skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's easy for most people to agree that 80 hour work-weeks are typically bugs, not features - especially as they often seem to be a symptom of a dysfunctional working environment.

> Life outside of work is, for many of us, far more meaningful than work.

There seems to be a meme that this should be the case. My work is extremely meaningful to me, and my work place is extremely not-dysfunctional and no boss is breathing down my neck for my to work any number of hours. My personal life is also great. In a Sophie's choice situation, I'd choose my wife, obviously, but I don't accept the dichotomy. I love my wife and I love the time we spend together, but a few year ago when I down with the flu for a few weeks, my brain felt like it turned to porridge. That's not good for me and it's not good for her. Being professionally challenged is extremely important to my private life, and working with people who feel the same way about their work is important to me. Right now, I am getting enormous returns, both mentally and financially, from my work, and so I work a lot. I completely expect the calculus to change when we have children, but we don't yet.

I understand that there are people who don't feel the same way about their work, and there is no merit in working 80 hours for the sake of working 80 hours. But focusing on that number alone and trying to form some objective truths from first principles is not terribly helpful in my opinion.
Hi!

I created a site where you can get feedback for your website and learn about usability by helping others: http://usability.userium.com/

First I learned Meteor from the "Discover Meteor" book and built the 'Microscope' app, but then decided to do this project with the 'Telescope' open source project, due to its additional features.

The idea is that first you can

(1) use the usability checklist:
http://usability.userium.com/c/usability-checklist to catch common usability problems on your website.

(2) After fixing obvious problems, you can ask for feedback on the site.

To increase the amount of replies, only 3 website feedback requests are posted on the site per day. All the feedback is public, so that others can learn and apply the tips on their own websites.

This is a work-in-process, so please let me know if you find this site useful? How could I improve?

Many thanks in advance!

-Nina, nina@userium.com, http://usability.userium.com
When did ideas get muddied by personality? I see this in the whole Ender's Game debate and in this Fisher debate. We need to compare ideas outside of the personality THAN we can separate the idea for the person.

In our history (Historical Philosophy/Theology Major) you would be apsolutely shocked at the lives of great thinkers and disapprove so much of their lives but MOST people don't know. This is the issue with open lives we know so much more about people. It is never just a book or an idea we can learn maybe to much???
Well Guy has an MBA from UCLA afaik so what does he know :P
You can see these in dialects or domain specific languages (DSL).

For eg. a cron scheduler Rebol dialect:

at 18:30 do %batch.r
at 10-Sep-2009/02:00 do %batch.r
every minute do %job.r
every month on #15 not [sat sun] do %job.r

ref: http://softinnov.org/rebol/scheduler.shtml

And here's an example of an Excel Rebol dialect:

Excel compose [
start
show
open file (test-file)
;alerts on
alerts off
;remove worksheet
;close workbook
;goto workbook 1
;go to worksheet #2
;quit
add a new worksheet
;goto cell "B3"
;select rows "1:3"

select "B4"
set value to x
goto cell "B6"
change to "Testing"
select "B7"
set to "=B4 * B5"
select "A5:A9"
change to "=$B$5 * PI()"

set cell 10 2 to 222.22
set 11 2 to 333.33
set cells "C2:C6" to 123
set "D3:E4" "Yeah!"
change "A1" "=B10"

copy "A1:A9" to "B21"
cut "B21:B29" to "A18"

select "A5:A9"
copy
goto cell "C15"
paste
goto cell "D15"
paste values
goto cell "E15"
paste no borders

go to worksheet "Sheet4"
autofilter "A5" on

open file (test-file-2)

copy workbook "pbtest.xls" "A1:C5"
to workbook "test-b.xls" "B2"

goto workbook "test-b.xls"

goto cell "F1"
cur-cell: current column
repeat i 3 [
repeat j 4 [
goto cell j (cur-cell + i - 1)
set to (i * j)
]
]
]

ref: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1240 | http://www.robertmuench.ch/development/projects/excel/dialec...
Masajes Majadahonda
Cached - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qjCebmD...
Cygwin programs don't all depend on a Cygwin environment, most of the work occurs at the C library level. Some stuff might want a shell with more or different features than you get with the windows cmd shell.
Not everyone enjoys their work. It's a sad reality. Most of us are just lucky enough to keep a monthly paycheck in our chosen fields at a rate that is almost a living wage.

Having said that, and I don't mean this as a slight to you or your particular lifestyle, do you have a significant other or children? This is probably a key question when talking about work/life balance. Because, as with all things, it's very important to strike a balance.

Generally when you're young and have nobody else but you to feed, your work life balance probably looks like WORK/life. Then, when you get married but before kids show up it looks more like WORK/LIFE. Then when kids show up it's work/LIFE. Then, hopefully it remains work/life for a long time and as you age it becomes work/LIFE.

I'm middle-aged and I've discovered that for me, I no longer identify with my job. I'm not what I do as far as work goes. It's gotten to the point that when I meet new people, I feel kind of awkward asking them what they do, knowing full well, the social norm means, "what do you do for a living?" I generally answer that questions with, "I'm a husband and a father...that's what I do.".
I've wired Safari directly up to a verbatim search, and it's made my life much less stressful. Don't know how long that'll be available for though…
Unknown slate spotted on Google site, could be an 8-inch Nexus tablet
Thanks, that was helpful. I agree that we should do better on both points.

Jeffrey Snover[MSFT]
Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect for Windows Server and System Center
Sounds to me like you have an irrational fear of cancer and/or death.
I always enjoy visiting afrigadget.com , where people are figuring out solutions to their own problems with available resources. Definately a different perspective than I have ever seen on TV.
If only you had good internet there!
> Do you think it's a market that is too saturated to achieve the level of sales you saw?

Not at all. There are thousands of plugins, but there are 72 million WordPress sites.
I ummed and ahhed over it. Really it's two posts, one about helping someone out and another about NP-complete problems in the wild. Thought I'd go with the Hacker News angle for Hacker News (hopefully to encourage / keep up the helping).
When A Startup Chooses IPO Most Founders Are Out
As a mid-40s year old male, I can assure you that working 70+ hours a week will eventually kill you. Your body will respond in ways you never expected in your youth. And it's insidious. It will sneak up on you and catch up to you when you least expect it. If you're lucky, there will be time to take corrective action.
Some people are born with good genes, intelligence, money, muscles, height, amazing good looks, etc etc
Some aren't.

Life is certainly not, in any way equal, and it's idiocy to pretend it is.

We are all born with totally different strengths and weaknesses, and that's what makes us unique, and should be celebrated. Not denied.
For embedded problems where speed/energy is a tradeoff you can't make. Then you start looking at solving it with parallelization.

Take this straight forward camera sensor:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/8668

If you look at the datasheet, there's a control interface (I2C), various clocks and a data interface (DOUT0-7). The clock minimum is ~6 MHz, so no biggy and suited for embedded systems. Until you start to work out the details: you need to send commands, read in a hefty datastream and do something with it (like writing to storage). That means you either write out the pixels as they come in, or you buffer an entire picture (or large part) and then write it out.

The first solution means that you'll need an embedded system with a clock that has an integer amount times the minimum clock for the sensor (you need to do stuff between different moments when data comes in).

The second solution means a large amount of RAM (think order MBit).

Embedded systems never scale the way you'd like them to, typically everything scales in one go. You want more internal RAM? Well, we also scaled this and that even though you won't need it, and it's 32-bit now instead of 8- or 16-bit. You want external RAM? Well here's an IC with the extra pins and an FSMC but it also has more Flash than you'll need and it comes with USB hardware you won't need. Result: more $ per unit even though you'll only need 40% of its functionality.

There's also an additional problem: This type of control from one single-core system will mean that you're going to write very dense code loops that won't be very happy about exceptions (e.g. flash write delays).

What you need in this kind of systems is a parallel approach:

- 1 core to do the I2C (very low requirement)

- 1 core to check the timing for your output stream (straight forward logic)

- several cores to read/process/filter the incoming stream (follow the datasheet)

- several cores to store everything in temporary external RAM on the fly (lockstep)

- one or more arbiters to tie everything together (the challenging part)

An 144 core system like this would be severely underemployed for this type of camera sensor. You could scale up the sensor to very high performance cameras.
"That brings up another interesting aspect of FORTH and this hardware, if you are familiar with the Propeller chip this is like a 144 cog prop, sorta. So that's one interesting way to structure separate blocks of code, run each block on separate hardware..."

But on paper it appears that a cog has more power than each one of these limited cores. Plus historically the Propeller has been cheaper than most of the esoteric crazy Forth chips and implementations.
> On this last point, they talk about leveraging a non-corporate image, like the Dudesons or Madventures, and throw “the largest events, gigs, and parties of human kind”.

Well that sounds really sustainable.
Gimball flying spherical robot takes collisions in its stride
I guess the difference is that what google does is already somewhat fuzzy, when you search for something you're not necessarily even sure what you want the search engine to return. We also don't expect the results to necessarily be perfect which is why the search engine returns more than one result.

On the other hand when you're trying to do some specific task you already know in most cases exactly what you want to happen, so if it does something else then that is very frustrating.
I've been working on http://loggur.com for a (very) long time now to address exactly what the author describes. (Note: The home page is very outdated and vague; I'm planning on redoing it upon release; see my other comments about the details here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811801)

And I should point out that coding will never fully become unnecessary. Of course many of the repetitive parts of coding can be automated, but with all kinds of new ideas and unknown technologies that the future has in store for us, custom code will almost certainly always be required.
Slightly meta, but this is one of the many topics that (1) will continued to be debated and (2) always draw attention. The problem with these statements is a fundamental issue with definitions.

What does successful mean? Raised a million in funding? Sold company for a million?

What is a blog? Is a magazine/newspaper turned digital considered a blog? Does a press release written by someone else count?

What is an entrepreneur considered? Someone who just started a company (less than 1 year)? Someone who's started 40 companies over 30 years?

Probably the most well known entrepreneur blog by what is considered a highly successful entrepreneur, is Richard Branson - http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson - but as far as I can tell he doesn't actually write any of it himself.
Free to Freemium: What We Learned from Changing our Pricing Model
Ant On A Rubber Rope
Children’s Increased Engagement with Technology
instead of Gimp, have you tried darktable, krita, mypaint or rawtherapee? It depends what you need.
Notice on the packaging says: If you start talking with a high pitched voice, replace the unit immediately.

EDIT: It's a joke, lighten up people..., cause you will with this drive :)

EDIT2: And in the case the drive fails, just open it and get a guaranteed 1 minute of fun.
توقعات الابراج مع ميشال حايك
توقعات الابراج مع ميشال حايك - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=25788
توقعات الابراج اليوم الاثنين - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=25788
توقعات الابراج مع ميشال حايك - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=25788
توقعات الابراج مع ميشال حايك - http://www.alhqeqa.com/?p=25788
CMYK is not exclusive to Photoshop, is it?
Visualise your Netflix usage [graphs]
Indeed, but to a one man shop, being stuck in the flat part of the curve at, say, $2k/month in profit and growing by $100/month/month is a completely different thing to a 10 man shop at the same place.

One venture is about to fold. The other can safely quit its day job and start entrepreneuring full time without having to worry about starving in the immediate future.
I feel like I've been reading this article every year, with some variation but the same yet-unrealized potential every time.

I'm not an expert in "human" coding or AI, but I get the same vibe from both of them -- until you try it yourself, it seems pretty reasonable that someone will solve this problem fairly soon. And it has seemed that way for many years now.

Simple CRUD apps can already be built with simple, friendly interfaces. The simple apps will continue to get easier for non-programmers to assemble without "coding".

But real life requirements get comlicated soon -- your simple CRUD app now needs to auto-charge customers every time they foo 100 bars, unless it's been less than a month (in which case you charge a prorated total at month end), and early subscribers are grandfathered in to a simple fixed monthly charge. How will you click-and-drag that? Or explain it clearly in natural language, without multiple possible interpretations?

People make complicated stuff in Excel spreadsheets, and while it starts off as fairly vanilla, it quickly becomes something as complicated (if not more so) than writing a standard computer program in code.

Natural language serves a purpose -- mostly around navigating complicated social situations, including expressing general desires to others (who have motivations of their own, and will interpret according to their own internal rules). It's fuzzy and generally non-specific because that's how we are.

Why do we imagine our normal ways of interacting with each other can be applied to instructing a process to execute complex & strict logic?

I'm pretty sure we can make progress -- clean up the leakiest abstractions from software to APIs to hardware... -- and sort out the best way to build coding languages so they are as intuitive as possible for humans -- but I don't think "code" generally is going to disappear anytime soon.
It works for me using Opera Next. Chrome, FireFox and IE: No go :)
Faking The Dream
> NP-complete is essentially shorthand for belonging to a class of problems that are computationally very hard

It's totally correct, but it always bothers me a little to see people talk about NP in those terms; much, much more difficult problems are known. Recreational wikipedia reading taught me a while ago the the regexp equivalence problem ("do these two given regular expressions define the same language?") is EXPSPACE-complete, where EXPSPACE contains all the problems that:

- Require additional space bounded above by an exponential function in the input.

- May require an unbounded (though obviously finite) amount of time.

That second point is a doozy, and the problem so accessible that I'm fairly sure many people have independently come up with it and wished for a solution. That's not going to happen, though; a solution would be good for much more than just deciding whether two regexps are equivalent. Any NP-complete problem is utterly trivial by comparison.
Massachusetts man uses 3-D printer to make prosthetic hand for his son
The Future Of Photo Editing?
I was reading about how in Africa they've built their own networks with just basic phones, and it fascinated me. What they've managed to achieve with what we view as obsolete technology is fantastic, which is why I'd be curious to see what they could do with more technology and how it could shape their lives. Like this guy: http://gizmodo.com/313408/nigerian-man-builds-working-helico... that's just an awesome hacker ethic.
Thanks Peroni!!
The slowness was in returning the results, not visiting them.
But their needs are not already satisfied. Maybe their physiological and security needs, but what about their needs for belonging, esteem and self-actualization? The more likely scenario is they'll spend the remaining 90% trying to fulfill those needs through philanthropy.
Good if you have your Netflix account connected to Facebook
I did one of these a while ago that lets you mount a redis server as a local filesystem: https://github.com/mattsta/redisfuse

It's a great way to do FS-like things ("edit X in vim", "run aspell across all keys in Y") on very non-file-like objects.
For comparison, here is a recent JVM in Lua: https://cowlark.com/luje/doc/stable/doc/index.wiki
I write ExpanDrive, http://www.expandrive.com - which mounts SFTP/S3/Dropbox/Openstack Swift/Google Docs/Box on Mac/Windows & soon Linux all in Python/FUSE.

Ctypes is the way to go for interacting with libfuse. Even better would be speaking the FUSE protocol directly to /dev/fuse*, but is rather complicated by our Windows support.
I agree. It would certainly take decades for them to master the technology. It might even take them 50 years. A lot of the knowledge required is implicit in the industry taken as a whole. Put me in the stone age with a manual for making bronze. I would be proud of myself If I managed to forge something useful inside of a lifetimes work. Where does the ore come from? How do I extract it? Precisely how do I get the fire hot enough? Similarly, if I knew how to create a warp drive, there is absolutely no guarantee that I could actually build one with current day tech. It might take a decade just to produce one of the required components.
BlackBerry Takes $1B From Fairfax, Others, Replaces CEO Thorsten Heins
I'm slowly moving my elaborate data-cleaning system from R to python. I never got the hang of R packages and ended up rolling my own "import" scheme, but now it all seems like I've passed some critical complexity point.

I'm still doing all of my model estimation in R, and data.table + ggplot2 is still my go-to solution for interactive exploration and plotting, but I'm putting more and more of the process-csv, write-hdf5, remove out-of-bounds values, backfill, stratified sampling/bootstrap, etc., logic into python.

I may end up moving more of the estimation itself into python, now that statsmodels and sklearn are more mature, but R does that pretty well.

I've not tried Julia, but I have experimented with Java for some of the data-processing, but it's never seemed worth it, over python. Basic CSV processing is faster in python than in Java (although the python version uses much more CPU), so I haven't felt the need. (I'm probably limited more by disk bandwidth than CPU, but I've not done the tests required to prove that.)

Julia seems nice, but it seems intent on copying all the questionable design choices of matlab, rather than using ideas from the numpy/kdb+/apl worlds.
BlackBerry-Fairfax deal dies; Thorsten Heins out
The astounding athletic power of quadcopters (video)
EBay CEO "Keeping an eye on" Bitcoin
Raspberry Pi monitor hits Kickstarter target
Build a system with what seems to be a good, logical set of usage assumptions and you will find that once it's out in the wild, you will get people trying all kinds of different ways of using your system. It defies your own logic, but humans aren't that logical (usually). Being too clever with your assumptions usually backfires.
I wonder if Microsoft's failure to dominate search, email and social networking has anything to do with his view.
Most stable camera ever
on the other hand, you get a lot of free accounts and private information. I own a domain that was once used as webmail for a couple of hundred people I guess. Looking through the catchall is awkward and invasive...
Haha nice. It's running kitkat too - white icons, top right.
The Excel rule is simple: if you want an expression then start it with '='.
Yep, totally agree - it gets so much worse. I don't recall going much further than NP hard in my undergraduate courses but another guy I did my PhD with was a researcher into QSAT which is PSPACE-complete (fails the "verify a token in polynomial time" condition of NP-complete).

There are so many different complexity classes, P and NP are just the start.
Show HN: The Best Toilet In The World
You were able to read the website? All I see is:

Error establishing a database connection

Maybe the OP should hire a coder to fix his site?
Actualvim – Sublime Text 3 input mode powered by Vim itself
For anyone interested in Prolog the usual book recommendations are:

"Programming Prolog" (Mellish & Clocksin), "The Art of Prolog" (as a first/second book), "The Craft of Prolog" (as an advanced book for later)

I don't own the first one but "Art of Prolog" was a little over my head when I got it (maybe I'm not that smart) and the typical "family database" examples are kind of tedious. I've worked through a couple of books now and the first book I'd recommend these days is "Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence". Don't let the AI in the title distract you, Part 1 is a very good introduction to Prolog (the best I'm aware of) and Part 2 covers typical AI topics (also very interesting of course).