skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dart is trying to rip off Smalltalk and Erlang while putting on Algol sheep's clothing. I have no doubt they will be successful at the Smalltalk part as most of the team seem to be ex-Smalltalkers or ex-Smalltalk VM'ers. I don't know enough about Erlang to know if Dart isolates approximate it.
How to Evaluate Web Application Security Scanners
Canadian IT firm at centre of Obamacare foul-up furor
You know how it goes, "explain everything, predict nothing".

Or maybe you don't, because I just made that up, but it fits.
I believe it's unfair to include Diamond in this genre, as although he's popular, he's also a thinker (and prof) with an academic's consistency and attention to data. The Freakonomics guys are also closer to data, but episodically popularising rather than Diamond's coherent meta-narratives. The biggest argument you could level against Diamond might be one of leaning too heavily on "geographical determinism", which he can veer towards at times.
CGI is a Canadian company, but CGI Federal is a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary.
Ask HN: How do you do webdesign/frontends when you are a backend engineer?
TL;DR
As a single founder/coder/hobbyist how do you do webdesign / frontend of a web service you build when all you ever did was devops/backend engineering?

Long story:
I wish to build a site relevant to my passion (travelling) which I think could also be very useful to other travellers. I wouldn't call it a "startup" by who knows - it might turn into one.

The issue: all I ever did and enjoyed was the invisible part of web services - server setup and management, deployments, monitoring, performance tweeks. But the core functionality of my "startup" will need a slick and modern responsive web interface. It will be close to impossible to use templates or CMSes like wordpress for it.

I enjoy reading about new UI toolkits, JS libraries and CSS helpers. I even built a slick and modern submitting form with PureCSS ! ;-) But no doubt I have no "taste of art / design" so I will never be able to do anything close as my friend did with html tables and gifs for spacing 10 years ago.

How do you, fellow engineers, coupe with that? I do not want it to block me from working on my project.
You'll probably be downvoted since this isn't typically considered HN-worthy content, but I have to admit I chuckled too.
Here is my personal experience with some of that "poorly written" code: http://www.postlibertarian.com/2013/10/yes-the-obamacare-web...

> the text on the sign-up page, the front-end javascript validation on the sign-up page, and the text on the help page all have different requirements for valid usernames in the database!
I didn't, now I cannot unsee it, damn it.
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Yeah, because you're going to get the highest quality from firms that want to do completely speculative work. That's why 99 designs has the best designs, right? If you know you're the best, you'll compete for free!
has anyone here actually attempted to use the site, or just reading about how it fails? The only commenter I've read was using IE.

I just signed up and had no problems.
it's a different user interface paradigm, mainly it's not graphically sophisticated (independent streams of text vs dynamic bitmap overlays)and less time integrated (you have to define how and which script to run when something change). But at the time it was thought so, that's how I felt reading bits of this book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environmen....
So the government has a monopoly over dolling out plan s on the exchange. In addition you need to be "cleared" by their system before you can get subsidies. Also there are subsidies, so they are directly paying for parts of healthcare. I mean before this I would call my insurence company and I would work with them for insurence. Now before I get insurence I or they need to interface with 30 government agencies to get information about me so I can be approved for a plan.

Then I can't even choose a plan I want since the goverment mandates levels of coverage.

Please take your blinders off your enabling your party to do horrible things.
It's fascinating that so many of them are ex-KGB. These guys would have been painstakingly vetted for their impeccable ideological purity before being recruited in the first place, let alone promoted. These were the ultimate guardians of the Communist system, and they turned hyper-capitalist overnight. I guess it's like we see in the West when holier-than-thou politicians are enmeshed in a corruption scandal but like everything Russian, executed on a grand scale. Have you seen the size of their novels?!
So what? What's the problem about that?
Easy for me as I know black metal (extreme metal in general) quite well, so I got 18/20 (they did put some obscure bands in there). But that is funny how close some names look/sound.

As someone else pointed out, they should've added more Swedish bands (was Marduk there? I don't think so?) so that it would be harder even for Swedes, I guess. But then again, Sweden is better known for death metal and melodic death metal (that must sound funny for non-metalheads!), and those bands tend to have english names, such as At The Gates, In Flames, Dismember or Entombed. Hard to mistake for Ikea brands!
Ask HN: I've been asked to give a speech: I am terrified.
In one month I should give a speech in public -- my first speech in public -- for a big event.

The problem is: I am psychologically unstable, last year I suffered from a major depression which degenerated into agoraphobia. For a long time (~5 months) I was unable to leave my house.
Now I feel better (I didn't see any psychatrist), and I thought I was ready for "regular-life" activities, but receiving this invitation had led me down again.

I've always been a shy, introvert person, and -- given my recent past -- I don't think I'm ready to talk to hundreds of people, even if I have good experience on the speech's subject.

Any advice? Should I go?
Thank you.
Here’s a link to the original research article: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/41/16384.full
What is so bad about this (obviously autogenerated) code?
Conway’s Game of Life and Three Millennia of Human History
... all of which reddit (and to a lesser extent, slashdot and disqus) do just as well.
Map: These are the cities that climate change will hit first
One reason is ridiculous schedules. Last year, I worked on a government contract where a law was signed on September 1st that required a system be in place to make payments on January 1st. So four months for vendor procurement, development, testing, and roll-out. The development time ended up being two weeks. That's not going to be quality software. If it even works, everyone is happy enough.
The Chicken or the Pig?
Also, if your net worth is -$0.05, you're worth more than all of those with less than you combined! Not only that but as someone with a net worth of -$10k, you too are worth more than the bottom 5% [1] of Americans combined as well. I guess a more interesting metric would be to count people with debt in these combined statistics as having nothing rather than having negative net worth, even if they do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6527192
Jetway: The pop-up hotel for private jets
Oh well, I guess even Swedish names would be pretty easy for Swedes, when you have he choice between "hell" and "kitchen table" :D
So it's a lot like the west.
What a hoot. I ended up with 16/20 and I know nothing about Death Metal. Not sure if I'm proud that I know so many pieces of Ikea furniture...

Some of those band pics are downright scary.
Agreed. They should make a sequel.
Take a look at what the GDS is doing here in the UK.

* hire really smart people with up-to-date views on technology [1]
* build on, and release new open source [2]

[1] https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples
[2] https://github.com/alphagov
Its hard to implement type inference and type classes unless you carefully design the language to accommodate it from day 1. For example, return-type polymorphism (functions like `read` or `return`) is particularly tricky, specially in the more dynamic languages.
You can get a VM cheaply, but then you have to manage everything yourself. I don't have a lot of experience in this field and would be completely lost if something suddenly goes down or I need to scale. With Heroku and MongoHQ, you don't have to worry about these things anymore and its really easy to set up. And for someone like me who would need several hours in setting up everything on my own server, even the paid plans don't sound too expensive.
So this is what $634mm gets you?

https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registra...
I can't imagine PS4 not supporting IPv6. Hell, Windows XP has since SP1, though I find it extremely odd that none of the current consoles (PS3, 360) do.
Non-fragmented IPv6 network can bring better latency to than a fragmented IPv4 network. At this point, IPv4 address fragmentation is only getting worse.
I hope it's okay to vote Like and Dislike for javascript
I see the only lesson here: NEVER use cell phones for activities that you want to keep secret. They are known to be easily trackable and heavily backdored. Linux netbook (single-use&destroy for extra credits) with TOR + encrypted mail or IM on public WiFi networks would be much more secure and not so impractical on such high stakes.
Well, the finger is pointing at the NSL recipients. They are supposed to be the only people that know about the order, so they carry the can if it gets leaked.
Oh wait, I can plug a project here!

http://www.deathmetal.org/

The net's oldest and longest-running metal site.
If that was the case you screwed up forwarding ports 88 and 3074 to your xbox. Anybody that cares about XBL match outcomes does not connect without making use of port forwarding or their router's "DMZ." As far as comparative advantages go, this helped you with the bottom 20% of XBL. Moreover I am pretty sure that MW2 did lag compensation so I am not sure it was an "advantage."
Dude here in england where the government provides health care , it works out that private care is worse in standard (more fuckups personal experience with private cancer care vs nhs cancer care) and generally the public option runs trouble free , sure there will be teething problems on the first days of it opening but in 10 years time , you'll be wondering what kind of idiotic state ever decided to make it a private only system in the first place and what self depreciating lies you've had to swallow about freedom and open markets to get into this state.
Try being an active member on 50 forums. Try being an active member on 50 mailing lists.

When there's some software that lets me see all activity from all forums in one place, I might consider using one again :P (RSS is a good start in theory, but I've not seen a single forum which uses it effectively)
I think the Ikea products are named after places.
Back in the 1990s, I used to wander around IKEA with death metal friends, reading out the names of products in the "death metal" voice.

According to staff there we weren't the only ones.
you can get some inspiration from websites like themeforest(where you can buy some nice templates for cheap prices) once you have a theme you like you can implement that one or just adapt it to your needs but having a base to work on I think it's important. I understand you, I am a web developer, I can write css/javascript and anything I need but my taste is terrible. So that is what I usually do, I begin with a base and start to work on it, adapting, changing, adding and then I polish the result. It's not the best thing to do but usually works fine. If I had tons of money to spend I would probably do something different but since I don't...
That did not work very well with the F-35 joint strike fighter. The requirements where/are unreasonable
I just implemented this tool yesterday - its awesome! took less than five mins to go from zero to saving files on the server.
And the Swedes helped invent death metal via Bathory. It's all your fault!
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I still wonder if they can ever become a profitable everything store.
Every metalhead on HN right now is debating with themselves on whether or not to remark on the the fact that most of those bands were black metal. Metalheads love genre taxonomy (well, music fans do in general). To 'get it wrong' can stir a whole cauldron of reactions!
How about the CBS video linked above? Or the links below? Or the countless other media accounts of the launch being a "complete disaster"? Or all the comments on this very page of HNers not being able to use the site?

Not even the administration's biggest defenders are trying to spin this as a successful launch.

Are you really implying the media as a whole is biased against Obama?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we...

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/poll-rollout-health-exchanges...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h...
Above all, the brand credibility goes a long way... In a far-west like the Web is, where rip-offs happen all the time, people tend to choose those few services that prove them selves worthy of their trust... JustFab was discussed here just a few days ago...
I agree. All those external services have to be up for the users get a bad experience.
I measured the emission spectrum of a tungsten lamp in the laboratory a few years ago. I don’t remember all the details, but in the visible spectrum the tungsten the amount or radiation that the tungsten lamp emits is roughly 0.3-0.4 times the radiation that a black body would emit.

I googled a little and found these two articles:

1) http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/seri/ApJ../0061//000... :

* In page 151 it has a graph of the emissivity of tungsten for different colors and temperatures. More emissivity for blue (A) than for red (C).

* In page 156 it has a greph of the difference between the color temperature and the true temperature. For 3000K, the difference is only ~100K. I think that it’s changes the color only slightly.

2) http://physicsed.buffalostate.edu/pubs/TPT/TPTDec99Filament....

* More friendly version, with an experiments with actual lamps.

* In page 525 it explains that the emissivity if tungsten at that temperature in ~0.42 but you must introduce a correction because the glass of the lamp absorbs a 8% of the light.
I've yet to work on a non open source project where the i18n messages aren't a mess. Am I the only one not really surprised at this code?
Sounds awesome! I'll put in a bid, then hire the cheapest programmers I can to make it look like I did some work, then of course I'll lose the competition and still get paid for 3 months. Repeat and you have a viable business. And you never need to actually support software after the 3 months is up.
Incomplete code (or error messages) should not be found in production.
And people complain about politics stories making it to the HN frontpage..
By comparison, the top 400 people in the US have 2.5% of the US's wealth (using Forbes's 2010 numbers of $1.37 trillion for the top 400 households, and the Federal Reserve Board's $54.9 trillion US net worth)
An asteroid named XKCD
I lost my group health plan, which I had for fifteen years, recently so I has experienced the web site first hand :-)

My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access.

Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. Couldn't they have posted that as a huge banner message and let people know? I had four days of frustration trying to login.

Then, when I got the reset password link, and followed it, one of the profile verification questions they asked for resetting my password WAS A QUESTION THAT I HAD NOT BEEN ASKED so I had no way to answer it. I wrote down my profile questions so I am fairly sure of this. wTF
I had to do that for SQL
Diamond is a little different, but he is working outside of his original field and produces very mixed responses from anthropologists (e.g. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-does-... ).
> I never understood why mailing lists prosper when newsgroups are mostly dead

Spam, AFAIK. I don't know why, but spam on mailing lists seems relatively rare, compared to usenet which was ~99% spam last time I looked.
There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful.

What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?
"Support", as in, being able to connect using IPV6, in a IPv6 network, is one thing.

Requiring it in order to enable some functionality, is something else entirely. This might spark customer demand.
I don't use IDEs, but it seems that there are only 2 or 3 that really work: Visual Studio for C/C++, and Eclipse/Intellij for Java. Do you use one of those?
Expert Interviews No 1: Personal Trainer Paul Cook
uhh PHP dislikes are going up (what a surprise)
That sounds like poor BA/spec work. BA asks: "what do we need from this username". BA should ask "what do we need from usernames overall"?

It's always going to be hard to be agile on federal contracts - there're too many customers to really get a clear view from them.
>It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for

It's probably just a single contract with milestones that correspond to payments. Like "completed design" means they get 10%.
National Public Radio had a good report on 8 October 2013, "Health Exchange Tech Problems Point To A Thornier Issue,"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424...

that discusses the broader issue of United States federal government contracting for information technology services. Some reforms are suggested in that story that would help more competent startup companies compete against the established federal contractors that win most of the big contracts. The specialized skill that the incumbents bring to the contracting process is not specialized skill in data-processing or programming for federal agencies, but rather specialized skill in navigating the federal bureaucracy for bidding on federal contracts.
Something similar for Sweden ?
for only 50k parallel connections

Its hard to win when you set the goals like this (low), too
I do miss those in Go.
I hate to be THAT guy but I got 19/20 because Norden, whilst being a table, is also a very kvlt black metal band.[1]

I picked up their full length at Wacken 2006 for €3. It was not good.

[1]: http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Norden/11433
Training on using their platform for their commercial benefit. That should be the default anyway.
Alright, so what life time can one expect as a customer? And economically speaking, how expensive will a battery swap be?

The whole reason I'm asking is this 20 year old skateboard I have down the hallway, which is working flawlessly with every single component easily swappable :-/
Even easier if you're both swedish and have at least some knowledge in metal bands (coming from a guy that shared rehearsal space with Meshuggah in the late 80's).
Here are 3 alternatives:

1. Mao: https://github.com/azer/mao

2. Zen: https://github.com/pranavraja/zen

3. GoConvey: https://github.com/smartystreets/goconvey
I would think WaPo has plenty of sources, and if anyone was wiling to speak on the record they would have published those quotes.
It's not speculative? If the work achieves the stated end-goal-metric ("A citizen of the state of South Tennechigan can purchase a health insurance plan subject to the given constraints.") the operator is awarded the revenue offered ("$150 per successfully sold health insurance plan").

Think of it as a feed-in tariff. If you successfully purchase, install and connect a solar panel, and the panel feeds power into the grid, you're paid. If not, because you screw up any of these steps, you don't get paid. If you make a substandard installation (say, in the shadow or on a north-facing roof), you get paid less. The only thing that matters is the desired end goal: solar power is fed into the grid. You carry the risk, you get paid for the result.

The idea is that (at least in these cases) it's much, much easier to describe and document a desired outcome than to accurately describe and anticipate all the variables that potentially affects the outcome.
Except today's Macbooks will be outdated and superseded in 5-10 years, whereas a skateboard won't.
So you're commenting on something (Oculus) you clearly have no knowledge of.
It's funny that people here are mocking Gladwell and Diamond for presenting popularized, simplified interpretations of the science, but those people are doing the same thing by simplifying the works of the authors.

There's nothing "magic" about 10,000 hours. The implication is that hard work, practice and luck play a bigger role in success than most people believe. It's a theory. Sorry if it was too nuanced for you.
Depends on the products, many are places, some are given names, etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikea#Product_names
Thanks to Lavabit’s design, Levison could not simply offer a tap of a particular user’s communications if that user had paid for a secure, encrypted account.

That line really bothered me. The government demanded access to all user's data and this line places the responsibility for that onto Lavabit. The government wants all of our data, all of the time. They are the responsible party not Lavabit.
Welll, the reasoning behind it might be from two facts - a) Ruby and Python both are far better beginner/learner languages than Java & others - I mean, if some kid wanted to learn programming, I'd suggest to start in those because they don't have distracting boilerplate; and (b) other things being equal, Java does get you better execution performance than Ruby/Python; not on C level but it's halfway in between.

But still "developers too good for Ruby and Python" is an interesting statement; IMHO the only ones who'd claim to be 'too good' for Python/Ruby would be authors of their own languages or maybe the hardcore Lisp or Haskell crowd.
According to the "about" page, it re-orders blocks of colour in rainbow order.

I'm starting to think of something that might be good advice in general - 10 lines of actual working example code is worth 1000 lines of abstract documentation. (I've also been working with Twisted recently, getting frustrated with documentation that's full of recursive jargon...)
Extend Drake (“Make for data”) with a Simple Clojure Project
Violence is not an appropriate response. The first two are sufficient.
Interestingly enough,

> IKEA is that friendly shop where you get cheap furniture from the inside of a giant, unending warehouse. Black metal is the kind of music that sounds like someone screaming while trapped inside a burning church. They each possess a fervent fan base. And to tell you the truth, the names of the furniture in IKEA sound a lot like the names of black metal bands.

In the body text down at the bottom of the front page.
So you could craft a headline targeting the individual with the highest debt and still say "this greedy scumbag has more money than n% of the population combined", where n is the percent of people who have negative wealth.
While I Bathory was a big influence for a lot of bands, Possessed and Death were both producing rehearsal tapes and demo tapes in '84. Hellhammer (of Switzerland) was arguably more important with their Satanic Rites demo, in '83 [1]. Note I'm not disagreeing with you, just discussing degrees of influence. Bathory's influence would be much more important in the first and second wave of black metal.

[1] http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Hellhammer/Satanic_Rite...
Some are, others are more or less punny/witty/semi-relevant nouns/adjectives/adverbs. One example I remember from the quiz is the oven called "Dåtid", which sort of means "past time".

Edit: Of course there's a relevant section on the Wikipedia page, should've guessed. :)

Edit 2: Never knew there was such a system to it!