skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's going to turn into an all out semi-fun war of drone counter measures (lasers, guns shooting plastic projectiles) and even drones battling other drones in the sky. This should be interesting.
The piece isn't a review of Gladwell's book, nor is its thesis predicated upon the (de)merits thereof. He's saying Gladwell as a whole, in all of his works, may be Considered Harmful. You don't have to read his latest book to cogently draw that conclusion.
Lives aren't meaningfully hanging in the balance when you're talking about a four-pound drone that is being flown only kinda recklessly, and only near volunteers.
I'm not having an errors accessing the site, however I'm a bit turned off by pricing. $10/m seems steep to me for just hosting static files. I especially don't like that I can't do a git push to deploy updates (breaks my workflow) and having to zip files seems unnecessary. I also don't see any must have features; hosting on a CDN isn't a killer feature and the zip deploy, at least for me, makes it a no go.
Sorry about that - it's up and down at the moment. We only just launched and quickly hit our DB limit. We're waiting to upgrade the database until after the initial traffic wears off as it involves taking the site down completely. Rock and a hard place!
The article says: "The researchers studied mice with prion disease because these mouse models currently provide the best animal representation of human neurodegenerative disorders in which the build up of misshapen proteins is linked with brain cell death. These include Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as prion diseases. Another paper in Nature Neuroscience last month highlighted this pathway as a potential therapeutic target in treating Alzheimer’s."
"It's a pretty solid language" - can you remind me what should I use "==" or "===" and why should I care? More here: http://wtfjs.com

"has interpreters installed on virtually every computer on earth with built-in distribution" - which means we are stuck with it, thanks very much for "open" web.
Working with basic data structures like maps, sets, and lists that you don't have to manually allocate takes approximately 20 times as much code as it does in nicer languages like Python.
For anyone curious about an example of this being done, check out this behind-the-scenes footage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_711646...

They use a drone in lieu of the crazy camera crane and gantry thingies, and get some pretty awesome shots.

I suspect that drones are going to really transform the way we make low- to mid- budget shoots.

I'm loathe to allow the FAA more authority over the little guys--this sort of anti-drone stuff really will only impact hobbyists and makers. The rest of the folks, the ones who can actually profit off of mass surveillance and whatnot, the .gov's and BigCos, they are going to do it anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UEJd8_7Nyw
British scientists pave way for simple pill to cure Alzheimer’s
Fashion-based-programming leads to endless re-invented wheels and more effort going into running round in circles than looking a bit into history and learning from it. Ruby and Python seem to live in parallel, separate worlds. Oh look, here comes Node.js where everything's written again, this time in JS.

I'm not arguing for monoculture but it's a bit sad to see isolated communities not working together.

Haskell is an example of a language which a good reason to exist: solid unique PL qualities and is also highly applicable to specific problems.
> (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.)

Ahem: "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome" [1], published in Nature (they published in Science too but I don't have the cite handy) -- masterfully demolished [2] by Graur et al.

You might say that the ENCODE paper's authors "are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible". You might also say, inflammatory as it would probably be, that their results are "bullshit"; Graur et al. certainly seem to have taken that view, if not in such earthy fashion, and they did an excellent job of demonstrating in exhaustive detail exactly why that's so. (If you're at all familiar with the ENCODE work, but haven't read "On the Immortality of Television Sets", I strongly recommend you do so -- and that goes double if you've seen the reams of garbage in the popular science press about "the death of junk DNA".)

Climate science, of course, is a much more generally contentious field than bioinformatics, and much political power attaches to it; one does not, after all, often find governments writing policy on the basis of a bioinformatics consortium's latest recommendations, while such behavior is the status quo in climate science. Were that otherwise, one wonders whether Graur and his co-authors would've found themselves unable to publish in GB&E or any recognized journal, and had to resort to doing so on a website of their own. Perhaps they could name it "Genomics Audit".

As for laymen such as myself, a mere software engineer without a day's worth of tertiary education to his name, well -- all I can say is that, while evaluating the evidence for and against AGW (climate change, whatever) and developing an informed opinion of any sort requires enormous intelligence and domain knowledge, spotting propaganda does not, and neither does mistrusting propaganda once spotted.

Your comment here verges upon an argument that propaganda is only evil when unvirtuously engaged in; that is, that the ends justify the means. I suggest that fallacy inheres within this line of reasoning, and that even a superficial review of the history of the 20th century suffices as demonstration. Perhaps you disagree.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature1...

[2] http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.e...
Is it still single-threaded only using one CPU core?
I was thinking the same thing about simultaneously liking and disliking JavaScript.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure its the same with C++.

C++ faults are blown out of proportion by sensationalists, most of whom have never touched C++ code in their lives.

Out of C++, Java, Javascript, and PHP, easily four of the most used languages in the poll, only a single one has positive votes. And it has just as many faults as the other three.
Being from Utah, I love seeing useful technologies come out of our oft forgotten tech center.
I was going for ease of use and encryption. This install procedure is not secure and people should review the source, but the more steps there are the less likely people are to use some type of encryption.

I would like to use a package management tool in the future.
Hey, when a Nobel prize winner like Ivar Giaever can understand the science behind climate change by surfing the internet for a day, then of course everyone HN can do so, too.

/s

(For those who don't get it: http://www.skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist...)
That's 10GB of CDN bandwidth, which is much faster, and geographically distributed.
Mobile apps: How well do you measure quality of users from various channels?
Free plan without custom domain is useless, no point to test your service.
> A recurring observation about wealth distribution is that if everyone's income & wealth were equalized, we'd soon return to the economic disparity & distribution we see now. Poverty/wealth is, on the whole, a consequence of chosen behavior.

This is unsubstantiated hand-waving. I agree that you'd see quite a bit of inequality, but you have no evidence that "we'd soon return to the economic disparity & distribution we see now."

> Poverty/wealth is, on the whole, a consequence of chosen behavior.

While "chosen behavior" might be a component of outcomes, there's no good evidence as to how much impact it has on outcomes as compared to other factors. Also, how do you define "chosen behavior?" Are you including IQ? Impulse control? Personality traits? Are any of those "chosen behaviors?"

My personal experience with life is that those three things + parental wealth are a bigger components of outcomes than "chosen behaviors." It's easy to make the "right choices" when they're laid out right there in front of you, and easy to get back on the "right course" when you have those factors, which are the result of the grand lottery of life, on your side.

What is the equilibrium income/wealth distribution in a system where everyone is genetically engineered, taken from their parents at birth and raised and educated in identical conditions? That'd be the scientific way to isolate the impact of "chosen behaviors." I don't know any more than you do, but I bet its a lot narrower than what we "see now."

> I find it odd that those of us who make this observation, and follow it thru to its natural outcomes, are lambasted for the consequential opinions we hold thereon

I don't know your particular opinions, but I'm going to hazard a guess and say you're overstating how much of your process of "follow[ing] it thru to its natural outcomes" is based on analytical logic versus handwaving moralizing.
Yes.

That was just my adaptive unconscious coming to a rapid blink of an insight rather than a long and convoluted reasoning process. Mr Gladwell seems to think the former is okay though, so I'm sticking with my gut instinct.
Debate about including "undo send" in Mailpile
Beats hanging around with dumb ones.
> A recurring observation about wealth distribution is that if everyone's income & wealth were equalized, we'd soon return to the economic disparity & distribution we see now. Poverty/wealth is, on the whole, a consequence of chosen behavior.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
That seems to be a bit short sighted to me. You're turning off potential users because your site is down and you have an easy fix for the problem? Seems like a bad strategy to me...
> Lono includes bluetooth 4.0 (LE) so the Lono app will be able to recognize the device by proximity (no pairing required). This will make setup of the device a snap– especially on iOS 7 which has an API to automatically setup wifi access.

Does anyone have any additional information on this? I would think if you're going to send over your wifi credentials, there should be some pairing involved.
I've been meaning to compare with https://github.com/cinely/mule-uploader which seems to be more focused on robustness.
When it comes to landing top job at Twitter an Engineering degree is optional
And here I was thinking that I had left /r/politics behind on reddit.
That's fine - Forge isn't for everybody. Our target market is front-end developers and designers, or anybody who wants a new, simple workflow. Thanks for checking it out!
The DARPA ADAMS project is doing a lot of research in this domain. Many of the papers being published by the researchers are public if anyone wants more info on how this detection is done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomaly_Detection_at_Multiple_S...
> The report said that White House officials "strongly objected" to accusations that they did not favour disclosure, and cited statistics showing that Obama gave more interviews in news, entertainment and digital media in the first four plus years iin office than President George W Bush and Bill Clinton did in their respective first terms, combined.

What a bunch of crap. Cherry-picked QA sessions are wholly irrelevant to policy transparency and accountability.

This is a very interesting quote from the article:

> The CPJ has made several recommendations to the administration, including [...] to guarantee that journalists will not be at risk from prosecution for receiving confidential and/or classified information.

Recently there has been a lot of rustling about redefining who are journalists and restricting/eliminating protections of "illegitimate" journalists.

Surely this quote will run directly contrary to who can be considered a journalist, especially since Senator Feinstein (of pro-surveillance notoriety) has come out against the notion that anybody with blog should be afforded the same legal protections as "legitimate" journalists.

Or, more to the point, anybody with a blog could be provided legal immunity after having been recipient of classified information for the purposes of journalistic publication.
image conscious, control-freak, say what you will. There are many ways to view this issue. We are in a time where there are so many sources of information it is hard for governments to hide it from their people, the more unpopular one gets the more likely there will be people to uncover stuff.

plus, we really didn't have this level of investigative ability before, whose to say Johnson, or even a war time President like Roosevelt didn't put more effort into it?

Perhaps as a people we have finally grown up and realized its not all what we were lead to believe. All those off hand jokes about the "man" have some basis in truth.

We're from the government, we're here to help. Funny how they know when and what.
No, @decorator takes care of it - http://funcy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/decorators.html
?- like(prolog)

yes
I agree that some suck less than others but being a government contractor will always suck more than working in private industry (even as a contractor).

Just to not be a totally cynical asshole, I have heard NOAA is actually pretty modernized and efficient and everyone I've talked to seemed to be happy working there.

I'd also add that while the place I was at had its share of crap, the government for the most part loved our work because their previous contracting company had came in, wrote up a ton of requirements and specifications, sat around for two years and delivered nothing functional (and still got paid).
Classical Code Reading
If you don't mind downloading binaries from total strangers, this is the one I'm using right now:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9lhundywuz7llg/QuickCursor.app.zi...
Interesting idea. Try get people who are considering selling exploits to get a little money from Google instead. Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf) is highly respected in the security world - The Tangled Web and Silence on the Wire are excellent reads.

It would be very surprising if this didn't lead to a few new BIND and ISC DHCPD bugs coming out in the near future.
Can I buy these on Amazon?
Generally buying a house should not by itself give you a negative net worth. Net worth = Assets - Debts, so when you buy a house you generally get an asset of $X (your house) and a Debt of 80% of X (your mortgage). You 20% of equity will simply be a transfer from a cash account into an asset. The act of buying a house will decrease your net worth because of closing costs but it probably won't make you go negative by itself unless you put the closing costs on a credit card.
I am absolutely not arguing that static/strong typing obviates the need for testing. Unit and integration tests absolutely have a place in statically-typed languages, and it is precisely as you describe: to ensure functional and business-level requirements.

Notice that I said "ensure", and not "describe" or "define". Because I think that's the disconnect. When you come from a dynamically-typed language background, I think you're more apt to believe your testing needs to describe/define your contracts, because you don't have a type system to leverage. But if you _do_ have a type system to leverage, the pathological context that justifies e.g. BDD is no longer valid, and tools like Ginkgo -- enabling "descriptive tests that can act as effective documentation" -- therefore don't make much sense. To me.
Putting an entire Xbox 360 into the Xbox One would have jacked up the cost rather substantially.
I think the copy could be improved.

The service is obviously not targeted to developers, but several words is:

> zip-and-deploy with Forge

What's zip? What's deploy?

> Uploading and deploying static builds is the way it should be.

What's a build? (Yes, there sort of is an explanation underneath, but how do I create a build?)

My suggestion would be to make it less technically sounding.
Unfortunately I didn't have time to read these articles in depth, nor do I have the time to write a detailed answer now - sorry. But it seems to me that the situation has changed since these articles were written, at least concerning the tools I know best (which are .NET and C#).

We now have built-in support for data (sets) manipulation in C# and Entity Framework makes things like db.Customers.First().FirstName with syntax support totally real. Many of the premises these essays seem to be based on (like "the languages in play lack any real specialized data structures") are just not true anymore.

Also, I would like to know more about why using an ORM like EF would force me to "have an incredibly stupid schema".
I'm also surprised at the dislike for Groovy. When I looked at it, it seemed to be roughly on par with Python or Ruby, with some nice features unique to Groovy.

Of course, there's the limitation that it only runs on the JVM. Maybe it suffers from the following thought process: many people who want a rapid development language and would be interested in Python or Ruby aren't interested in running on the JVM, and people who are already in the Java ecosystem are too biased in favor of static typing to give Groovy its fair shake?
Can't go wrong with a multi-paradigm managed C-derived language.
What Every CS Student Should Know About the First Job
Yeah there were two Railo projects yesterday on the front page of HN: DistroKid and SQL Fiddle.

Here's a challenge for you CF haters: Download and use Railo (GetRailo.com) for your next side project. You just might be surprised.
The public needs to know! /s

(But seriously, if we as a culture are going to insist upon a look into celebrities' lives, I'd rather it be someone of value, who made something real, that benefited humankind, instead of Snooki or Honey Boo Boo.)
Not really.

If you lose a lawsuit and fail to pay, then they just come and take your money and/or your possessions. If you attack the sheriff's deputies carting off your stuff, or assault the bank manager for having given away "your" money, then yeah, you are in for a world of hurt.
Seems like she would have been better served to contact HR about it instead of publishing it online. If I ran a company and one of my employees did that I would fire them in a heartbeat.

I agree that the sign is stupid, but intentionally and publicly harming the company you work for is not acceptable behavior.
I'm confused by this statement "Your Forge account is billed based on how much bandwidth you use. On our basic plan, if you stay under 10GB each month, you'll only be charged the base rate of $10."

Is it that I only pay for what I use or is it a minimum $10/month charge? Right now with https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ (and similar to AWS) I really only pay for what I use. With NFS I deposit money and based on my usage each month money is deducted. Please make it clear if I'm billed on usage or charged a flat rate.
If the server is hosted on the Xbox, why am I paying for XBox Live at all?
The real lesson is that humans are tribal and can classify people outside their tribes as something lesser. It's a fundamental and frightening part of our nature; the average human has the capacity to be cruel and brutal. That is the banality of evil. It's not just European great leaders, it's everyone, and it's fueled by the same underlying tendency that creates smartphone brand fanatics.
AT&T Wireless is literally Cingular, rebranded (announced at the iPhone keynote, no less).
This is a good idea. As time passes and as more methods of communication include a way to correct typos and other errors for at least a short time, email once again stands out as the unfavorable exception. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to retract or correct an email after I pressed "Send" and triggered a delivery near the speed of light.

If this worked for marriage, life would be perfect.
Woah, where did that come from?
For me, it's the sheer verbosity. You can't just say "import module; module.function()" without having more boilerplate than code.

Also, "hard to shoot yourself in the foot" can sometimes mean "hard to do mystical stuff when you really, really want to". 99% of the time, regardless of language, you should be writing clear, idiomatic code. 1% of the time, though, you want some voodoo (that you can encapsulate so that no one else really has to understand it), and when that time comes you want the language to get out of the way.

For example, almost no one needs to write metaclasses in Python. It's just not something most people will ever have a nonzero desire or need to do. But, suppose you're writing an ORM or a templating system or something else were it might be darn handy to create a lot of methods at instantiation time. In those cases, it's incredibly convenient to be able to do the magical stuff at all. You only have to get it right once, then all the downstream users can benefit from a much simplified and cleaner experience.

I don't want to shoot my foot. Sometimes, though, I might want to shoot a snake crawling across it. I prefer to use languages that keep things safe in general but allow shoot-footing when you really, really need it.
As a thought experiment, what would happen if the GC was removed altogether? What consequences would that have (good and bad)?
If VB6/VBA weren't coupled to the god awful IDEs and completely unversionable/patchable binary formats of their applications, it would be a pretty decent programming language.

It's persisted - absurdly - in spite of those crippling issues.
He said "They should have made IPv6 mandatory", as in, it cannot use IPv4. Obviously, "when connecting to the Internet is required" is implied, and having an always online console is irrelevant to his point.
> If you are connection pooling. Which you should be.

Plain MySQL connections are exceptionally quick to set up - much more so than many other DB options. For this reason, many people have written code that does not use connection pooling (coughPHPcough), and instead create new connections at whim. This is why it's worth pointing the differences out.

As a point of contrast about the side effects of this connection speed: The standard Python MySQL library does not even offer connection pooling - you would have to write your own or use a ORM that provides pooling. On the other hand, the most oft used PostgreSQL Python library offers connection pooling for free.

Not saying one method is better than the other, but it's quite possible to write a performant solution using MySQL that doesn't pool connections.
Ask HN: Inbox for everything?
I'm curious if anyone out there knows of a tool or service that can serve as a unified inbox for email, Facebook messages, Twitter mentions/DMs, text messages, IM, etc?

I've always wanted something like this but I'm not sure if the problem just applies to me or if someone else has solved this problem already.
Kippt (YC S12) Takes Its Enterprise Tool For Sharing Useful Content Out Of Beta
Here in the Midwest, you can't stop the lawn from growing beautifully on its own, at least in May thru July.

You can take an abandoned field and mow it once and it will look good. Maybe not great, but nice.

Watering only gets you from 75% nice to 100% gorgeous.
The problem with your line of thinking is that Climate Change isn't N vs NP.

This stops being a scientific problem when it becomes a political one. I'm not going to let someone tell me what I can and can't do just because they have a PhD and a model that proclaims doom.
On Dalvik not JVM.
You changed your diet and started exercising. Did I miss the "hacking" part?
NLP in Ruby
s/perfect antithesis of science/perfect antithesis of religion
This isn't just Obama. This is the new form of management. It is control-the-message-at-all-costs and treat-the-plebes-like-the-animals-they-are.

It's happening in corporations, politics, colleges/universities, etc. It has been in place for some time, but not to the extent that it is now. It's continued pervasiveness into our culture is likely one of the root cause of so much that is problematic in these institutions today.