skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does beauty have to involve difficulty in reading? I mean, maybe great beauty does involve not communicating a lot of factual information clearly. Great art and even beautiful print magazines generally don't do this.

Having the text all across the page did not make the information very accessible to me.

And going from the huge light-blue banner to the gray and white was actually rather jarring. It took me a minute to decide I had to scroll down to the text rather than clicking a "next" button or something.

And icons looked nice but like most icons were more eye-pleasing than actually communicative.

I'm surprised some people find it beautiful but I'll file it under "once interface design made computers (barely) usable, designers decided they had to make them unusable again (but now beautiful)". It's the world of "satisficing".
Not on most projects, no. We are on my current project and the review tool is based on tasks, not commits and can review multiple commits in a single session if they are all related to the same task. Regardless, I am only ever reviewing the end state.
Steve Albini's letter to Nirvana
I've read about supposed benefits of nicotine a while ago and got myself an electronic cigarette. I have never smoked before.

Not sure if there are any mental benefits. I feel a bit more relaxed right after vaping. No ill effects whatsoever. I made a few week to month long breaks to see if there would be any addiction - there was none. I was able to stop at any time.

It's sort of like snacking for me, but without the calories. Definitely contributed to my weight loss.
They're so committed to security, they're making my ticket asking 'why was there a security token sent to my phone when I did not log in?' rot in whatever queue for a week now.
Or switch on the aircon, or play some music.
What I find interesting about RMS isn't that his productivity was suspect, but frankly that it just ended in the late 80's.

IIRC, RMS had developed pretty severe wrist pain by then, and was forced to dictate his code to assistants. Well, you can imagine how that went.
Note that there are also six button fighting pads that should be compatible with the Steam Machines too.

The one in particular that I find most interesting is the one for the upcoming Hyperkin RetroN5 -- it's a six button bluetooth controller with a microswitch based thumbpad (much like the ones that came with Neo Geo home units from the 90s).

http://hyperkin.com/blog/2013/03/retron-5-details-revealed-f...
Nope. The ISO3166 code for the United Kingdom is 'gb'.
They tried to shift to "Steam"-style distribution platform.
Based on what? I have yet to meet a Scala developer who wants to go back to Java, but know many Java developers who are moving in the other direction.
My understanding is that the bulk of JVM startup time is NOT compiling or loading the actual application code, but loading the classpath.
Lawrence Livermore NIF laser fusion experiment delivers record energy output
Why We Rent Movies from Apple and No One Else
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters
Litmus Builder
Network Solutions is now a Web.com Company
A lot of games have acceleration turned off, so you don't see what you're describing in such games.
So why didn't Clojure have this from the beginning? Wasn't that on purpose?
You're missing a quite few updates in LightTabe... Latest builds support python live edit.
That is not true, it's designed for you to be able to modify the controls.
And the spacebar key, when hit, sounds different than the other keys. I'm not good with onomatopoeia but normal keys generally go tack-tack-tack while the spacebar goes tchick-tchick-tchick. It's noticeably different. This could actually prove quite scary since if you know the length of the 'tack', you're basically doing stupidly simple linear cryptanalysis.
I have some RSI problems in my left hand that prevent me from holding down WASD for movement in games. For the most part now I just play controller-based games, but there's plenty of PC games that don't support (or don't work well with) controllers.

I had thought for a long time that it'd be nice to have a one-handed analog stick controller for my left hand, covered in buttons on the back, coupled with a mouse. It would actually give me finer control over movement than a keyboard, but with the aiming capability of a mouse.

This device isn't exactly that, but I'm really interested in this device to see how it helps with my RSI when gaming. I'm also curious as to how the haptic feedback will work. Maybe I should sign up for that beta after all!
There is a reason why Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were created in Canada back in the 1970.
That was asked yesterday, and the day before, and this front-page post is still on the front of the "ask" page:

"How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431573
Microsoft boss cries at send off
Actually, nicotine has a rather short half-life of about 2 hours [1], which means even smaller doses quickly restore it close to previous levels. So in essence, tapering off is like going through many shorter withdrawals (doesn't sound scary but its actually a bit of a torture compared to quitting cold turkey).

[1]: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/documentStore/m/a/u/mau01c00/...
>90% of customer funds are stored offline.
>Offline storage provides an important security measure against theft or loss.
>We distribute bitcoin geographically in safety deposit boxes around the world.

Using offline, split, encrypted files has a huge amount of security: Breaking into n+1 bank vaults (simultaneously) is not enough. That's pretty nice. It's not 100% secure, but probably better than average compared to online wallets or exchanges.
Right, but almost no one uses the Emacs or the imitations being referred to here: almost everyone uses the Emacs Stallman released after this 1983 announcement.
Coursera: Programming Languages - starts in 7 days
Link examples of websites that elate you.
Worked fine for me too. I think it might do that if you've already been logged into a Google account and signed out. Try deleting your Google cookie(s) entirely.
You took the words from my mouth.

For reference, I'm not new here. My account is.
> To the OP: curious to know, are you a user?

Yes. Reading the literature, I found no reason to not try out nicotine. I discuss my personal experiences in http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#nicotine

> Have you been off nicotine longer than 2 months in the past year?

Why would I do that if I find it useful, as I do? But I have been keeping a log of nicotine use since June (to use it as a covariate in other self-experiments), which indicates I easily skip it for long periods: 03, 07 June 2013: 4mg gum; 22 June 2013: 2mg gum; 24 June 2013: 2mg gum; 1 July: 2mg gum; 9 July, 2mg gum; 20 July, 2mg gum; 20 August, 3mg gum; 5, 6 September, 1mg gum; 20 Sept, 1mg gum.

More generally, I received my current batch of nicotine gum (96x4mg) back on 28 December 2011, or 640 days ago; I still have 2 pieces left over, so that means I've been using the nicotine at an average rate of (94 * 4) / 640 = 0.6mg/day. (This includes the August-November 2012 period where I was taking gum every other day for a dual n-back experiment.)
You're right. I hadn't even checked that before I posted the comment.
IOS 7 Apps are Prettier but are they Better?
downvoted? No, you're totally right. We need to move on. see my rant below. upvoted.
Get the full source code for our iOS PocketWeather App now for FREE
Please ask Google before asking HN; it's been answered many times. "Ask" should be a way to initiate interesting discussions, not meta-discussion about effectively gaming the site.
Ironically, I'm assuming I'm the one who inherited ben1040's ticket mentioned in the other comment thread.

I just wanted to say thanks to puredanger to putting this thing on each year. The quality of the talks exceedingly high, but honestly the buzz about St Louis is my favorite part. Its great to see people come in from the coasts (and all over the world) and watch the tweets as people discover restaurants, breweries, and all St Louis has to offer. Its nice, at least for a weekend, to see my city not reduced to "flyover country."

I hope that people take that enthusiasm back to their respective homes and keep it in mind next time St Louis comes up!
>> I think the challenge is Valve is trying to create one-size-fits-all inputs with those trackpads.

The problem is that you can't.

There are just too many different type of gamers having different requirements. Given Valve's lineage, their core audience are the FPS/PC type gaming crowd who are used to keyboards and mice. And this controller makes sense for that audience.

While I'm interested in the Steam Machines, I would never buy this controller for myself, because I'm into fighting games and old-school console type games. And even though the Steam Controller isn't for me, the great thing about Steam Machines is that they're still computers at heart, which means that I can probably use just about any other controller out there if it has USB connectivity and identifies it as a standard HID.
That is a pretty curious aspect of nicotine (and one I mentioned in my personal experiences when I was wondering if the reason the e-cig water was not helping was due to taking too much nicotine), but it isn't mentioned because I didn't see how it was relevant to any of the questions discussed.
It depends on the particular type system. For example in Dylan or Common Lisp (or Dart), annotating all types doesn't guarantee anything about whether you can still have type errors at runtime. In typed-clojure or typed-racket, you have a guarantee that if a type error does happen, it will happen either in dynamically-typed code, or on the boundary between dynamically and statically typed code.
How To Boost Profits: Easy Ways Of Transforming Prospects Into Buyers
> The hand-wavy "other compounds" that the article mentions and then doesn't describe? Anyone know what those would be?

Excuse me? I went to considerable pains to give the primary source citations & jailbreak the PDFs.
You can buy icebreakers easily. We would be happy to sell you as many as you want as the global shipbuilding industry is doing extremely badly. Just last week a whole dock was shut down in Rauma, Finland.
Canada can be the next USA, they just need around 100 million people to start. How about handing out a few acres for the brave souls?:-)
That's where I give Star Trek a lot of credit. There is an internal consistency of design within that universe, and it doesn't feel totally arbitrary. For example, the "warp nacelle" concept is fundamental to that universe, and at least until the newer series, it was maintained across a lot of different cultures' ships. You could tell that some thought went into the design, as opposed to just "Hey, taking a giant submarine and sticking it in space would look cool!"

In fact, Star Trek uses the warp drive as a technological benchmark by which all species and cultures are measured. Are there other methods of hyperspeed travel? Eventually, yes, those are revealed. But they are still compared to the warp theory.
Ask HN: What Silicon Valley startups accept temporary workers?
Hello HN, I've just graduated from a technologist course from UTFPR (Federal Technological University of Paraná, Brazil), I'm traveling to the USA and I'll stay in Palo Alto between 09/29 and 12/05. During my stay, I'd love to work at a startup! I want to experience how it works, how problems are solved, learn and have fun. I have some experience with PHP, JavaScript (jQuery) and MySQL, but I'm interested in doing anything a startup need. I'm not focused in getting paid, since learning and helping are my objectives, but anything would be helpful during my stay. Please recommend me startups that have this interest as well. Thanks!
Time Stamps in iOS 7 Messages
You could, but to be intellectually honest, you could only use that argument if you yourself would be convinced that no shrinking of the sea ice was evidence against global warming.

Belief in global warming can really only come down to belief in the experts, especially the IPCC. My understanding is that the most important evidence is global temperature trends. This is (and should be) analyzed very critically since the data is very complex and suffers from many issues. However it seems that the debate has already been won.
The Basic Rules of Successful Entrepreneurship
At first I thought Gabe should have said something earlier in the week stating "hardware announcements"

Then I realized how much mindshare the gaming community is giving a game that doesn't even exist a week after a game launches to the tune of a billion dollars.

The man is smart.
There absolutely is a need to "attack" other websites, when you see one community that was once flourishing with great degrade into every other regular old internet comment board.

HN is a fantastic place with lots of very smart people. I would hate to see this place run down with stupid nonsensical comments, memes, and image replies.

I come here for the quality discussion, that's it. If that leaves, there's no point to HN.

Have you seen Reddit "discussions"?
Structure of the database matters a lot. Going column-oriented [1] will improve performance dramatically before you scale up the processing power.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS
Does this count as a protection racket if the US military provides support? :)
Yep - IIRC, in-app purchases only apply if the purchase itself is delivered through the app (usually content)

This is how apps like Uber, Lyft, InstantCab, Instacart, etc. let you pay through your phone, and why Netflix and Hulu don't even let you sign up for their service on iOS.
Apple taps Nike Fuel Band designer for wearable device project
Security via obscurity. Got it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
London schoolboy secretly arrested over 'world's biggest cyber attack'
Or the endless Facebook spam!
Ford's Mulally tops Microsoft wish list - report
> The market responds to informed consumers by providing nicotine without the tobacco.

Well, once tobacco has been socially stigmatized and huge taxes placed on it, anyway. I'm not sure nicotine gum/patches/e-cigs existed before the War on Smoking. I expect you could buy purified nicotine oil from chemical suppliers, but it'd be up to you to figure out how to use it (and do so without killing yourself).
Are you suggesting that most hardcore console gamers use a keyboard and mouse? I don't think that's true...

Edit: Rereading your comment, I guess you might mean PC gamers who are sitting on their couches. I don't think that's the market this is after; it's trying to get console gamers onto Steam by providing them a cool new product that will work well with the games they have. This makes that a much smaller shift for those gamers than the keyboard and mouse. Will they still get owned by more traditional PC gamers (since they're now competing directly), as you suggest? I guess that's possible, but that's just saying "console gaming needs to stay separate", not "they should use a keyboard and mouse for console games", which just isn't on the table any more than PC gamers are going to switch to a handheld controller.
Yes, in fact it would solve the aiming issue, while using the left trackpad in "joystick mode" would better replicate a keyboard.
Great contrast. Iterative vs waterfall software life cycle.
It is interesting to watch ARM finally adopting many of the great architectural solutions that MIPS used 22 years ago, back in 1991, when it launched the MIPS R4000 family of 64 bit processors. [1]

[1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/raw/documents/R4400_Uman_boo...
Just because you can modify the controls doesn't mean it's a good controller for all use cases.

For example, it would be very difficult to do an ultra move in Street Fighter IV on one of these pads -- i.e., quarter-circle-forward x 2 (LP + MP + HP). A standard d-pad with tactile buttons is much more precise.
Work at a tier A company and buy lotto tickets give you the best of both worlds, corporate + startup!
I know the business school default assumption is that you should basically always reinvest, but every once in a while it makes perfect business sense to just pocket the money, distribute to whoever the shareholders are, and walk away. This is the business equivalent of winning the lottery.
Territorial waters extend 12nm from the coast. So if there's a path through that's more than 24nm wide, some part of it must lie outside of Canadian territorial waters, regardless of the status of the islands.
Earnest question: who is the target audience here? If Java and Scala can be intermixed in the JVM, and the generated Scala code is not very idiomatic, then how would this be used?
And from the outside it's basically just a black streak, even before it starts actively hiding itself. I find the inside far more fascinating. Forests on a starship? Sign me up.
...starts with a grandiose vision, which (at the time of writing) he hadn't even begun. He then asks for time, money, and equipment, before the end of the first paragraph. The very first thing promised ... has never been effectively delivered.

That sounds like a Kickstarter pitch. RMS was ahead of his time in yet another way.
Good question. I had assumed that he was referring to a synergistic effect of MAOIs and Nicotine causing increased addictive potential, but I really have no idea whether monoamine oxidase is involved in the metabolization of nicotine.
Which error bars do you mean? The recent warming "pause" currently puts us outside the 95% error bars for nearly all of the individual climate models, demonstrating that either climate sensitivity is being drastically overestimated or natural variability is being drastically underestimated.

(see the latest ClimateAudit post for pretty box charts and some analysis: http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/24/two-minutes-to-midnight/ )
I believe what is described is that nicotine is a potent agent for habit-forming, so you don't get as much addicted to the nicotine itself as the habit you have formed while taking nicotine, ie. smoking. The article describe utilizing this process to one's advantage by taking safe forms of nicotine while forming desired habits or (i.e working, learning etc.).
EMACS (as mentioned in the announcement) does not refer to GNU Emacs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#GNU_Emacs
Ah, so basically, about 20 times less than an average smoker (compared to your calculated average), and about 4-5 times less for the peak days, if I'm calculating correctly?

That is, assuming a 1-pack-a-day smoker of a 0.6mg / cigarette brand ...

Okay, I guess - I wish you the best of luck, and your usage seems well controlled. Though, the withdrawal I went through when I quit - I wouldn't wish it to my worst enemy. So I hope you don't mind if I say "be careful" (even though I can already see that you are :)
What are you talking about?

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/petergleick/files/2012/02/Glo...
The idea Bret Victor represented is great, but the form of his creations are probably inefficient. Now these guys are trying to imitate that exact form in unusable SVG mess that doesn't work at interactive frame rates.

You should concentrate on the concept of interactive debugging and representing data going within the software.
I wish you'd also do one titled "How to find great markets"

I'm working on a blog post on this now. Unfortunately I understand this piece a lot less. If you point me at a market and say "build a product for this market", I'm pretty confident I could do that and be the best. But if you asked me to pick a great market, I'm not confident that I could do a great job at all.

I think finding and analyzing market opportunities is much, much harder than building great products. There are hundreds (thousands?) of phenomenal product managers, but only a handful of people that really understand markets. The few that come to mind are Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs (unfortunately he's gone now). I've read all I could find from them, but even they are having trouble articulating this, which suggests they don't have it entirely pinned down.

I'll see if the blog post goes anywhere in the process of writing it. I'd really like to understand this better.
The icon for VI (US Virgin Islands) shows only one of the three islands (St. Thomas). St. John is incorrectly included with VG (British Virgin Islands), and St. Croix appears to be missing entirely. For a better diagram, see, for example, the US Virgin Islands quarter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2009_USVI_Proof.png

I could nitpick about Florida and North Carolina, too (missing the Keys and the Outer Banks), but those issues seem relatively minor.
This should become a law, like Brook's, Sturgeon's or Greenspun's.
ASk HN: Did Internet evolution kill all the security models?
I was doing some researching to improve the security on a system right now, and this did come to my mind.

When you design with security in mind, you assume things are going to get compromised.

As such, one of the unix-like systems strategies, is to limit the available resources for compromised "elements" (users, processes, hosts, subnets, etc).

Back in the day, we did "download markup to render rich text".

That is relatively acceptable, even if it implies some trust levels (the server software, the client software, the content processed, the scenario, etc...).

But hey, we're 2013. The browser access to many layers of abstraction and functionalities, the smartphone is not better...

Quality of default configurations of many elements has "evolved" across the years... to the point of demand your work exponentially if you want to follow some minimal security best practices.

Once upon a time, the data was in your computer, and you used e-mail to communicate, and did access to content following html links. But nowadays any security model is broken by default for the average use that people does of internet.

Share everything, locally, remotely, between devices, reuse credentials between providers, crappy software validation processes, code which you cannot audit but your data uses, etc etc etc

Did the internet evolution kill our computers security ?
I would pay $100 easy; more than that I might convince myself to just wait.
The only folks who have answered that question are folks who were lucky enough to have things go in their favor.

Admittedly, they all worked hard at it and deserve it, I think what people really want to hear is an average perspective. What happens to the average programmer? Or an average engineer? How about folks who don't want to go into management? Or how about folks who want to go into management but couldn't (and why?)? Or someone who lost all his/her money by betting on a company which later became worthless? How do they deal with it? What are the risks they took etc.

Those answers demonstrate selection bias at its best.

On a completely different sidenote, I hate the Co-founder/CEO of Echosign (he answered the OP on quora). He puts badass pictures in every single quora post, yet does not realize that he has not done any of that. There was no need to put a picture of a soldier in that thread.

Some of his other posts have even more ridiculous pictures.

He seems to have a crazy fantasy idea of the life he's living. Typical MBA-preneur/paper-pusher/number-cruncher who thinks he changed the world and now living the life. Sigh!
This. The best decision my wife and I ever made was to go to a Justice of the Peace and the courthouse instead of the bullshit charade that is a modern wedding. While my version was rather extreme, my two sisters are better examples.

Sister 1 had a large, expensive, lavish wedding.

Sister 2 chose my father's rural backyard in the woods overlooking coastline. My father and I erected a gateway made of driftwood, and covered it in leaves and flowers. No money was spent, other than my sister's cheap, plain white dress and the groom's simple suit. It was a beautiful, simple ceremony. The groom's great grandmother remarked on how the wedding was "the way weddings were before everyone went crazy."