skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once it gets going though it screams. Not sure I want to trade the miniscule difference in startup time for that.

As for page load times, this is silly. There is no startup time on a page at all. Possibly the first hit but there are warm start options for that in CLR at least which make this a complete non issue.

To give you an idea, 98% of our page hits are under 80ms processing time and we have big, heavy pages (we're old school asp.net mostly).
News: Personalised or serendipitous?
SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada Corp. SpaceX is certainly farthest along but the CST-100 is a fairly mature design as well, and SNC have already completed captive carry tests on DreamChaser test models. With any luck there may be 3 separate manned spacecraft being made by American companies within the next 5 years.
Apple should hire a nation wide law firm to defend any and all apple developers who are sued by Lodsys fore these patents. Instruct the lawfirm to never settle and actively file actions on beheld of each client against Lodsys. It's simple, once they realize that no one will settle with them, they will go away.

Now, where on earth is that patent troll bill congress has been promising?
It is laughable that matters like this get flagged to oblivion and disappear from the frontpage, especially considering how important they are in many ways.

I wish I had more than one upvotes.
I'm not convinced Mars can support a large human population even with initial massive economic subsidy. Pregnancy in the high radiation and low gravity of Mars may result in low fertility rates and some very... interesting, (misshapen, if not defective) new humans. Unfortunately the only studies, which were kind of bad, were conducted in zero G and not 0.4 G [1], and the embryos were quickly transferred into mice in 1G for neonatal development and birth.

Even if fetal development in microgravity is OK, absent DNA repair technologies, radiation induced decay of the gene pool over the generations may require a continual replenishment of fresh, "unmutated" DNA from Earth--at least until humans evolve sufficiently on Mars. It is not practical to assume no additional radiation exposure on Mars: even if humans are buried underground, and do not come out during the occasional solar storm, they must occasionally walk on the Martian surface. Otherwise it's a robot's world, and human colonization is merely an exercise in preserving the human race though Martian burial in case of Earth apocalypse.

[1] http://www.everythingology.com/mammalian-reproduction-in-spa...: "These results suggest for the first time that fertilization can occur normally under G environment in a mammal, but normal preimplantation embryo development might require 1G"
Any interest in sharing these decks? I'd love to use them.
> This was America, or my home country - Australia - about 200 years ago.
>
> Its not Antarctica because Antarctica is very heavily
> claimed at this point. But Mars? You'd be amongst the
> first colonists of a new planet. You'd be helping
> build something which may outlast Earthbound habitation,
> and moves us out of the current resource paradigm
> (exactly 1 planet).
>

As I type this from a reservation, I'd like to assure you that America and Australia both had land claims at the point those pesky Europeans showed up. Keeping the claim was the problem.
It obviously depends on the project, but for something like Disqus or anything else large in terms of size, I'd still go with Django.

For some personal projects, I like to use werkzeug, but they usually are very small and don't do much. :)

I also write things personally in Go if it makes sense. But the Go work is typically not for web services.
If you don't mind running development versions: Notifications can be a part of building that. Problem: you (currently) have to be connected when it happens.

http://redis.io/topics/notifications
I don't think this is only applicable to Mediterranean cultures. Eastern Europe seems to follow the same medium/large/small pattern as well.
How I Am Learning Ruby
The siesta does not reduce the number of hours worked in the day. It just shifts them.

If you actually read the article you'd know that the complaint is that they work too much and that it's because their timezone is out of sync with daylight. Which is what distinguishes their situation from ours here with DST -- we're actually better sync'd with daylight because of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license is as simple as it gets.
Congress is too busy attempting to filibuster the debate period to get anything done.
Big fan of HackNY, awesome stuff.
They're probably simple wrappers around https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/org.swift.atlassia...
actually this office style was popularized by bloomberg http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/nyregion/bloombergs-bul...
Thanks -- upvoted you and followed @ramit .
I'm not talking about page load times. A server side app is a great use-case for something that has slow startup. I was just using that as a citation for perceptions on speed and how it can negatively affect experience.

I'm talking about command-line applications, like the one in the article and in your first post. Then you get the startup every single time you run the command.
I started programming (professionally) this year after transitioning from a completely different career. I lucked into my current gig by basically impressing my future employer with enthusiasm for programming. I also am kind of a rarity, as there are probably less than a handful of professional programmers in my rural Texas town of 15k people, and seemingly no one else was interested in Rails. So I've gone from Michael Hartl's tutorial to an actual job with customers in less than a year, without a CS degree or anything like that.

I honestly think the best way to learn programming is to make yourself by having a project. I'd been dabbling in online courses for a year and a half beforehand, but I don't think I learned much until I had a customer that said "I want something that does this, can you do it?", and just having to figure it out.
This is great, I'd recommend pairing it with Bootsnipp [1]. It seems pretty feasible to almost create your own custom theme out of StartBootstrap, BootSnipp and a few other items from the Big Badass List [2] by just cut-n-paste - but I wish there were a "real" cross project build system.

1 - http://www.bootsnipp.com/
2 - http://www.bootstraphero.com/the-big-badass-list-of-twitter-...
Ask HN: Best Password Manager for SME/Startups?
What secure password manager (e.g. LastPass, KeePassX, Password Genie) would HN readers recommend that incorporates the following features (non-free is fine):

-Centrally stored and synced password file

-Individual user passwords (fine-grained control a +)

-Master password

-Mobile support

-Auto-filling out forms in browser a +
Well I have a $250 piece of software called Flying Logic. I like it because it automatically lays out the graph when you draw a new edge.
Here is what Lodsys has to say about the creator of the patents it asserts:

> Abelow is not an officer or manager of Lodsys Group LLC, he has no interest in Lodsys patents, and he does not receive any revenue from the licenses granted by Lodsys in the patents he created.
The Selected Papers Network
Microsoft Paid for my iPhone 5S
I'd go one step further and argue that: no sane language should be a language for producing Unix system calls.

The impedance mismatch between sanity and imperative OS (and imperative hardware) is too great.
Actually Canary Islands is also in the wrong time zone.

Spain should be in 0 (and France, Moroco, Argelia, etc...) just as UK.

Portucal could chose, since it just in the middle, currently is 0.

Canary Islands should go to -1.

http://www.travel.com.hk/region/time_95.jpg

Anyway, I think it will be a good marketing movement for Spain, as I've explained, so we get rid of a little bit of the lazy country fame.
Which part, the Manna part or the Australia Project part? The latter is sort of the 'Star Trek Society' that has a number of advantages. As written the next stage would be for Australia to dominate the world of course :-)

But the thing that I found interesting, both in the story and in real life, is that the story's author has his characters as 'worker bees' with not thought to living their lives, and then switching over to living full lives. If you subscribe to that philosophy, then nobody would ever be 'useless' for more than about 8 years since you could pretty much learn everything from high school through a masters degree in some subject in that time if you dedicated your time to it, and assuming like the story author did, that these people didn't have to do anything to maintain their lives (food, shelter, clothing).

The difference between people who are naturally curious, and the people who aren't, is where I am most intrigued. When do people switch over to being victims? And what keeps them in that mindset?

Thanks for the link, it was an interesting read.
> it's the entire cultural thing of sleeping/relaxing at siesta,

I'm Spanish, from Barcelona and I don't know anybody that sleeps or relaxes at "siesta" time. Well, I don't know about siesta time.

> it's the fact that they take a three-hour "lunch"!

Also, I don't know anybody that takes a three hour lunch
Like https://www.circuitlab.com/ ? (Developer)
Can you trust your VPN provider?
I was planning to design my website today. Looks like Universe has responded !. Thanks for such an awesome templates. Web is a beautiful place because of u guys !
Bitcoin billionaires
Parenscript. We wrote a REPL and debugger for it in order to be happy working in it all day, which I keep meaning to open-source.

We have a longer-term idea to make a Parenscript-style Lisp that compiles to JS and Lua, for a bunch of different reasons, one of which is to take advantage of LuaJIT's superior C interop so we can do proper numerics on the server.
I've been wanting to do something similar to this in the future after my education. If you don't mind me asking, did you major in Math?
Hmm… realeasing a distribution after only 3 months of vimming. It's like… deluded newbies deluding other newbies.
I've got a good number of gay friends so:

Queer isn't actually offensive today to "all" gays. There are popular gay/lesbian magazines that use that name in Germany, [1] and [2]

Queen: don't forget drag queens which doesn't necessarily have a negative connotation

[1] http://inqueery.de [2] http://queer.de
Good luck getting all the part-timers through DV!
Yeah, this is a great problem for Rockstar to have. People are starting to take games seriously as social commentary. Oh how far we've come from the days of Mortal Kombat.
The cashless society is coming. More reason than ever to use cash.
Almost unrelated but the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a good follow-up for inspiration.

https://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi/7018...
Why hasn't anyone addressed the probable criminal activity going on with these handful of judges in this one district of Texas? Just because someone has the title "judge" doesn't give them untouchable super powers. There's a giant reek of illegality coming from that area and someone needs to look under the covers.

My hypothesis is there's a payoff racket going on. There's a multi level system setup with a few insiders who know how to pay off the local judges to dismiss certain cases.

This is Texas. These people don't have some sense that big bad companies are beating up on little old inventors trying to protect themselves with patents as has been portrayed in the media. These people are generally small minded Jesus followers who can't name 20 states outside of Texas and would be hard pressed to remember the name of the Vice President.

I'm not speaking out of my ass either. I've lived in Texas. I have family there now.

There's some serious corruption going on and it needs looking into.
The "Actionable" list is actually better named "Weekly Actionable". Its the tasks in the weekly sprint that are currently actionable and can be worked on.

The reason we have that is that we noticed that many of the tasks in the weekly sprint aren't always "workable" and delayed for various reasons (waiting for another card to be finished, not relevant until the due date, still need some more refinement/feedback, etc), and that when I was scanning the weekly sprint for actionable tasks I had to keep ignore them manually, and they were just creating noise. They aren't quite appropriate for the "Blocked" list, so we created a separate list for the "actionable" tasks.

I would suggest you to just ignore that list, and see if you the need for something like that really arises with your workflow.
Ohh, so that is why sites disappear from the front page suddenly. Interesting. I agree with you.
I don't think we need to be so inflexible about language -- there are plenty of people in the world who would like to pay someone to make straightforward websites (patching up broken plows?) rather than work on, say, a new in-kernel memory allocator (building a boat?). It would be pretty ridiculous to claim you have to be able to do the latter before you get to call yourself a programmer.

I think the truth is that programming is a field with work available for people of disparate skill levels and experience -- http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-somers-web... is a good article explaining some of why that is. It describes a friend of the author who went from being a law student to being a programmer with an $85k/year salary in six months; does that make programming semi-skilled? Where's the boundary?
I created a side project this summer based on an open source tool which I use in my day job. My idea was to offer this open source tool as a service.

So I set aside a week to travel down the East Coast. Every day I went to offices and MeetUps and demo'ed the original open source project and my service built on it. Each day was 15 hours, door to door. One time I had to patch a shoe with duct tape.

A week after my return, I'll admit that the service is a failure. The idea is a good one, and everyone wanted to try it, but no one committed themselves to using it, much less paying for it. The trip was still a success! When you show people crazy projects, they show you theirs. The projects I heard about, I had no idea that they existed. Networking was good. Being new places was good.
> the reason for the unemployment rates and poor GDP is because of this attitude to work.

And exactly what attitude to work have Spaniards?
Funny, I was just thinking about this earlier today. Specifically, I was comparing the sunrise/sunset times for A Coruña, Spain and Niš, Serbia, two cities that share a time zone despite over 1500 miles between them. (I chose these cities because they're at approximately the same latitude near one of the widest points of the CET zone.) Their respective sunrises are a whole two hours apart:

http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/a-coruna.html

http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/nis.html

The Central European time zone could probably use a bit of fragmentation.

A more extreme example is China, which has been "unified" under one single time zone since 1949, despite the fact that the country's over 3000 miles wide. That makes for a four hour difference in sunrises between east and west. Of course, this is a bit problematic for the west:

http://www.wisegeek.org/why-does-china-have-only-one-time-zo...
3D Jello Simulation in Javascript
Just a little hack I threw together in an afternoon. Was really fun to work on and learn what makes it look more or less realistic looking. Input on how to improve such a simulation would be awesome!
Another example of UTF-16 brokenness: it is byte-order dependent, that is, programmer must care about big-endian vs little-endian encoding of 16-bit numbers. This caused another hack: using non-text BOM (Byte-Order Mark) symbols to denote what endianness is used.

I think it's very ugly and may be ok for Windows-x86 worlds, but not acceptable for variety of platforms connected to the Internet.

UTF-8 avoids endianness problems completely.
That seems highly unlikely given that Apple etc aren't retarded and would have pursued that theory if they thought it was possible.
Another thing, a lot of the most important work in development is relatively unglamorous. Most of the time it's better to have a craftsman at work than a diva steering your product in the wrong direction for the sake of looking cool in the moment.
Not really sure that Bitcoin involves "no major intellectual breakthroughs".

Perhaps no breakthroughs for independent parts (Satoshi did not create a new cryptographic function, for example) but the placement of known parts into a working system is in itself an intellectual breakthrough.

I don't understand how the author can say that Bitcoin is in no way an intellectual breakthrough. Perhaps I misunderstood the article.

Maybe the author misses the creative and novel system that Satoshi built just because the bricks are not all brand new. Even Bill Gates called Bitcoin a techno tour de force.
There's been an increase in gwern articles on Hacker News recently, I like it. Just curious why now?
Is it weird that the first thing I thought when I opened this up was

"Woah.. this looks like Google"
You say you would but I don't think you understand the implications of the his view and his Utopia. RMS is perfectly fine, he has admitted as such, if the implication is that we would have not had such a technical revolution that we have had. You talk about how great Firefox is and I agree but I don't think it would exist in this Utopia, or even have a reason to exist. I think we'd be to busy tilling the fields for our feudal lords. =)
No, what led to the ridiculousness of SF/NYC real estate is do-gooders talking about what we should find "acceptable" and what we should do to make things "acceptable." The do-gooders who complain every time you want to tear down low-rise development to build high-rises, the do-gooders who want to impose rent controls so old people can hang on to their apartments while younger people are priced out, etc. The housing market is like a balloon--you push on one end, and it inflates somewhere else.

I'm hardly a free-market true believer. But this is a basic bit of micro-economics: supply and demand of housing. If demand is high, you'll minimize prices by allowing supply to grow to accommodate demand. If you don't allow supply to grow, prices will explode. You can't legislate away the mechanics of the housing market.

Whenever I hear complaints about housing prices in San Francisco and how the single mothers working minimum wage jobs are getting priced out, I think of this article: http://seattletransitblog.com/2012/04/01/city-looks-to-detro....
It's a very different style of writing, but his twitter feed is hilariously sarcastic: https://twitter.com/pinboard
instead of inflatable structures, you're going to want to dig underground and pipe sunlight in using fiber optics. It's cheaper.

The hardest part of martian colonization is the high abundance of perchlorate everywhere.
>> "This is Texas. These people don't have some sense that big bad companies are beating up on little old inventors trying to protect themselves with patents as has been portrayed in the media. These people are generally small minded Jesus followers who can't name 20 states outside of Texas and would be hard pressed to remember the name of the Vice President."

Grow up. There's no need to insult over 25m people based only on your personal experience and conspiracy theory.
Congrats, this is very useful. One thing I'd recommend is adding an option to subscribe to a weekly newsletter.
Seems to be a common sentiment, but from where I'm standing there are at least a few huge differences between Go and Java:

* duck typing
* goroutines
* channels

And some smaller but still important differences:

* Very light-weight Public/private distinction
* Slices
* Objects that embed directly in other objects, not as references
* Return-value error handling; only a very restricted form of exceptions
I believe he's talking about some prevention is better than cure sort of thing. It's not important to get your car checked today because you have important things to do. However, if this happens every day, then one day your car is going to fail. Then, getting the car checked becomes a priority but if you'd fit it in earlier on, you could have gotten away with never having to deal with an emergency.

Essentially, he's talking about how we discount future risk when we prioritise tasks.
For crying out loud, why doesn't Trader Joe's just expand into Canada? http://www.piratejoes.ca/ is the biggest proxy for demand I've ever seen.

People in the big Canadian cities would line up around the block to be able to shop at a Trader Joe's. I know I would.
indeed. we are on the wrong country :P.
I think what he's saying is that "C" priorities, will become "A" priorities after being left alone UNTIL deadlines (urgency) pushes them to the top of the list.
This really helps with shaving of tedious design and layout work for devs who really just want to ship their app.

Thank you!
This is just an ad for a $20 e-book, posted by someone who created their HN ID solely for this purpose.
I don't see the impetus for colonizing Mars until we've started building serious cities in Antarctica. What does Mars buy you that Antarctica does not? Even the doomsday scenarios of "all your eggs in one basket" don't really seem to work; an Antarctic colony could be made self-sufficient and survivable in the event of an asteroid strike or nuclear war more easily than a Mars colony.

I think it's a cool idea, but people seem to severely underestimate the difficulty.
"Learn to program" doesn't necessarily mean "learn in a week to be a programming rockstar" (one of our favorites). If you're a smart person, you can pick up the basics of syntax, conditionals, simple methods. You can learn enough to bootstrap your way through a simple CRUD app. Hell, that's exactly what I did and now I'm being paid to do it.
CSSconf.eu 2013 - Intro.css
My theory on northern Idaho is that it is a thin strip of state between two other states. If people are likely to live and die within 1-hour of where they are born (let's say the hump of the bell curve is one hour), then that strip is going to get a fair number of people from the two states on each side.

I wonder if you can correct this map to discount people who moved across state lines, but did not move more than 1-2 hours from their place of birth.
Regarding #5, what kind of disaster does Mars provide a backup for that, say, a self-reliant colony at the South Pole on Earth does not?