skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would love to hear more about "leverage existing package management systems".

I guess many people use rvm to install ruby and I always recommend newbies to try it out for that purpose.

But recent criticisms of ruby made me wonder if that really is the right approach. Maybe it would be better to put more effort into creating top-notch packages for the major linux distros (and, say, homebrew). And to work with the distributions on the stable packages, while offering official repositories to get the latest versions.

rvm could still play a role in this scenario as a tool to switch between versions, isolate gem installations and so on, offering a unified interface that hides the platform differences of the distros.

I would certainly donate to such a cause.
Yes, but an old typo. Name got misspelled about a hundred years back or so.
I didn't know I could do this so well.
What Drives Quality: Project Management
This is really important for perceived load time[0]. Here's an article that illustrates how this can work in practice: http://dry.ly/full-streams-ahead

[0]https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...
The Wikipedia article on Diakatana[1] should tell you all you need to know.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana#Reception_and_controv...
Oh yeah, I wonder how many recruiters using Windows Phone hired him, LOL
I don't see it this way. The policy of cheap exports is actually to keep their people employed. Whatever they would be doing if they weren't exporting would keep them poorer than what they're doing today.

In addition, the large amount of foreign debt holdings gives them a claim on future output (or land, or other capital) of other countries. That gives the county geopolitical strength.
I've always thought that if I created something that other people could apply skills or talent on (a game, a language, an API), that it wouldn't mean I'd be a master at using it, and that it wouldn't be far fetched to think someone could master using it even I could master building, fixing, or enhancing it.
Some good NYRB reviews by Freeman Dyson were collected into a book too, I'm sure some of his aren't paywalled:

http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Rebel-York-Review-Books/dp/1...
How to Adopt Agile Retrospectives
Behind the VC numbers: Higher prices, less control
Every year we waste or lose 1.3 billion metric tons of food
It's at least as much about control. The Chinese don't want people to be able to push their currency around because they fear the destabilising effect of money surging in and out of the country and throwing the exchange rate around.

So they have massive dollar holdings in one hand and a central bank that can print money in another. Effectively they can control their exchange rate from either side.
Health Website Woes Widen as Insurers Get Wrong Data
Except with ATT it doesn't matter if you bought your phone for 600$ or 199$ with the contract: you pay same rates. So, if you don't mind being on contract for 1.5-2 years until next upgrade, just do it. Because if you won't upgrade after 2 years you still pay same rate. If you bring in your 700 dollars phone you still pay same rate, so why pay more then? ATT and Verizon match each others prices and have no problem with monopolizing market and charging 3000% profit on SMS service
Reread your question (while not at work).

Voting and election reforms must be partisan neutral. To better serve the voters, vs serve the parties.

Currently, districting carves out safe seats. Part of the horse trading that goes on. Serves the existing parties, but not the voters.

Competitive in Wyoming means taking the partisan index for the state and dividing it down the middle (per Durverger's Law). The most "liberal" elected in Wyoming is probably far more conservative than the "conservatives" in California. Which is okay. The people deserve representatives that reflect their values.

The point of fair redistricting is to ensure that all of these campaigns, no matter where, are competitive.

Right now, the only serious challenge to many candidates, both Ds and Rs, come during the primaries, which are low voter turnout elections. So the candidates have become ever more extreme.

I have no problem with any extremist position, eg Tea Party, so long as it reflects the will of the people. The People should get the government they deserve.
I've heard almost all of the complaints before and had a few of them myself. But before tearing this guy a new one for rattling off a list of trivial-sounding complaints, be aware that the second half of the presentation extols the virtues of Lua and advises you to "get past the initial irritation."
I don't find working the SQL in Scala to be very much fun. You end up having to write lots of marshaling functions and other such cruft that isn't application logic. As someone used to dynamic languages this makes the code very ugly and verbose.
Please stop pretending PHP is a good language
the US approach of "if the answer has one too many significant digit, it is wrong and you get zero points" is virtually unknown in Poland and comes as a shock to Polish students, who are often taught that "it is the approach that counts". I find the US approach much more realistic: it doesn't matter how you "approached" the design of a bridge, if the bridge collapsed.

My problem with this all-or-nothing approach to grading, you aren't designing a bridge in a 2 hour exam with a graphing calculator and pencil and 3 sheets of scratch paper. These aren't representative of real world situations, engineering rarely operates under that sort of time crunch. Apollo 13 is an exception, but by that point it isn't novices but experts doing the work, experts who'd studied the physics and math for years, if not decades. This approach is used to weed out students from programs that admit too many to their freshman classes. They should reduce their class size if this is so important. Many upper-level undergraduate courses, and a lot of graduate courses, don't even expect the sort of time-crunched, mental feats expected from freshman level calculus and physics students.
Hmmmm, yeah. Use cases doesn't take up much space, I'll put that before examples because it explains better what it is for.
Not just that, but rating one's skills doesn't really show anything useful. How many years have you worked with each technology? What have you built with each one? What makes you a 'master'?

Sidenote - I'm curious how one could rate him/herself as a JavaScript 'expert' but only 'proficient' in jQuery. Not impossible, but seems unusual.
I doubt he really needs the money at this point in his life. Coding Horror, Stack Overflow, etc. all huge traffic. So I doubt it influenced him much.
I can't quite find the brand and google is drawing a blank, but I have recently seen some disposable metal silverware (not coated plastic, real metal).
I guess some french luxury brand, like Starck or Degrenne.
The author is very smart, and more trained in economics than I am, but I still disagree with some of what he says.

China is doing us two favors:

1) If they weren't buying our debt, someone else would. Without a large buyer like China, we would have to pay higher rates on our borrowing. This would trickle down to mortgages too, since China is a big investor in Fannie and Freddie debt, and mortgage backed securities.

2) Chinese goods are cheaper because of this policy. One could argue our domestic industry is less competitive, but on the surface, cheaper goods are better than more expensive goods. We benefit from the subsidy.
First malware ever for Firefox Mobile OS
Wow, excellent link. Thank you for sharing.
Google Stock Hits $1,000 for First Time Ever
Or spend two weeks training them to work on a biscuit making assembly line or babysit machinery that they'll have to be trained on anyway.

But I have a feeling this is less about having a basic skillset and more about that few Americans wanted to spend their time doing that kind of work for what they were willing to pay.
There's nothing artificial about it. That's normal economics at work.

Interest rates will remain low as long as the economy remains weak. They will rise to 5% when the economy becomes stronger and inflation rises, reducing the level of existing debt to GDP.
Working with Jobs was probably better for Woz than working with Carmack ever could have been.

Jobs had a sense of how what Woz's talent could change the world. Woz may have enjoyed showing off his projects to Carmack, but I doubt Carmack could have gotten to leave his job at HP.
These guidelines pretty much apply to C++, although pointers in Rust are more akin to smart pointers than raw pointers, and there are indeed a bunch of use cases for those. Sticking to values and references works pretty well most of the time though.

But pointers in Rust seem pretty well thought out and more sophisticated than what's possible in C++. I'm particularly excited about the compiler error when a borrowed pointer goes out of scope.
Your SQL Queries as a Value - MoSQL query builder for node.js
> The self-correcting nature of business (even if it's still sub-optimal) to me seems somewhat preferable to the nature of government which is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with them that something has to change.

Er, but the self-correcting nature of business is simply the result of the fact that the nature of business is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with it that it is forced to change.

It is no different than government in that respect.
Quora's Distributed Cron Architecture
Jeff Bezos’s League of Shadows
If you plan on implementing anything with libtask, take a look at the version with epoll support.

https://github.com/jamwt/libtask

Mongrel2 is also an excellent example of how libtask can be used.

On another note, alts and chans are underrated in libtask -- I wish the documentation promoted them more. To get an idea of what alts look like when used with a few chans, take a look at keyboardthread() from acme:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/acme/ac...

It's just... beautiful.
I do this, but I'm not writing with an audience in mind; blogging is first and foremost a way to organize my own thoughts.
The science of reconstructing a freak accident
I cannot speak for BART, but in NYC the MTA has been trying to automate its trains for many years (since the early 90s for the latest effort) and has only barely been able to keep everything working on the one line chosen for the pilot program -- and that is one of the simpler routes in the system. While I am sure that automation is possible and that the technology is available, the MTA seems to be making all the wrong choices, and I would prefer to have human operators until some minimum technical competency can be established (we can start with this: trains that can reliably announce their position on the line, without needing a human being to set things up -- one would think this is a bare minimum for automated service).
Why I love email
It's weird that I see many people complaining about tables because of pairs/ipairs or trivial stuff like that, which are more nuisances than anything. The flexibility of tables/metatables make them a very powerful data structure (not unlike javascript's prototype). I've been playing a bit with it for game development and you can build some very powerful stuff just using tables.

Maybe instead of trying to use lua as another language, you should totally embrace "the lua way" and then you'll understand why their tables/metatables is the way it is.
Outsourcing is fine. Outsourcing and saying "It is because you all are so stupid." when that is clearly not the truth is not.
Private search engine Blippex turns to WebRTC to guarantee surfers’ anonymity
Why ? just as an option for extra security ?

And if you want to make it extra nice, you could add an automatic/half-automatic back channel through bluetooth. could create interesting design options.
Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings
Except there are lots of examples of successful train automation -- the article mentions several.

Plus, the author may not have initially known much about how hard it is to run a train, but they weren't expressing their own opinions -- they found experts and asked them how hard it would be.

It's lazy and disingenuous to pretend anyone involved in the article was expressing opinions about things they knew nothing about.
More information might not improve your ability to make decisions
You can make truly amazing music without the million dollars of equipment though! It's an optional extra, and I would argue that we would not be culturally less rich if those studios went out of existence. Worst case is that we would just have equally good music with a few slightly rough edges. As an example, I still choose Seth Lakeman's early recordings over his more recent even though they were made on a budget of a quarter of a macbook pro.
That's so much better.

PS. I noticed you have an article about bitmap indexing. I hope you realize that the algorithm you're using is based on WAH, which is patented by the DoE.
It's an interesting trend to run a blog that drives attention to your startup. The posts are becoming less and less relevant to the company too.
It has it, it's just not as slick as it could be. In Sir Tev, you're moving a copy of the object, whereas moving the actual object would be cleaner, and more obvious. At the moment it looks more like when you accidentally grab an image and move it (for it to then snap back into place) in some browsers.
What law(s) do they want to change even? The email is very vague in that regard.
> well, you can use it for that but it isn't the main use

Actually, you could use it for that, as long as the library actually finishes downloading the file on abort. If you need contents from the file again, you just download it again and as it will already be cached, that operation should be extremely fast.
What is RVM?
I felt the same about school: mostly, I hated it, and it was torture to go. I did very well, mostly because my mother instilled a kind of fear of getting less than an A on anything, which my extreme personality ratcheted up to a fear of getting less than A+. I obsessed over test scores, and remembering information came pretty easy.

The only part of school I enjoyed was math. I absolutely loved learning and doing math. That I could do a problem with lots of complicated steps, many of which seemed almost creative, and arrive at a common answer, was like logical magic. And it complimented my budding programming hobby very well.

I started trying to program games almost as soon as I had a computer, when I was still very young. I remember it took a long time to understand for loops at first. Then it took a long time to figure out how to poll keyboard input the right way. Then it took a while to learn the ins and outs of BLTing, and so on.

I left college after only one semester. I still thought the programming thing would probably only be a hobby. Still, I made a game, and tried to sell it. But it only sold 500 copies, so I was discouraged. My adulthood got off to a very rocky start, not knowing what to do. I took me 2 years to realize that I could actually get a programming job with what I already knew. At first, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, not without college. But through a couple of lucky breaks, it happened, and I found myself a full-fledged software developer at a real software company at 21, with no formal education. 15 years later, I find myself in the middle of a pretty interesting, varied programming career.

Looking back, the only parts of school that served me were math, and english. I could have just studied those two during high school, I think, and come out just as well. Everything else was self study.
And this is exactly the problem with all those "simpler" alternatives to RVM. They all claim to be simpler and doing less "unnecessary" stuff.

And they are simpler, from a technical point of view. But unless you, the user, is very skilled at Unix and knows exactly how environment variables, shell sessions, bashrc etc works, it's going to be more confusing. RVM is more complicated because it does more, in order to make it easier for users. Notice that most of the people who like rbenv/chruby are exactly the kind of people who are already intimately familiar with the Unix environment.

I write C++ for a living and use the command line daily. Last time I used rbenv, I quickly gave up because I had to manually mess with $PATH, bashrc and other stuff that RVM always took care for me. I know how that stuff works, but the whole point of tools is to make my life easier. If I have to do so much stuff manually then why should I use rbenv? Back to RVM for me.
It also supports raw SQL...
work as a garbage man also has pretty low entry barrier

What makes you think that? There is very little ad hoc freelance work in the business and contracts to collect refuse are very tightly controlled. I imagine that winning those contacts as a newly started one man garbage collection company is almost unheard of. As such the barriers to entry as a plumber are much much lower.
> They do have the policy, so we should frankly be selling more bonds and spending the money on infrastructure, but hey, that's a hard story to sell for some reason.

Doesn't that put us at increased risk of the policy changing and then having that much more in bonds to roll over when the rates go back up? (Or are we are highly confident that the investment will pay off before the policy changes?)
As We May Type
This could be big for making dynamic web maps faster. Often we request a large array of geometries to display on a map and can only display them all at once after ajax is done. If we could display each geometry as they are loaded it would be a big improvement to perceived performance. I imagine this is the case for other kinds of data vis as well. Off to test!
US dollars are the world's currency hub. Let's pretend that there was only one airline hub in the country, and we're going to say that it's Atlanta, because I always seem to use that as my connection. (Atlanta is a hub, but it's not the hub.)

Let's also assume that you have to use the hub, no matter where you fly. It's easy to see in this scenario that Atlanta will now enjoy a special status as an airport; everyone has to use it, even if they're not sending passengers to Atlanta. Now, let's say that the Atlanta infrastructure starts doing poorly - the ground crews don't get luggage from plane to plane fast enough, the controllers aren't good at scheduling flights - anything we can think of that will cause delayed flights. If flights are delayed often enough, then Atlanta's value as a hub goes down. If Atlanta's value as a hub goes down enough, airlines may try to move to a hub somewhere else. Atlanta, then, no longer enjoys all of the perks that come with having every flight in the country routed through them.

This is a cartoon, of course. Nor is the analogy perfect. But I think it gets the big idea across: when people do international transactions, US dollars are often involved. Even when neither side of the transaction is actually in dollars. US dollars are the world's reserve currency: the US is a large, stable economy, and the main instrument for storing dollars, US Treasury bonds, is the most stable security around.

If US Treasury bonds cease to be the most stable security around, then we have violated a basic assumption of the global economy. The rest of the world may try to move away from the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, which means the US would no longer enjoy the special status of being the world's currency hub.

Adam Davidson (who does Planet Money, which I linked to above) has a NY Times column explaining that in the short term, investors may buy more Treasury bonds immediately after a default, but in the long term, we would still likely lose our reserve status. See, "Our Debt to Society": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/our-debt-to-socie...
That's true, but giving the formula makes the problem way easier : You know you have to use that formula in the problem. That's less intellectually challenging.

The best is to give the students a cheat sheet with a lot formulas, but not a reminder in each exercise of which formula is useful in that exercise.
In that case they have to think about which one to use.
CrashPlan process in linux occasionally eats up most of the cpu. As a result of this I haven't been able to complete a single full upload after trying it for the last 4 months for a few hundred GBs. I have paid for a full year but I don't think it makes sense to renew. CrashPlan sync is just too slow and CPU heavy for a laptop that is used for dev work at the same time.
Ruby Version Manager: https://rvm.io/
I meant that the added pause will be equal to your typing time, so if you wait 10 seconds and type for 1, the other person will see an 11-second pause and 1 second of typing.
I'm interested to see the effects of the spray optimization work making its way into Play.
To me, Lua's most annoying feature is that tables are the only data structure. When I was first learning Lua, I thought it was pretty cool to have one and only one very versatile data structure. Nowadays, I find it's more trouble than it's worth.

To me, this harkens back to the debate about the length of a table if it has nils in it.

The Lua table is not the be-all and end-all of data structures (though it is quite versatile out of the box). However, it can be the basis for any kind of data structure you can imagine. Trees of all varieties, priority queues, etc.. The strength of the language is that there is just one fundamental data structure, and it is implemented well, and it has good syntax support in the language. There is no mental overhead like with Python where you have to use square brackets for lists and curly braces for dictionaries.
Just to be clear, it's sexist here in the US. It isn't necessarily so in other countries.
If you want low-overhead pseudo-concurrency for C, protothreads [1] are probably what you are looking for.

[1] http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/
Visualizing what the world is thinking (D3, Cassandra, ElasticSearch & Node.js)
The BBC HoC probably provided a nice reassurance, but there is a pretty big chance the US version won't work. I would imagine HoC is even more problematic given the difference in political systems.
Welcome to HN where the top-rated comment is from someone who admits they didn't read the presentation, doesn't understand what the author was saying and manages to complain.
I mostly agree, but they don't really have much of a choice. They have to put the dollars somewhere, and when you're dealing with that many, Treasury bills are really the only game in town.
Complex HTML5 image editor in JS
Anyone know of a way to check the model/version data of a drive in an OWC USB 3.0 enclosure?

I bought a 2012 MBA with the 128GB drive on release and in early July this year the drive completely spazed out. After a round with Apple's Genius Bar the options for my 3 weeks past warranty drive were ~$700 to replace it in store or ~$300 to send it away losing my laptop for a week. I just ordered a new drive from OWC and had it overnighted.
Downvote me all you want, but I'm right. Yes, I do realize that's not an argument.
I never hired anybody because I got candidate's resume via HR or recruiter. It was always thru some connections and things like this.
The first thing I thought when I read the $5 million dollar figure was "Oh shit, imitators are coming..."
A quick way to apparently find hardware model/revision
information (OSX 10.8.5):

Select "About this Mac" from the apple menu, and click
on "More info..."

Click on "System Report" and select the SATA/SATAExpress
page. Model and revision numbers for each installed hard
drive appear to be reported here.

(edit: presumably drives connected via USB are similarly described
in the appropriate page of the diagnostics/report)
> It’s not ok that echo 0.000001; produces 1.0E-6 and that casting it to string doesn’t help but putting quotes around it does.

Huhwhat? That's exactly the behaviour I would expect from a sane language.