skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing about visionaries is that they can see trends long before the others, too, while the others can look at the same thing and see nothing - and therefore think they're crazy.

They can see trends when stuff goes from 0.001%, to 0.002% the next year, then 0.003% the year after that and so on. Most other people see a trend only when it rises from 5%, to 10%, to 15%, etc.

People hear some police unit bought a tank, and think "ok, but it's not a police state". Then they see more units buying tanks and other war equipment, and they still think "ok, but it's not a police state yet". Then they see the police using the same equipment against protesters, and still say "ok, but it's still not a police state yet. America is not Russia! etc".

Then, they start barging into people's home for things they've searched online, and for protests they "liked" online, and start thinking "ok, maybe we are a police state now".

The problem is now it's going to be a very hard uphill battle to roll everything back. Now only do you have the police units wanting to keep all that equipment they bought, and thinking they now absolutely need it to "keep them safe", but you also have contracts lobbying to keep the police buying such equipment from them, and the federal government supporting it, too, and so on and so on.

And all of that perhaps could've been stopped early on 10-15 years ago, if people actually believed the people who started saying US is becoming a police state, and didn't wait until the very last moment, until nothing can be rolled back anymore, just like with the NSA spying.

There are at least 2 trends that are starting now, that you can start fighting early, before it goes too far: domestic drone surveillance, and NSA collaboration with domestic agencies.

These trends are very early, and most people are still probably thinking "ok, but let's see how it goes first, before we get outraged". Sure, you can do that. But before you know it, drones will surveil everything from the sky for the government, and NSA sharing with DEA, FBI, DHS, and even the police will be done "as a matter of fact". Don't believe me? Look how DoJ thinks about this:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/doj-if-we-can-tra...

You have to start fighting the abuses at the very first signs, not when the abuses are already an "entrenched system" and a culture of doing things for the authorities.
Custom database for Rails branch
25 years ago you would have written the above, but with simply replacing Chinese with Japanese. Lets fast forward to now and see how that worked out.

Nope, still speaking English.
that makes no sense. umming seems like you can't think fast enough for your mouth, so you're buying time with fillers

If you're thinking faster than you can talk, you should be stuttering.
Unbloodybelievable. Or perhaps not, given that it is a .gov IT project.

Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.
Thanks a lot for the replies guys. I had a feeling I might be paying too much. As since I hired my contractor he's suddenly been able to afford to set up and office and hire other developers that are charged at the same rate. Don't get me wrong, he's a really skilled developer and puts my JS skills to shame. But I'm feeling like the price per project seems to be creeping up exponentially. I'll try giving some smaller jobs to other devs in Bangladesh & India to see what the quality of work is like in comparison. Cheers.
Note: This happened 2 years ago.
I used it for some time and I quite liked it, more than Colemak. I was reaching 80-90 wpm (I'm about 140-150 wpm on QWERTY). However English is not my native language and since QGMLWY is optimized for English, it wasn't a viable alternative for me in long run. Interestingly, even though I quit typing on QGMLWY long ago, when I occassionally switch to that layout (I still have it installed), I'm able to type on it. Muscular memory dies hard. I do make typos, but I feel that if I returned to practice, I'd pick it up again quickly.
> Before you scream "bullshit!", bear in mind that this research has been used by NASA to ensure that personality types that don't mix well don't end up as astronauts together in extremely dangerous space missions, and it also helped Bill Clinton to unseat an incumbent president in the 1992 US Presidential race.

In what way are either of those things evidence in support of your claims...? NASA might be interested in this research but this appeal to authority is fallacious -- NASA is an organization interested in physics and astronomy. If you told me NASA claimed someone found water on Pluto, I'd believe you. But personality tests are not that.

And presidential races are just so full of BS to begin with. This last cycle was proof of that. It's basically impossible to say that anything in particular helped any given candidate in any given year, but every pundit loves to speculate anyway. So there's plenty of theorizing to go around.

Nothing you posted (including in your citations) gives me any kind of predictive link between the theory you espouse and how people will actually behave.

To make matters worse:

> Everybody has a mix of some/all of the above, but one personality type dominates.

Makes the whole thing sound vacuous.
At a hackathon about 6 months ago I decided to write a seam carver [0] in Go. I had no previous Go experience (not even "hello world"), so it was entirely new to me. Not only did I find the language a pleasure to use, but I was supremely impressed by the standard library and its heavy support for image manipulation.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving
If these activities are funded by Chinese government, I would suggest you make good use of them. The ancient China (around 600BC-200BC) is the golden age of Chinese culture. If you can learn from Rome people, you will benefit from China history and philosophers.
I found this to be true. I typed Dvorak for a few years while in University, but switched back to QWERTY when I entered the workforce. I was pleasantly surprised that the increased speed and comfort I had attributed to Dvorak was maintained when I went back to QWERTY. It may have been less efficient than putting the same time I to traditional typing training would have been, but it definitely did increase my general skills as a typist to practice a new layout "from scratch".
Simple templating with regular expressions
A friend of mine was on Shark Tank last season and they got mocked by the sharks for their poor business. Nevertheless, they were able to sell the entire company soon after the show aired, all due to the exposure.
Remember how this went down.

DevelopmentSeed (the guys behind MapBox) designed & developed a frontend site and then handed it over to HHS. That's where the good stuff comes from. Clearly however, whoever received the project from that point onwards doesn't understand things like asset minification or packaging.

My completely random conjecture is that whoever inherited DevelopmentSeed's code does not know how this stuff should work.

Also see: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/pro...
Zoomquilt
this blew my mind.
I'm also a sysadmin. I tried to switch to Mac mainly for the more polished os expectation.

I found I had a less polished experience. I support Linux. I program as a hobby, I found the development experience on Mac frustrating it wasn't as easy to set up an environment similar to my Linux one at work and on my Rackspace servers.

I really don't consider the closer to Unix a valid argument. There's tons of operating systems closer to Unix that OSX, check out *BSD or jump over to OpenSolaris/Illumos.
What I do is I have a second layout just for symbols which I toggle with Alt Gr using my right thumb. This way I can stay in the home row and accessing symbols is almost as fast as letters. You'll need a wide layout with 12 home row keys for this to be comfortable though (my right index rests at the l instead of j).

As a bonus I map Shift to the right Win key so that I can press it with my thumb as well. Using the thumb for Ctrl is also doable but it's a little annoying when you need to use the same hand for the combo.
This is a REST viewpoint so assumes all services are exposed by a REST API. ESB sits in the infrastructure layer and not the presentation - so these cannot be the same.

But I think you are right that in some enterprises ESB connects everything but in this case this is a really nice presentation to watch - back from 2008 http://www.infoq.com/presentations/webber-guerilla-soa
Middle Class Young People to be Materially Worse of than Their Parents
Oh come off it. This is an addition to an existing, very familiar category of loudspeaker announcements advising people that doing X might get them into trouble, where X has long been acknowledged to be a bad idea. You hear similar announcements in airports all over the world. Would you genuinely prefer they left the last line off the announcement and had more people being "not very good at comedy" as a result?
OpenX Sells Off OpenX Source To Developer
Intro to CS is a top 3 class. Good news and my major takeaway from the article.
Help me understand this, does this mean we're going to have back an OpenX _open source_ project?
That's where computerised tools come in. You can give the students tasks to do, the computer supervises how these tasks are completed, and suggests new tasks to do depending on how previous tasks were handled. The task of the teacher would then be that of a supervisor rather than that of an instructor.
Here it goes... http://www.revive-adserver.com/
Err. I'm confused. This sort of message has been there for years in Denver's airport. Is this news because they just added it to texas now, and we didn't expect a haven of freedom and left wing ideology like texas have this sort of thing?
Show HN: A site dedicated to special anniversaries for each calendar day
Many people, but precisely not "competent, intelligent human beings with discretion". The very people who would make the TSA (or any other place) a better organization have the ability to navigate away from thankless, low paid occupations.
I don't know why, but I always love comments more than code itself.
Why are SWAT now being used in no-knock arrests

Because they exist, and employing them justifies their existence. In past decades, SWAT was only found in large urban police departments. Now many cities that rarely if ever have criminal activity requiring a SWAT-like response have some form of SWAT, critical incident, etc. teams that need something to do.
Responsive vertical timeline with CSS
That was my impression as well. Have you published your seam carver anywhere?
Show HN: Retina Twitter Chrome Extension
'a bunch of lines removed/added' is a great representation for stuff that consist of semi-atomic lines, like code.

It is a horrible representation for stuff where edits may consist of both typo fixes, and separate wording changes in a single sentence - where you might want to accept change to one word and reject change to another word, despite that they came from a single "commit" to a single line.

For collaborative text editing both word's track changes and google docs features are far superior to git.
If the US government followed the example of the Japan or the UK in banning virtually all domestic firearm ownership, the cries of "police state" would be even more deafening...
Resolution requires contrast
Okay, as I wrote in another comment, I once learned Colemak (I didn't like it very much) and subsequently, CarpalX (QGMLWY) which I liked and I soon reached a reasonable speed of about 80-90 wpm on it (which is about 2/3 of my QWERTY speed).

What were my reasons of trying new keyboard layout?

- "The hipster thing" (so that one doesn't count).

- Curiosity. I wanted to find out what the fuss is about - whether the talk behind it isn't just that, a hipster thing itself

- I like to learn and I love the feel of improving, of being better than the day before

- It's very comfortable once you get used to it.

Adressing your objections:

"- I think it would take me a while to be as fast as on my current layout QWERT[ZY]."

1. The time will pass anyway.

2. I never typed faster than on QWERTY, but I'm not really a typist. I'm not a court reporter. My productivity is not directly proportional to my typing speed. It's the thinking that takes most of the time anyway. So I can sacrifice some of the speed for the sake of comfort.

"None of my friends and coworkers ever complained about keyboard layout and the urge to change

This I believe, but as Henry Ford remarked: "if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." :)

"You may not have your new keyboard layout available at different workplaces."

That's obvious, but I, for one, don't change workplaces that often. And I only use two computers: one at home, one at work. Installing a preconfigured keyboard layout on a new machine takes a minute.

I mainly returned to QWERTY (I'm repeating myself again, but so be it) because English isn't my native language. All these alternative keyboard layouts are optimized for English. I use a QWERTZ mutation (PN-87 - rare and somewhat forgotten even in Poland) for typing in Polish. So sticking to QGLWMY could only ever make like 1/3 of my typing life better :) If I used no other language than English, I probably wouldn't have looked back.
A Novel Prompts a Conversation About How We Use Technology
From the article:

“I am sure this is the first time in my experience we have come across what was literally a caffeine overdose. "

The energy mints have been around a long time, as have other high caffeine sources. And yet apparently this sort of tragedy is so completely rare.

Hopefully then, we wont have any alarmists calling for banning something that has been so safe apparently.
London UK: Red Badger - http://red-badger.com

We're a creative software workshop working on the leading edge of tech. We've been implementing Node.js projects for enterprise size clients for 2 years now. Our team is the perfect balance between creative and tech. Our UX people understand the technical limitations of what they are designing. Our techies understand UX. Everyone sits side-by-side and they talk, solving complex problems together.

We're passionate about providing value to our clients. We use agile processes such as Scrum and Kanban to deliver quickly. We use lean startup principles to innovate, failing fast & failing cheaply.

Most importantly, we have strong opinions, weakly held. We're always adaptable to new ways of working, new technology and new ideas.

At Red Badger our tools are chosen to fit each project, not the other way around. We are technologists, geeks and polyglots.

Technology doesn't stand still and neither do we. On a regular basis we get our whole tech team together (developers, testers, agile project managers) and review all the tech we've used across all our projects to derive what's hot and what's not in our world of tech.

Far from an exhaustive list, you can find the results of our most recent Tech Round Table with our favourites on our website: http://red-badger.com/services/tech/.

We're currently hiring into the following positions:
* Technical Architect - leading interesting new projects across multiple enterprise clients. http://red-badger.com/about-us/join-us/senior-developer-tech...

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The full set of job listings you can apply to is at http://red-badger.com/about-us/join-us/
You can also email us directly at hello@red-badger.com
Our stackoverflow page is here:http://careers.stackoverflow.com/uk/company/red-badger

We have won a few new key accounts so are looking to expand our team. Quality is of the upmost importance however. We will not hire for the sake of growth. We only hire great people.
Very well said. I guess another way to think about it is the famous story about 'how to boil a frog'.

People tolerate small incremental changes until it is far too late, like the frog that tolerated small incremental increase in the water temperature and now it is boiling...
This is funny coming from a nation that regularly violates the freedoms and basic human rights of its citizens.
Creator here. Just made this to scratch my own annoying itch that Twitter still looks so crap on retina displays.

It's super simple right now, just replaces the 48px avatars with their 73px versions. There's generally a bigger version of profile pics too but those don't keep to the square ratio so not using those yet.

It's my first attempt at a chrome extension. Pull requests highly welcome: https://github.com/jordn/retina-twitter
In the book "The History of Farting", an A-Z of different farts are described. Great for a laugh, but I doubt they would make good hostnames. You would be too busy laughing at the fact that the "J-curve fart" only exists theoretically, while your co-workers would be attempting to ignite theirs.
I mostly agree. I think they could have left out the threat of arrest, and simply announced "do not make jokes about security or terrorism in the secure area" as has been posted on signage already for years.

This would make the announcements more like the "do not leave your bags unattended" and "do not park in the loading zone" etc. that drone on in the background of every airport already.
Assuming that everything you don't personally understand is "just a hipster thing" is such a shitty attitude!

You offer five cons, which _to_you_ outweigh the pros – which are so obvious it seems redundant to even mention them, but let's just say, to sum it up, ergonomics.

It's very well known that full-time IT work takes a heavy toll on your body. That's why reasonable people make sure to work with decent posture, to take frequent breaks, and to exercise. It's why decent companies make sure to provide high-quality tools to help their employees stay healthy and avoid injury.

And it's why some people are interested in improving the ergonomics of typing, which – as everyone knows – is fraught with the dangers of repetitive stress.

That doesn't mean that keyboard layout choice is the most important thing in IT ergonomics. But for some people, switching to Dvorak or Colemak or whatever else seems like a reasonable choice, and many of them, myself included, are very satisfied with it, even while working in a collaborative environment where others use QWERTY.

For you to call this "just a hipster thing" is embarrassingly dumb! Do you say the same about ergonomic keyboards, rollermice, and saddle chairs?
Isn't that what he's doing? "X needs to die" quite clearly means "you people in industry need to stop using X", not "burn X at the stake".
This is exactly what I've done with KeyRemap4MacBook. It has built in options for switching around numbers and symbols, as well as changing {} and []. Makes so much more sense for a programmer, and you can make multiple sets of options so you can disable them if someone else needs to use your machine for a bit.
> If two people wanted to have a serious discussion about individual rights while waiting in a checkpoint line at the airport, would they also be subject to arrest?

I'd go based on the working assumption of "Yes" for that one. So much for free speech.
Would you say Go is an ideal language for potentially creating high performance graphical manipulation plugins? (Say, for Photoshop or similar.)
I use programmer dvorak, which also has swapped numbers and symbols and it's a blessing. The good thing about this one is also changes layout of the symbols so it's really a lot nicer to use.
Suggesting that prime numbers are the atoms of arithmetic seems inappropriate. Can anyone explain this? Am I looking at a journalism major's summary of research?
Mapping the Broken City
The advantages are speed and comfort. Yes, it's hard to learn and you'll be slower than with QWERTY for a while, but it pays off in the end. Consider it a long term investment in productivity.
That's the way it goes. Originally, the prohibition was about making jokes about bombs. Once there's that leg in, it can be escalated. It's very much like the acronym IED. For years it meant "improvised explosive device." I was floor when I heard a newscaster use it to mean "improvised electronic device" in reference to something someone brought into an airport.
Because in light of the recession, Goldman Sachs has become snootier about GPAs.
The article seems to contradict itself:

>Dr Dragana Cvijan, a pathologist, told the court that 79 milligrammes of caffeine has been known to cause death and that a post mortem revealed Mr Jackson had 155 milligrammes in his system when he died.

I think this is to be interpreted to mean that caffeine overdose is not the only way in which caffeine could cause or contribute towards death.
Sadly, he said himself that he picked this number with nothing else in mind that "a simple smallish number".

ref: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/310/why-did-douglas...
It's a lot of money in some ways and not a lot of money in others. It's an exchange that will be used by millions of people who will make decisions to spend thousands of dollars a year... The amount the exchange costs is a fraction of a rounding error in the scheme of things. I'm sure the insurance companies themselves have spent vastly more just getting their systems set up.
This should not be causing indignation. I think most of you agree with Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes that:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

(whether or not you agree with the decision in the Schenck case.)

I assume that the inappropriate jokes that are being referred to are related to people claiming that they have a dangerous item. We arrest people for making bomb threats (and we shut down schools in response to them), and I wouldn't expect any different at an airport.
And the phrase that sums it all: "Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. "

The problem is not being more creative, the problem is having the space to use it.

Bosses will hear the latest fads but when it's time to "put the money where your mouth is", it's back to the 19th century.
Make Prince Rupert's Drops - Glass Turned Hand Grenade
Making jokes about blowing up a plane has always been illegal. Now it's all jokes about security.

Example: "Hey, can you see my underwear with that thing?"

Their sign says that you are subject to arrest for any joke. That's the problem.
Sys-Con launches Ulitzer, attacks community and content creators
Because they lack the ability to rewind their lives and change the decisions that resulted in their being trapped by obligations and scrambling to get by at age 30 or 40 or 50? And, instead of providing substantial adult job retraining assistance, the US federal gov't spends trillions on dubious military adventures and the domestic security state.