skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did MS just purchase a new PR campaign contract? There are at least a few stories up front today.
What if Google Analytics makes all traffic Not provided?
Demo image is up.
Xbone got postponed to sometime in 2014 for much of Europe.
Why you should stop trying to be happy
Late to the party, but I wanted to say, thanks for the interesting comment.
Their webpage says they are security experts. I find that very hard to believe given the fact that their website SSL certificate is NOT VALID.

I mean WTF and they are trying to give advice yeah sure...
>It's fascinating that so many of them are ex-KGB.

It's not that surprising, really. Positions in the KGB were highly prized, and the organization only took people with high intelligence and demonstrated competence. They really were the best and the brightest the USSR had to offer.
They already are, but the new nomenclature might be confusing people. RC-helicopter and RC-plane shoots aren't uncommon (with helicopters being far more prevalent), sometimes with first-person-view flying, which is what they're doing in the wired article as well.

The term 'drone' doesn't really have a clear meaning other than the pilot is not inside the vehicle. It doesn't refer to the formfactor (fixed wing / helicopter / multirotor) the flight controls (line-of-sight / FPV / autonomous) or even weight classifications.
Coding for Hospitality
It has already done that.
Honestly the JavaScript it generates isn't very nice to read. I'd rather use a language like TypeScript which tries to generate idiomatic JavaScript.
The NSA could be modelled using the observer pattern.
New way to understand NBA best scorers.
> there's simply no alternative for bigger projects

I absolutely, completely don't understand where is this coming from. There are so many languages that there has to be a choice.

It of course depends on a given project, but I'd think that it's bigger projects which are more flexible in choosing the technology. I mean, if you have heaps of cash and many developers, than having to write three or ten additional libraries shouldn't matter. And then suddenly OCaml and Haskell are starting to look nice. Ask Jane Street.

In the projects I was involved in we had different set of constraints - we needed to ship something quickly, with small team and limited financial support. In such case how much more performant the Java would be, how much better tooling it has and so on was irrelevant and sheer speed of development in Python, Ruby or Racket was a win.

I get a feeling that this sentiment that "there is no alternative" for Java comes from people who are being forced to use Java at work (even for things it's not suited for) and who want to console themselves. It's something like "ok, I use Java as a templating language, but that's how it has to be". Well, I think it's not.

On the other hand, if you know what you want is Java - go for it. It's always the same old "best tool for the job". Just don't artificially narrow the choice of tools.
That pattern is called the Red Queen Syndrome and can be paraphrased thus: solving problems uncovers other problems.
Social media isn't simply "Media gone social".
5 quick business skills you can pick up right now
This is exactly the sort of thing I hope the FAA regulates. Multirotors now still have a very bad track record for long-term reliability, and even any-formfactor remotely operated air systems have been advised not to fly around densely populated areas for fear of harming someone.

And you want to fly these vehicles not only in densely populated (residential) areas, but in and around disaster and emergency situations?

I can see it being used as a tool by emergency response, but if I was a first responder and someone did that on my site I'd do what I could to get it down and stopping endangering everyone present.
The NY Times had an excellent excerpt of "The Circle", Dave Egger's book, called "We Like You So Much and Want To Know You Better":

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/magazine/dave-eggers-ficti...

The HN discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6461893
Bottled water quality is predictable, your next restaurant's plumbing condition is not.

I don't like branded bottled water but at least you know what you get.
Statcounter measures the amount of browsing, not unique people.

Netmarketshare attempts to measure the latter and shows IE on top.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...

So it depends on what your definition of "popular browser" is. Is it the browser that's used by most people? That would be IE. Is it the browser that most browsing happens? That would be Chrome. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that both Statcounter and Netmarketshare are not perfect and don't cover all or even most sites' logs.

As others have noted, W3schools only measures hits to the W3Schools site, which is not even close to be being representative of the web.
Don't Hire My Agency
I hope we commercializes drones, but I also hope he is cited for endangering the public. Those videos are basically how-to's for what NOT to do with responsibly operating a civilian drone.
TLDR:

1: social media is the convergence of communications and publishing

2: It's not "media gone social". Traditional/old media had no interest in "going social", and in fact viewed early internet/social media with disdain.

3: The phenomenon is better understood as "social networking + publishing -> disrupt media".

Posting this here because I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the traditional "old media" response to the advent of social media.

If you could go back in time, would it be possible to preserve old media hegemony, or was it an inevitable decline?
Great talk, very interesting. I feel even more introverted now than before I heard this.
Most of companies acquired have a California HQ office
We've only been friends for 45 days though. That's maybe like high five status.
> 2. If buffer is equal to url's scheme's default port,
set buffer to the empty string.
Marketers can track you by unique IDs from your phone's accelerometer
you are using references for already measured energies and orbital systems. For example, if you take the measured energy change for, say, but-1-ene and the estimated heat of formation difference for a C-H vs. C-C and hydrogen, you will get a good estimate for {alpha,omega} octadiene.

If you think you can do the same thing for ethene -> butadiene, you'll find yourself to be horribly wrong, because of extended conjugation networks.

So while for some cases it works, it is not always simple to go from known empiricial results to more complex structures using tables and addition and subraction. And in the case of the molecules I care about, there is pretty good reason to believe that the simple linear methods will fail.
You have a typo: Brandon Eich -> Brendan Eich. Not nitpicking, am compelled to point out since it is a name.
Quit = didn't log on for a week

::gasp::

Risible!
2. If buffer is equal to url's scheme's default port,
set buffer to the empty string.
Depends on the airspace classification above the farm (affects your airspace and how tall it is). Also technically you can only fly it if you're an amateur, which (as a professional farmer/operator) wouldn't qualify.

Often these places are pretty lax though, and if you already have clearance to fly a private aircraft there you can just advise your ATC and go from there.

If you're concerned about that, you have to get a CoA, and then the language of the CoA itself will outline who you have to notify, where you can/can't fly and what altitudes.
Sure - developers can access services that are cheaper than this. Outside of HN developers are a minority though and tools like Dropbox took a tech that was available to techies and brought it to the masses.

Some pointless comments here kicking a person while they are (or their server is) down - I'll never understand that mentality

Congratulations on the launch
To be honest, I mostly wanted to comment to share my anecdote and make a Prince reference. I'm not really trying to make an argument one way or another for browser popularity.

BTW, I personally think the browsing-time metric is better than unique-users, because applying the latter metric to music would have had Rebecca Black as the most popular artist of 2011. Which conclusion, though true under some definitions, might not be quite as useful as other possible conclusions.
Schwartz - a shell for Apple's Quartz 2D graphics programming - in Python
Dark-side market development
I don't intend this to be trollish but ...

I don't think you want users who; a) only use IE or b) believe in IE's infallability. Now that IE is not the dominant browser, we want IE to "work towards the specification". I'm really happy that IE9 and IE10 are so much more compatible than they were, but let's not go backwards!
Top Vines from Japan
Silicon Valley's Anti-Social Network
The galling thing about the Internet connection requirement was that it was extremely overbearing DRM that inconvenienced users in many cases and benefitted them in none. Requiring IPv6 doesn't have the same stink about it.
But at those prices, why not just get a MacBook Air? Sure, the build quality of the Zenbook is getting close to that of a MBA, but it's still has a ways to go yet it costs the same (or even more). Sure, it may have better specs, but really, for most people's use cases, the MBA is more than fast enough.
Ugh jaxb. I thought we had all moved on? Real men stax directly.
Ton's of great content in this series. Really interesting to hear how much CTO's think about company culture.
Google’s Schmidt ‘respects’ but disagrees with privacy complaints in Europe
Is Your Mobile Strategy Compatible With iOS 7?
I don't doubt that it may be a residual effect, but to say that it's an attempt at class warfare is to imply intent. I simply don't believe that intent is there. Then again, I generally err on the side of assuming people are acting somewhat rationally rather than maliciously irrationally.
That's what makes me wonder... How will they keep a plane flying at that altitude at 68mph? The thinner the air, the faster your plane must move.

(Ok, 250lbs is not that much weight, but you must add the plane's weight. And it does not have huge wings.)
See http://stackoverflow.com/a/4120034/168719 - that's the highest rated answer for the question "What is the simplest way to bind a group of 3 radiobuttons to a property of type int for values 1, 2, or 3?" Do I really need to say more :) Or http://blog.wouldbetheologian.com/2009/07/why-wpf-databindin... or http://paulstovell.com/blog/six-years-of-wpf - he also raises an important point: WPF never made any significant progress. I'm under impression that I've once seen a better article that sums it all up (consistently with my own experience), but I can't find it now, so these will have to do
5 things you can't forget if your running an event
Would be interesting to know what symmetric cipher was used as well as what the key exchange mechanism was. Probably far more important than key size.

I have a feeling it defaulted to DHE+AES256 which is known to be slow.

Also if AES was used, was it configured to use the native AES instructions?

Lots of questions about this benchmark.
Depends on what you mean by "basic web app". For example, the Erlang-based CMS Zotonic runs beautifully on a T1.micro, even with PostgreSQL and an Nginx proxy on the same box.
3. Amazon gives preferential treatment to merchants using their auxiliary services. They already give preferential treatment to merchants using Amazon Fulfilment by writing off (at least some of) the bad merchant feedback caused by fulfilment issues. This effects customers (as well as merchants) because from the customers perspective failed fulfilment is the same no matter who does it.
Know if the open-sourced it or is it just dead and gone?
Ironically, a large amount of the waste comes from the effort to avoid waste.

Weeks of development time have been spent dealing with how to keep our memory load under 1Gb, since that's how much RAM we have. Granted, 4GB of RAM would have been more than enough, but all that developer time saved the tax payer $20.

On the reverse side, I've seen half a million spent on hardware for a project where the sys-admin was making $35k.
After using a Surface Pro, Windows 8 began to make sense. Still I don't appreciate the lack of Start Menu in the desktop portion of the OS, fortunately Start8 compensates that nuisance.
I can't really make heads or tails of what you wrote, but I assume from footnote 2 that your currently wearing a bullet proof vest because there's a small probability that you could get shot.
There's a certain sort of "figure head" status that the pilot may assume, when degrees of control are acquiesced to external factors beyond the capacity for a mortal human's situational awareness. The global awareness of air traffic, and mechanical state is often placed beyond the scope and reach of the pilot's abilities as an individual.

But the decision to step over the threshold and place the airframe in a circumstance of danger rests with the pilot. The pilot possesses the choice and power to throttle up, and take flight. Regardless of prior certainties and ambiguities, a pilot makes the decision, estimates the risk and rolls the dice. The plane is in the air because of the pilot's direct action, even if decisions are made based on proxied information from inspectors or ground control.

The passengers, too, roll the dice by delegating control over their lives to the pilot. They've chosen to accept the implicit risks that the pilot has assessed.

People on the ground also collectively acquiesce to the risk of having planes over head. When we don't agree with the idea, sometimes the only way to settle matters is with anti-aircraft artillery.

So we do have a form of choice regarding whether or not UAVs are permitted over head. How the enforcement of such "authority" and "regulations" takes place might become it's own beast.
1128 days. PDF status?
I may be able to help here since I worked as a data analyst in the grocery world. I believe "retailers innovate at the front end" refers to the store specific details that are created by giving individual stores some freedom. For example, a product may be required to be on display at the front door of a store but store and category managers are given the freedom to choose which item it is. Big football game coming up near a NFL city? Maybe chips and soda.

As for packing, price, and promotions, it does have a bearing on how inventory and sales are recorded. Product packages, prices, and promotions change all the time and while it may be easy to keep track of sales, units sold, etc., the actual storage of this information is much more complex. Retailers need to structure their data in a way that allows analysts to determine how the sales were generated. In addition to knowing Coca-Cola had an increase in sales last month, innovation on packing, price, and promotions lead to technical requirements to know which specific UPC of Coca-Cola, at what specific price point, under what promotion, and at what location in the store drove those sales.
"rock solid tried and true technology"

Thanks. I needed a good laugh for the day.
This makes me never want to leave the US. I fear that I will be scrutinized at the border and not be allowed back. Is so ridiculous I drive down the street when a police officer gets behind me I get really anxious and will sometimes go off route just so they're not behind me.

I was born in Germany to two American parents that were in the military. So I'm afraid they may send me back to "where I came from".
Christopher Chabris Should Calm Down
Yet if you look at what's been revealed about the NSA's capabilities, they're excelling in some areas of technological execution.
Making full table scan 10x faster in InnoDB
Sorry, it wasn't really a thorough answer or intended as one.

Bad oversight: whoever's managing the project, doesn't understand the project. Not just, "I don't know how to read <some language>" lack of understanding, but "I don't know the difference between a spec and code". They don't specify terms that keep contractors in line which allow projects to run years and millions or billions over budget. Most of these contract managers aren't engineers, they may have engineers on staff, but it's not uncommon for those engineers to be employees of the same contractor that receives the benefits of the contract. The system is both incompetent and corrupted.

The companies receiving contracts that habitually run late and over budget are also some of the largest. Small contractors don't make it when this happens, but NG, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, they can survive the political fallout thanks to their clout.

If the companies have no oversight, and no accountability internally because they have no real concern for the other stakeholders (ie, the people paying them, the citizens/taxpayers), and the desire to make high quarterly profits, they'll rig the game by rent seeking, rather than completing a project effeciently and effectively and moving on to the next one. See NG and the maintenance of the JointSTARS aircraft as one such example. A rushed, but militarily valuable, project that had no maintenance plan in place, ends up contracted out to a company that destroyed one of the (few) planes and received no real punishment for it.

Thanks to the tenure-like nature of civil service, a large chunk of government employees are retired in place, new employees have no place to start (few positions opening), and those that get in have a terrible example in place and become retired in place after a handful of years themselves. They may start off dedicated to the job, and many do remain dedicated, but they are also frustrated by the processes involved and either quit or ride it out to retirement.

And regarding the platitudes, if companies and citizens (and consequently many of the elected and appointed officials) see profit as motive, rather than the future of the country or the society, then they make decisions based on that altered morality. Decisions based on short-term profit may not be harmful to long-term objectives, but they often are or are neutral to such objectives. A modern works project on the scale of the construction of the interstate system would likely never see the light of day, and if it did it would be mismanaged so as to never achieve its objectives.

Normally I type these up in emacs and copy them over, this is not a well formatted message, sorry about that.
The Android-x86[0] project has been doing this for a while! You can run android on x86 laptops that, in theory, don't suck and aren't built like crap. I'd suggest considering them.

http://www.android-x86.org/
Not at reasonable performance or in high availability mode. Like I said it is fine for testing and that is about it.
How the NSA Spies on You
I think the Oyua has really shown also that games work well with a controller. Many android games are just trying to use the screen to emulate what we're used to (buttons, d-pad, analog sticks, etc)
Rocket Lease Update Sep 2013
Nice interviews. I really enjoyed reading the answer of Alex Haro to the last 2 days worries. It definitely conveys the fact that technical issues are one component of the job, the others being often more human-related. Software engineers often their have strong opinions (and usually for the best) and making all work together, without going in a techie fight, can sometimes be a real juggling act.
...because Obama lived in Indonesia?
Obviously he folded it into little bits. :)
A new version of Windows Server doesn't address the problem of loading 64 JE files and 11 CSS files on every page. There is some programming ineptitude at play as well, though I realize that the article was focusing specifically on the new ObamaCare site.
One Result of the Fed’s Tapering Plan: Surging Bitcoin Downloads in India
The only way to kill them will be to destroy their brains...
Apigility - REST and RPC API builder for ZF2
Thank you!! It's a slow process, but I'd love to make more. Some ideas I have are: Stories of massive growth/scale, Stories of horrific bugs/failures, Stories of mistakes/regrets, Stories of introspection (realizing something about yourself that changes the way you approach work). I'm particularly interested in stories of conflicts and mistakes -- I feel like people don't share them enough and they can be really fascinating, valuable, and relatable.
Was going to say the same thing. I found it pretty distracting. It looks great, but at a detriment to usability.
I'm not sure that Microsoft's is a bad legacy. They did a whole hell of a lot to put programming and office tools in the hands of normal people.
Thanks for pointing this out. It's all too common to overlook employee contributions to projects.
C# has all of those listed features, yet is still usually considered at least okay by hipsters. :)
This I think it the best comment in the (what I found to be very interesting and fruitful) discussion. I'll be thinking more about what I see as an inherent conflict between science and religion, but thanks.
Bill Gates complains that people aren't doing real programming and people berate him to shut him up. Steve Jobs throws the first iPod into a fish tank and he's revered as a God.

I guess it's no wonder why the mainstream of Apple and Microsoft is what it is.
If you ever find yourself considering whether it's IE or the other browsers, that are doing it wrong... just assume IE is wrong, and you will most likely be right.
It's more like a very inconsistent difficulty. It will work fine for one person with a specific pile of hardware, then you look at a different person or part of the hardware pile gets replaced and suddenly nothing works.
The Performance of Open Source Software: Haskell's Warp
Should Mathematicians and Computer Scientists take NSA-Funding?
Thank you for the link. I didn't know Jobs and Gates where fighting IBM together back then.
Why makes Python so wildly popular?
This is why I'm envious of cities with real transit. Driving sucks.
What Do You Make Me Better At?
Typescript is surely the way to go for writing. But what about stuff that is already written? Many of the samples are code ported from C#/.NET.
"My first thought would be to scoff at your criticism. Would the birds' travel patterns be any less impressive if they were resting for very short periods during these 200 days?"

The criticism isn't aimed at the birds; it is aimed at the logic of the researchers. The critic claims their conclusion does not follow from their data.
Founder Stories: Walker Williams of Teespring (YC W13)
At an individual level: How many programmers who are good enough to get a job that pays well in the private sector want to take a job (either in the government or for its contractor) with all that bureaucratic overhead?
Donation Gandhi - Web presence for nonprofits
Lots of things changed, especially unions and labor costs. The guy who digs a subway or water tunnel in NYC today probably makes $250k, retires at 55, and makes $150k for the rest of his life.

The guys who built the Brooklyn bridge were day laborers who made nothing and died young.
Show HN: Java race against the clock