burke's brilliant dConstruct talk
Amazon Brings HTML5 Mobile Web Apps To Its Android Appstore
> Edit 2: I knew that Blackberry was dead the day my friend walked into my office and demoed an SSH client on his iPhone for managing his servers remotely.

That's odd he would make such a fuss about an SSH client on his iPhone, coming from a Blackberry. I had SSH on my Blackberry Curve, though it wasn't in their marketplace and you had to seek it out via a simple Google Search.

After later attempting to manage servers remotely on Android (even with Swype), it couldn't beat having a real keyboard to do it with like I had on my Blackberry. Though I chose to have a more modern phone lacking a physical keyboard for other reasons than how useful the SSH client is without it.

> Of course, his phone was jailbroken to do this, but nobody even wanted to jailbreak a blackberry.

There really wasn't a need as you could sideload your own apps in the same way you do basically on Android. Even the Blackberry SSH client worked without such things. There was an awesome Zelda clone I would play in the same way on my old Blackberry (which was basically the only noteworthy game I ever saw on a Blackberry).

The iPhone was revolutionary in many ways, but those two points are a bit over-hyped and a tad disingenuous.
thanks daenney, can you recommend any project-based ebook out there that I can buy?

I tried searching but everything I found seems to be outdated.
I would be interestd in something along the lines of
Practical Django Projects by James Bennet (apress)
How to manually install Chrome Extensions Outside the Web Store
> switching an OS is very likely not enough to be disruptive

You're right. It's not disruptive at all, especially if all your core services (address book, calendar, etc.) are stored with a platform independent cloud service (read as: everything outside of iCloud, koff koff). Switching these days usually involves a short, tedious process of entering in all your passwords.
Consider that it's

1. completely backwards-compatible with ASCII

2. you can always tell if you're reading a part of a multibyte character or not, meaning that you can tell if you're reading a message that was cut in some random point and can tell how many bytes to drop before reaching the first start of a character

3. endian-agnostic due to being specified as a byte stream

4. contains no null bytes, so it can fit in any normal C string

Point 1 is absolutely vital for backwards-compatibility and 2 makes it better than a lot of other multibyte encodings. Consider for instance chopping one byte off the start of a ucs2-encoded string - you'll get complete garbage. And 3 means you don't get strange endian-related errors.

It's a robust, resilient encoding that's a drop-in replacement for ASCII and needs no special support from many utilities - tail and head for instance can work with UTF8 text as if it's plain ASCII, just looking for a \n byte and chopping the input in lines.

So yes, I do think it's elegant. It may not be the simplest possible encoding for unicode, but it's extremely practical.
You say that like having an OS level dev kit was never part of the plan. So your position is they whipped together a dev kit in 8 months on the shocking revelation that programmers would want to develop on the device itself?

No, what they did was prioritize their resources and release something that was good enough, and build on it. Release and iterate. They knew the first most important thing to get right was the web browsing experience which included a javascript engine. That is a user level experience that will sell more phones. They decided the Devs could wait, oh and what do you know the devs can still program the phone via the web interface so why not play that feature up -- 2 for 1 by focusing on the browser.

"A phone, an iPod, and a revolutionary new internet communicator." It as so important to the product it was in the lead. People had phones and ipods before, they had never had a fully functional mobile web browser.
This was actually one of the design goals of UTF-8. A decoder should be able to pick up a stream at any point and not lose a single valid codepoint.
Nationalism is at least partially rational: most wars aren't civil.
I liked nReduce, but I think a lot of the ideas could have used some feedback (including mine at the time), or early pivots, some were very obviously not that great

It might have been good to incorporate some sort of acceptance gateway or idea validation phase.

Maybe something like you create iterations of your landing page and the software auto A/B tests them for you. Once you have X signups for one you can join the others at the next stage. Video posts can also go on your home page to keep your fans informed.

They probably should have taken some small amount of money from users at some point also, even if just to keep the service going
Getting i-th char in O(1) is a nice thing to have.
I see you love wasting resources.
While the obvious analysis is that they were making a Blackberry competitor, wasn't Android really targeting deployment on hardware that could Windows Mobile? iirc, the first phones running Android were slight variants of Windows Mobile hardware, which happened to have the BB form factor.

And if this was the case, there were plenty of touch screen Windows Phones at the time. I think Android going touch would have been inevitable.

Having said that, if Apple didn't release the iPhone, the definition of touch on Google would probably have meant "with a stylus".
Why? 2.9% is almost a full 1% higher than what you can get otherwise. On top of 1sc's 1% transaction cost, you're looking at 4% just for processing!