skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This Walmart vs Costco nonsense has got to stop. They serve completely different segments of the market. I won't bother rehashing here what others have argued much better (and with data to back it up). Just go read this and stop making the comparison already:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-ne...

(This article was also posted on HN a couple weeks back)
That's exactly what people in charge fear in my industry (working in online publishing). The do fear, that the people find the linked ressources better, so that they may never even return.

Kind of like the fear of becoming obsolete. But instead of testing and maybe even becoming better, they just forbid us to link out.
On the contrary, after accumulating a certain amount of karma (500 points??) a user gains the ability to downvote comments (but not stories).
There’s no way to make smart decisions with that sort of self-doubt.

Fortunately, it can be overcome. There are so many entrepreneurs who are smarter, more experienced and more successful than I am. Much of their wisdom is available for free on the internet.'

This is exactly why now startups straight out out college are getting successful. Students, who are mature enough have an ocean of knowledge and experience on their click. I can understand that experience can only be gained, but a wise is one who learn from others mistakes. You can not commit all the mistakes in your single life.

Earlier people used to avoid funding to fresh entrepreneurs, but today "unexperienced" ones can easily "evolve" and become immune to some common traps startups experience. That is why it is said that if you really want to change the world, read and read a lot.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-fut...
RubyGems visualization tool
for the ruby lovers
No doubt. Consider, though, that only disengagement is a choice; whether or not you have power is not up to you. (You don't.)
Steve Forbes still weighs in on the Op/Ed link and I doubt very much he would agree with your characterization.
Planted? No, they did something much easier--they changed the subject. The "OMG they've got WMD" rhetoric was replaced by something about the freedom of the Iraqi people.
Sorry, that was a snap response. Once again I've taught myself the value of posting slowly.

c) is wrong; I mistook you for someone else in the discussion. I noted so in an edit.

For the rest, I think lamontcg put it better than I could have.
They have actually been sold out for about a month or so. The inventory has been cleared. Now they are above retail price through third parties.
> It isn't.

Well, whether it is or isn't depends on how good the docs are and how well you write them. Yes, in many cases it can be easy to forget if the documentation is not woven in well enough.

> All public APIs should have documentation, even if you believe it's obvious what they do.

As a note part of the function of such documentation is to establish standards for what is acceptable in terms of expected input and output handling. What this means is that if documentation defines the code contract, then the first thing you look at when debugging is the API's documentation. Then, if it matches what you are doing, you might dig deeper.

What this gives you is not debugging by comments (something K&R rightly hated) but asking which side the violation of code contract is on. If the documentation doesn't match what you are doing with it, then the violation is on your side. If it does, then the violation may be on the API's side. The goal here is to define where changes can most productively be made.

> Because there's other code in the wild that relies on the behavior that you promised.

That's exactly right. More specifically the API documentation is the promise.

> If you're changing it so often that updating the damn comment is an issue you either document implementation details that don't belong in API documentation or your API is unstable crap and nobody should be using it.

The thing is it took us a long time to get our documentation approach right in LedgerSMB. It was a struggle that really only I think reached something I am happy with 5 years into the project. A lot of our public SQL API's are not documented actually, because they are dynamically discovered at run-time and are minimalistic (and consequently the developer contracts far more vague than the API conventions, so it isn't always clear what belongs in the documentation since it is all dynamically looked up anyway), but our Perl code is very well documented and I am very happy with that.

For the SQL though, it's written with documentation generation scripts in mind and therefore the question is what you can document on top of what is already there in the system catalogs.
Yup, I wish I could find my essay, but I wrote an essay in the 90's on this. That one day, numbers and arithmetic will be outlawed, because any data (program, image, movies, etc) can be presented by a number, and those numbers can be represented by a bunch of mathematical operations. So if we can copyright programs, then those numbers and any possible arithmetic operation to generate them will also by be copyright able and anyone possessing them without permission is breaking the law. This also applys to all possible forms of IP.
Potentially, but I feel that the historical significance of these systems and the value of making them available to a newer generation of creators outweighs the technical infringement of copyright. It's basically abandonware, after all.

I feel very strongly about the importance of learning from the past, and not making the same mistakes over and over due to lack of historical perspective. I was particularly inspired by Bret Victor's talk at the DBX conference[1]. That's what motivated me to make this available in the most accessible way possible.

[1] http://worrydream.com/dbx/
I wouldn't hire someone just because they're entertaining. But I might not hire someone otherwise qualified if they're not. And I'm not even in the habit of socializing with co-workers outside the job. But the job is enough hours with someone that I'd much prefer to enjoy their company.

I'm not sure why you keep assuming the best programmers are boring or unpleasant. I've found the opposite to be true, generally.
Wait just a second...

Her interview with alex jones is a year old
The IPCC - which was set up in the 1980s. Note the name.

The questions you ask are legitimate.
Roughly:
1. The letters and punctuation which comprise a computer program in human-readable form can be translated into a string of numbers.

2. That list of numbers can be looked at as if it were one really large number instead of a list of smaller ones.

3. By being a bit clever about how the original program text was translated into numbers, the resulting very-large-number was made to be prime, i.e. not evenly divisible by any numbers other than itself and one. Prime numbers hold a special place in the hearts of many mathematicians.

4. The social implication of all this is that what would have been illegal (rightly or wrongly) in the form of a computer program entered the public record instead in the form of a large number with mathematical significance.
Some parts of this article may be correct, however this:

"For anyone who has not been following the Wal-Mart saga, sales have been sinking dramatically at the retailer as the company has turned to hiring mostly temporary workers"

... is simply wrong. Sales (from the '13 annual report):

FY09: $401b | FY10: $405b | FY11: $419b | FY12: $444b | FY13: $466b

Sales are sinking dramatically at the retailer? At best that's ignorance, at worst a sensational lie.
Parsing PDFs
G(uanine), C(ytosine) and U(racil) are RNA nucleotides, so it seemed more appropriate somehow...
Anecdote: for one C++ solution I work on (two projects, 300k SLOC)

VS2008: 5 min

VS2012: 15 min

VS2013 Preview: 10 min

I use VS2012 and I'm about to use VS2013 for .NET development, but our C++ project is stuck in VS2008.
I actually feel like it is misleading. I would expect each bar to represent an item of a similar type. But, in this case, it doesn't.
Thanks. I did submit a request before calling AT&T. Below is what I got. I just wanted to try some official way to unlock my iPhone. Given that AT&T provide that service, I think that's the right of a customer.

Request number: 391xxxx

Thank you for contacting AT&T Customer Care about unlocking your AT&T Mobile device. We are unable to process your request through this channel.

To submit a request to unlock your business AT&T Mobile device, please call Business Customer Care at 800-331-0500.

To submit a request to unlock your prepaid AT&T Mobile device, please call AT&T Customer Care at 800-901-9878.
Note that BES communications are only secure within a community of interest. (Assuming whomever is running your BES isn't logging and transmitting your texts) Once you talk to someone outside of your BES, RIM controls the key.
Creating a startup isn't primarily technical. It's about business stuff - marketing, hiring, customer support, all sorts of soft skill things. All the clever code in the world won't make a startup succeed without the other stuff.

So really, "technical meritocracy" isn't what makes for successful startups. I think the concentration of technical founders in these parts gives us an unbalanced view.
If you want Walmart to run like Costco, Walmart has to fire over a million people to drastically bring down their head count to match the substantially fewer people that Costco employs compared to Walmart on a sales basis.

Costco sales: $99b | Costco employees: 175,000

Walmart sales: $469b | Walmart employees: 2+ million

As someone else noted, they're very different businesses. The comparison is Samsclub vs Costco.

If you want to know the job killer in retail, look no further than Amazon.com. While all the pundits are busy chewing on Walmart, at least Walmart employs a ton of people (I'm not arguing that's good or bad, it's just amusing that the pundits are universally missing the elephant running down the road).

Here's Amazon's ratios:

FY12: $61b sales | Employees: 88,000

Amazon would have perhaps 500,000 to 750,000 employees at Walmart's size. That's assuming Amazon would ever hire all those people to begin with (the KIVA purchase says they would rather not). Amazon can avoid all the labor problems, by simply not hiring so many people in the first place. Whereas to compete with Amazon, Walmart might have to fire a lot of people and shift to heavy automation. That isn't going to go well for Walmart = massive strikes, national headlines, endless political pressure.
Southern Utah's First Coworking Space
Here's some ideas for names for the next release:

Tenacious Turkey

Threadbare Thrush

Tailles Tenrec

Tailful Tenrec

Thorny Thorny Devil

Timely Tarantula

Titilating Titmouse
Your parent mentions two issues. The one out of purview is when the whistleblower associates the topic to their identity before the leak, on the internet, in a way that may not draw attention at the time but stays registered forever.
Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
Of course, the catch here is that the 5C is not a "new iPhone" in the traditional sense. The 5S is the "new iPhone." The 5C is taking the place of the 5 in this cycle. If the 5C's numbers look better relative to the last analogous period, the sales of the 4 when the 4S was released, then this was a win for Apple (on a revenue basis.)
2 and 4 are still true for alot of people. Using the range calculator on Tesla's website, a day ski trip would still be very difficult if not impossible. The range, especially in the cold with the heat on (and it gets much colder here than 32 degrees), just isn't enough... And the nearest city is ~250 miles away, which is really pushing the range, especially with the speed limit of 70 mph in the cold...
I lived in Prescott Valley, and several years in a row saw brown/blackouts in mid-summer. Also saw them a number of times in the Peoria & I-17 area in phx (closer to cactus)
This is from another blog, but the figures are from draft versions of the latest IPCC report:

http://climateaudit.org/2013/10/08/fixing-the-facts-2/

The figure that was removed shows that measured temperatures are falling outside a 95% confidence interval from the multi-model mean.

This does not mean the climate will not warm, that C02 is not the major factor (or at least a major factor), but it does mean the models that are used for 100 year projections have failed after after 15 years and are running too hot.

It should be cause for celebration. The highest warming scenarios are considerably less likely.

This also does not mean that an emissions tax and spending on R&D on low emissions energy sources is unwise. But it should be factored into cost benefit analysis of climate change response.

Ultimately response to climate change is a public policy problem and is not just based on scientific data and projections.

Really, the response boils down to one question, how much is each of us willing to pay per year to respond? $10, $100, $1000, $10000?
> In the desktop version yes, but not in the mobile versions though. They are relying on native UI heavily.

This is because the startup times with XUL were simply too slow. The first version of Firefox for Android did, in fact, use XUL just like desktop Firefox. The app startup times were atrocious. The decision to use a native Android UI made the app usable while Gecko was starting in the background.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cameron, presumably.
Good points, all. I especially like the point about hiring similarly minded people. Diversity and variety of opinion is necessary in large companies where risk mitigation is valued, but in a startup, it's better to fail fast and keep moving.
The price difference between the 5C and the 5S appears even more minimal in countries where the phone payments are split across the life of the contract, rather than being upfront as in the US.

For instance, on the same plan with the same inclusions in Australia, the 5C is $64 a month, and the 5S is $69. From my perspective, there is no chance I would go for the 5C, and I think for it to be a successful device it needed to be $200 cheaper than the 5S (unsubsidised/retail), and really be a midrange device. But then, I've been wrong about Apple products in the past, so who knows.
my app is fire-and-forget for users. they don't actually need to re-download the image. so this is a clear win as it will allow them to get those bytes down the pipe to my backend faster.
If you're the sort of person that likes to try out stuff from different places, including compiled binaries, non-repo packages, and other fun stuff, eventually stuff will break. A lot of desktop pieces of software have config files that keep changing.

I've found that keeping your old /home around and a copy of installed packages works well enough for most situations.
Huh , that is pretty scary add a physical packet snooper on all the traffic sent from my computer , it might be possible to mitm the private key as it is sent to the server. That way i might have a fighting chance against this.(if the traffic was unencrypted that is )
I respect that. I'm very impressed with the speed of that emulator too.
The Curious case of Customer Validation
You have a killer idea, say a brain implant that functions as a telepathic device.

You've figured out the logistics, You need a billion dollars to develop the prototype and cover overheads, legal issues and other crazy stuff.

And now you need the validation, will the average Joe sign up to have his head bust open and pay a ridiculous fee to have this implanted ?

How do you find customers? Do they really need this? Is this really a practical solution? Will they pay for it?
For some this part might be simple, for others not so much (including myself, thats why i'm writing this post :O).

Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want.
They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product,
even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake
from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether
or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference,
that they don't care about the idea, the startup fails. - http://theleanstartup.com/principles

head over to

http://shipquick.co

for a simple solution to this issue of customer validation. Validate Quicker to Ship you Idea Quicker.

Even I am validating this problem right now !

Cheers.
no surprise this post wasn't popular; it goes against the narrative.

I enjoyed it, FWIW.
Adding Value to Client Web Design Projects
I'll reply to one of your comments when it is ready.
Tragic. What kind of cancer did he die of?

What was your startup? What was your business model?
Except in the iMessage scenario, Apple generates (and keeps) a copy of the private key so you can recover a lost device by signing into iCloud on a new phone.
Given the tech community's tendency towards populism over genuine technical merit, I don't think it is a good model for discovering truth about the world. The tech community is still busy reinventing the 70's poorly, let alone making any real progress.

Social is only important in so far is it facilitates communication and progress towards technical understanding.
What we know is that it seems possible, when looking at the system externally, for them to perform MITM attacks. What we don't know is if their system internally makes it possible for anyone inside apple to intercept and read those messages, with or without an order from the NSA. They could very well have told us the truth!
Algorithmic solutions will always be hard. "I know it when I see it" is hard to program.

Depending on the site, I'd go to a trust-based solution. New users get their images approved by a human censor (pr0n == spambot in most cases). Established users can add images without approval.

If you're going to try software, try something that errs on the side of caution, and send everything to a human for final decision-making, just like spam filters.
As always, this event will be a blast. Hope you can all make it!
They don't do anything with VRAM. I think they switch win32k and other calls between RDPDD and the current display driver and automatically change the display settings, which can be a quite tricky task. Some links:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963038 (this can be triggered by switching between 15-bit and 16-bit color)

http://www.nynaeve.net/?p=3
China's Building Cities So Fast, People Don't Have Time to Move In
Nexus 5  $349
Imagine a giant cluster of VMs running desktop iMessage. Imagine the android client is actually a VNC client connecting to one of the VMs and screen scraping it. Sprinkle with magic dust and UI polish.
Citation needed.

Fact: Many existing transit services originated as private companies.

Funding often came from business, retailer, and real-estate interests: increasing the availability of transportation increased the availability of employees, of shoppers, and the value of housing.

On a large scale, though transit companies are hugely capital intensive, require close coordination with other entities, and tend to have positive externalities which limit the ability to fund operations strictly out of farebox revenues.

A large number of non-BART commuters, employers, retailers, and others, are about to discover the value of the transit system, which moves over 370,000 riders daily.
Quantum Viruses?
The prices for recording shows seems absurdly high.
What costs $2 million for a comedy pilot (i.e. no special effects or pricey explosions etc involved)? Could somebody elaborate. If you think what you can get for $2million it's an absurd amount of money.
FTA:
"yet a typical half-hour comedy pilot costs $2 million to shoot"

I think Louis CK got away with 100k per episode (albeit doing most of the work himself), which also seems kind of high, but anyhow shows what it can cost to shoot.
Really? That's what you have to contribute in conversation to a discussion about thousands of years of discovery about the nature of reality itself? We know a lot more than "shit".
Well the trophy for most BS per capita definitely goes to the Chinese.Unfortunately If I see a chinese name on an IEEE article and it's not from a reputable university, I skip it.

As for clearing out toxins. It's been known for years that sleep clears free radicals from the brain. That's why very long term sleep deprivation can led to brain damage, and why if you take modafinil you aren't shielded from the physiological adverse effects of sleep deprivations (though mentally you'll be fine).
I found the article to be a good summation of work done over the last few hundred years.
The police will make this sort of request for subjects of criminal investigations. It's a specific process, governed by the courts and warrants -- I believe it's called a pen register.

Whenever a new technology comes out without lawful intercept, it gets embraced by criminals. Remember Nextel/Boost phones with direct connect? You might recall that there were 3 resellers on a block in the hood selling these things in the early 2000's. DirectConnect wasn't tappable for a few years, and the addressing scheme was tied to a phone, not a user. Those users later moved to BlackBerry.
In one of the companies that I worked, and used to take interviews, the general practice was to ask questions whose answers would benefit us.
Also, in certain cases, when we were starting out work on a different domain, we used to call candidates who were experienced in that domain, and get our initial doubts / understanding issues resolved via interviews!
I think the state of the art right now is Remmina, which allows you to connect to Windows 7 + systems. I dont know if rdesktop now allows you to do that, but (a year ago) earlier it didnt.
That's not what these researchers found. They found that each device has a distinct private key, and that the sender of an IM actually sends a separate message to each device, encrypted with the appropriate key. Do you have a source for your claim?
It's a pity to see that Windows haven't died off yet and things like this are still happening. Using Linux / Mac for years, never looked back.

And for those who say "my mother can't use Linux", don't be a cheapskate, get your loved ones a Mac - they will definitely know how to use it.
great to hear you are opensourcing this!

I had a quick look at the minified source. its pretty hard to decipher (method names have been renamed too), unlike traditional minification which you can recover by just reformatting.
Thermoelectric bracelet that helps people maintain a comfortable body temp