skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, one of the biggest problems is that we have no idea what "there" actually looks like.
From personal experience (anecdote alert!), errors are also common in the ostensibly stone-cold-hard field of algorithms in computer science. A few years back I went on a string algorithm kick, and started dredging up old algorithm papers from the 80's on which to build Wikipedia articles.

Often, the papers would get the general idea right, but if implemented as described would not work at all or fail on edge cases. The best example I have is an algorithm to find the lexicographically-minimal string rotation[0]. The simplest and fastest algorithm to do this is based on the KMP string search algo, and is tribal knowledge among ACM ICPC competitors. I thought it was pretty neat and wanted to cement this algorithm in popular knowledge, so I set about researching and writing the Wikipedia article.

I found the KMP-based algorithm in a 1980 paper[1] by Kellogg S. Booth. The paper has very detailed pseudocode which does not work. At all. The tribal knowledge version I inherited had similarities in the general idea of the algorithm (use of the KMP preprocessing step) but everything else was different. I scoured the internet for a retraction or correction, but all I found was a paper written in 1995[2] which mentioned in passing errors in the 1980 paper.

I do wonder exactly how common this is. I emailed a professor who co-wrote one of the papers, and he replied that "it seems to me that all
the algorithms (including our own) turned out to have errors in them!" Has anyone done studies into errors in computer science papers?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicographically_minimal_stri...

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00200190809...

[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.55.9...
Urbit/Docker Tool
I'm the biggest proponent of basic income, but the US has serious divides along racial and socioeconomic lines that I don't see being resolved in our lifetimes. This will probably prevent any sort of basic income from being implemented.

In any other modern, western democracy, basic income is a no-brainer. The majority of the EU is already discussing exactly such a motion, and the safety net of most developed European nations is unfathomable to Americans.

In conclusion, there's no point in waiting a century in hopes that the USA's crippling structural issues will be solved. Move onto greener pastures like Germany, where you can have that future right now. In Germany, captains of industry are lobbying for basic income as we speak [1].

1. http://www.goethe.de/ges/pok/zdk/en4387190.htm
There is too much money, and it has nowhere to go. Even the property bubble is starting up again. It won't be "the value of tech stocks" that crashes, it will be "the value of money". Which means inflation, and anything imported will become more expensive.
It's called class struggle. In the US the rich win the class struggle largely because those in the middle (a.k.a. middle class) considers themselves not yet rich rather than not yet poor.
Agree!!!

Almost all the modern software stack's components are basically written or build on top C code.

Linux, BSD, WinNT kernels are all build with on C.

gcc and all most all compilers, stdlib are written in C.

python, Java, PhP, lisp, smalltalk, NodeJS, are written in C.

Apache, Nginx source are written with C.

C++ is just add on layer to C.

Chromium, Firefox, webkit are all build on top of C/C++.

I haven't be able to find one core component in the modern OS/web stack that is not base on C.

Can anyone?
If it's performance you care about, here's a ridiculously exhaustive set of benchmarks for every web framework you've heard of, and many more you haven't.

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=ec...

I've got no love for PHP, but if you must, use a recent version and a decent framework.
And break Cygwin/MSYS/<*nix compat layer> that provides install(1).
Bad example. When did the Beatles fade from popular consciousness? They've been outselling most other artists for 50 years non-stop.

Vanilla Ice might be a better example.
The best deal for the iPhone 5s/c isn't available in the US (Rather India)
Correct, in the digital realm there is absolutely nothing that actually binds the .png of your signature to the document which you were supposedly "signing". That's a huge problem.
wow 200MB, someone should tell t-mobile what year it is. i think they are stuck somewhere in 199x
You should be reading http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-1-arvo.html in parallel with these scripts if you're a docker user and you don't already have an Urbit ship.
Sniffing out probes part 2
What Makes a Good Programmer Good?
Haskell is useless
It's fairly easy to get a good working PGP system on OSX - Symantec makes it obscure to get but it works well, at least for file encryption with options available in the Finder menu.

https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer?a_id=109355

No need to pay - you just need to go through the rigmarole of getting a trial registration.
Rationing with waiting lists is dumb, always has been and always will be. The smart ways to ration are by money (better surgeons charge more), or by QALY (better surgeons do more important operations on sicker people). And even with single-payer, there's no reason you can't pay better surgeons more.

It's true that not everyone can have a top surgeon. But for serious surgery, the "complication" is frequently death. It's extremely silly to tell people that 1% chance of death vs. a 2% chance of death "shouldn't affect their choice". I don't know about you, but I don't want to die, even as I accept that small chances of death are sometimes unavoidable.

Regarding medical ethics, obviously in the abstract we should prefer saving ten lives to one life. But in practice, it's often better to have a rule like "don't kill people" than "kill people when it serves the common good". "Don't kill people" is very easy to understand, and very easy to enforce. The "common good" is abstract and fuzzy, and can be used to justify anything from fighting malaria in Africa to Stalin's Holodomor ("can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs").
Just to point out to readers that DannyBee works for Google (reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6658276)

DannyBee - have you read Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall (http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Mazes-World-Corporate-Managers/d...)? It was one of Aaron Swartz's favorite books.

It's an excellent, and fair to all sides, dissection of morality in corporate management. It explains how and why managers rehearse to explain actions their company's have taken.

In this particular comment of yours, you say lots of true things. However, you are not acting in a straightforward "hacker" way, as befits this site, telling the truth how it is.

Google can continue to behave in this way as a company, but it will alas find it harder and harder to hire good geeks.
That's on your file system.

The HTTP protocol specifies that, if the server says a document is 'text/plain', the client must not attempt to second-guess it based on content.

IE second-guesses it based on content, so you cannot serve up something that looks like HTML as text/plain to get it to display.

Substantially worse, IMO.

That said, it'd be better to actually save content types in extended attributes or something. And make all applications magically save and respect these attributes.
If he's the father of everything, then he's to blame for everything being worse than it could have been with Lisp.

He's the Thomas Edison of this story, and I'm with Tesla.
Large parts of Classical Greek plays were were sung. We know this from a host of different sources (not least the plays themselves, parts of which are written in sung meters...)
Hmm, interesting. Android by default notifies apps that it's on a limited data connection, and they restrict background updates and such. For example, I can install apps from the Play Store on cellular, but they won't auto-update themselves. Same with apps like Pocket, Currents, Google Music (different bitrates for cellular and non-cellular backed wifi, pre-caching), etc. Gmail won't download images/attachments automatically on cellular, but will on wifi. For all of these though, you can usually override this in an individual app's settings, such as telling Google Music to always stream high quality or Gmail to always download attachments.

My tablet barely uses any data (with syncing enabled) in the background on cellular data. This despite having background syncing turned on and quite a few apps that use it. I take it with me most places and do casual browsing on the cellular connection (public transit and airports mostly), and the most I've used was 150MB/month. It just waits to do anything bandwidth intensive until it's back on wifi.

I'm really surprised Apple hasn't done this yet. I guess that's the reason why carriers complain iDevices use so much data.
I disagree. I'm delighted Angular exists but I think there are many examples in history where the more general, lightweight technology sees more widespread success than the feature-rich, high concept alternative.

That's exactly why we chose Backbone over Angular earlier this year.

An imperfect analogy, but: maybe Angular is like Wave, Backbone like Email...
> > I can't see this being a pleasurable user-experience.

> You describe exactly how Linux became what it is.

The main server OS (UX not quite relevant for servers) or an OSS kernel primarily used by consumers with a semi-closed (Android) userspace?
If you are starting a business and plan to be the initial developers, use what you know (PHP) because you probably won't have time to learn new stuff and build your business. I'd base the decision on who is doing the coding and what skills they have. Try to stick to standard frameworks and programming practices/decent docs, task/project management, and source control, making it easier to transfer responsibility and project historical artifacts to other developers or grow the team as you grow your business.
Tint: new iPhone Weather App
Tint is a new iOS7 weather app providing corrent conditions, hourly and weekly forecasts, precipitations and pressure map and 5 different color palettes
That doesn't explain the third line. Your rule would result in

(if condition
(1)
(else-clause))

trying to call 1 as a function, which is an error.
In 90s, technical founders were able to launch startups successfully if they were technically strong. Getting designer was not top priority at the time. So everyone focused on having strong technical teams.

Eventually, people figured out that having someone with design skills early on your team can provide huge competitive advantage to your startup against tech only competitors. And today designer's role is very prominent in startup world.

Now all startups have technical and designing strengths on their team from day one, what do you need to stay one step ahead of the crowd ?

I have a feeling that code-wizard + design-guru team won't be good enough in near future.
www.academia.edu - research paper sharing portal, you can pick an area of your interest and track from there.
Fake femme fatale dupes IT guys at US government agency
Please detail this "extra software".
Stick with what you know so you can get your start-up off the ground quickly and cheap. Once you hit PHPs limits, you can still gradually migrate over to $whatever_language_is_hipster_language. Regarding node.js and Go explicitly, I'd give those two at least one year of "maturing time" until you use it for mission-critical stuff.
I retract my earlier comment about the most painful thing I've read this week.
The "terminal" on MacOS X. It has:

- tabs

- cut and paste that actually works

- various ways to focus windows

- hey, search!

... and a bunch of other stuff. While CMD.EXE has its feet firmly rooted in 1982 or so.

Yeah, I know you can buy more whizzy shells. But MS really has no excuse for letting the NT console system rot as much as it has. Given that their programmers use it /all the time/, I find it hard to believe that someone hasn't written something better. (PowerShell overshot the mark, and wound up being unusable).
Symphony makes $2500/month (http://www.symphonytools.com). Launched 4 months ago. Back in December, my co-founder and I spent 3 weeks brainstorming and wrote 25 business plans for 25 ideas. And then chose this one. Started building it in January.

It's written in Python. Hosting costs about $700/month on Google App Engine. It doesn't cover our costs yet, but it's growing. Hardest challenge so far has been to find ways to let the world know about it.
OS X Mavericks forces use of iCloud to sync Contacts, Calendar & Mail Accounts
Interesting. Why do you have a clean room if I may ask? I'm guessing data recovery?
I have a way to describe this. I call it "they need everybody yet they need nobody".

They have decided that they would rather have contact from as many people as possible and be the filter that decides if what someone is offering (or wanting) is desirable to them or not.

The other side of this is (back in the day) people who would do a version of "serious inquiries only" which would surely scare off all but the hardiest people.
Here's how we do Guaranteed Income the free market way...

http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/44789487956/guaranteed-in...
just checked out your site, i think its decent it would be great if you made it easier to tick the words, its difficult to pin point and click too many check boxes
So that basically means there are security problems everywhere?
Sorry, I don't have any such link, but I was in the dev tools business then, and I remember, for what it's worth.

Regarding CSS, it rose very gradually, but its rise created a slowly growing problem for Dreamweaver, resulting in the transition from then, when most pros used it for at least part of their workflow, to now, when most don't. Dreamweaver had the best WYSIWYG mode of any HTML editor at the time, and it had a pure code editor, and its big claim to fame was that you could edit in either, jump back and forth between modes, and they would (mostly) remain in sync. You'd do the rough layout visually, then tweak the details in the resulting code, then tweak a bit more visually, then add another touch of code, etc. As non-HTML components on the front end gradually became more important, people used the WYSIWYG mode less and less, gradually shifting toward straight coding, significantly reducing the value of DW's dual-mode advantage over pure code editors.
It would be useful in part because another surgeon can assess how well he is doing before actually stacking up enough bad/good statistics to notice. It's also useful for training, just like watching yourself swing a golf club or a baseball bat or rereading your old code can help you, with the aid of others, see what you could improve on. Doing the wrong thing over and over in a vacuum doesn't make for much learning..
A quick history lesson for those who haven't been to Latvia, this is a country that has been screwed by history in a way that is hard to imagine. First, they were occupied by the Soviets, with all that entailed, purges, gulags and so on. Then they were occupied by the Nazis, and things got a whole lot worse. Then after WW2, the Soviets again, keen to punish the Latvians for daring to "let" the Nazi war machine crush them beneath its jackboots. Stalin has some ideas about lebensraum of his own, and instigated a mass programme of exiling Latvians and importing Russians. Even today, they are still finding pockets of Latvians deep inside Russia, relocated there by Stalin, cut off from the world, and asking them if they want to come home. Think about that for a second.

These people have a resilience that no pampered Westerner can really understand, they'll survive this like they have everything else.
Did a murderer and a sex offender just save Oklahoma $20 million?
I'm a mathematician, so I think that makes me a boolean :)
There's a way to do it and actually spend less money on welfare:

http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/44789487956/guaranteed-in...
The Nvidia Shield is Nexus-level friendly: it's just fastboot oem unlock, no special keys or APKs or anything. It's also an incredibly nice device. (I wish Nvidia made phones...)
I respectfully disagree with OP.

I would say that django_extensions is handy enough to have it included (mainly for the sake of shell_plus and runserver_plus), South is invaluable (although migrations are going into the core in near future[0]), but others—it very much depends on the project.

sekizai is one I've never heard about before. Judging from the first sight, I think it can make templating more flexible, but at the cost of increased complexity.

Earlier I thought that reversion is great to have by default, and I was adding it to every project. Then, as I recall, mysterious errors started popping up one day in one project after Django update. They turned out to have something to do with reversion compatibility. I looked into it and found that we had no use cases for reversion—I could simply throw it away without any consequences, which I promptly did.

I've used grappelli for a while, but in the end I found its UI less usable than native Django admin UI. (Recently I stumbled across http://djangosuit.com/ — this one does seem more functional, although I've never used it in my projects yet.)

[0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/migrations/
I giggled a little bit too much on this pun

[4] "Who will drive adoption?"
I thought they were for freedom of speech. There was a giant shitstorm when Jailbait was shutdown, with many cries towards "unfair censorship".

But when censorship agrees with their biased views, all of a sudden its okay.
You are absolutely right. However you comment reminds me this one from original Dropbox announcement on Hacker News:

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

This might be a fun experiment for a developer. But for the broad user perspective even replacing launcher is a big deal.
The 2nd edition (2012) fixes this and recommends ghci -- http://www.amazon.com/Haskell-Programming-Second-Edition-Com...

Worth the purchase!
The only flaw I see with beginning with semi-trucks is the perception of driverless cars to the masses and the potential damage a driverless semi-truck accident could incur vs a driverless Prius or something smaller. Not saying there won't be a market for it in the trucking business, but seems smart to start on the smaller cars just for the sake of perceived safety.
I totally agree that driverless trucks are the future, but I don't think it will come easy. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is one of the largest unions in North America, and one of the most politically powerful. I think that they will fight this with everything they have to keep humans getting paychecks.
This one allows up to 384GB RAM:

http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290

And it costs a fraction of EC2, which would cost you $2556 for 30.44 days.

I could get 10 servers with 1 Gbit each, and it will still be cheaper than EC2.
Yep, definitely sounds like an appropriate use case. I was just poking a little fun at the possibility of it being used to exploit users.
Ask HN: What are the best Marketing APIs today?
Give me your Top 5.
If you are hiring "additional" developers then you need to go with something you know, unless you want to learn something new and get started on it first. Otherwise you are just hiring developers and not participating...
The whole thing about Dvorak keyboards being faster to type on is a myth. See link for details: http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors
What are those 2 boring startups you run?

Also, a sneaky, probably short-term idea for making money is to have sneaky affiliate links with misleading anchor text like "Click to see the image", and point the affiliate link to an Amazon product page or something. Probably an easy few thousand dollars per month.
>“Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong,” The Economist states in its recent cover story “How Science Goes Wrong.” “But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think.”

I think the fact that people rarely retract can also be more of a practical issue than anything. Some guy wrote his master's thesis 3 years ago and it's in fact wrong? The author's too busy with his real life to have been keeping track of that. Or he's working on some other domain. Or the paper was written 30 years ago.

I've also heard a lot of people say that a lot of research happens in the dark in many domains. People doing research in Haskell will gladly talk about their work on mailing lists it seems, but when it comes to chemistry, apparently it's a whole lotta silence. Pretty depressing.
He criticizes himself for this too. But he didn't make the guy famous; Petrofsky was already a star, the subject of laudatory movie, and so forth. He became more skeptical and challenged Petrofsky's claims in print in 1985. I think that's a pretty good turnaround time.
PHP is rarely going to be a bottleneck, especially with opcode caching. Content heavy stuff beats up a database, so caching there, then stick Varnish in front of apache.
Agree with all you are saying above.

"Cold calling via phone is a not an effective use of a smaller team's time in my experience-- you will rarely reach the right person within an organization, there are lots of 'gatekeepers' for high level executives, and voicemails just don't generate responses."

Along these lines I'm amazed at the amount of times don't use postal mail to break the ice.

I don't mean a canned direct mail piece. I mean a personal letter, signed in ink, that makes the point.

With that their is no (direct) rejection and it's possible to send many at a very low cost (even if they don't end up in the right place).
Also original C isn't that huge of a step away from B. Some insane parts of C are remnants of B like undeclared functions are believed to return ints.
I've never had a cab keep their doors locked when I waved one down; maybe the neighborhood matters?

(I live around 145th and Broadway; sometimes I take a cab after going out drinking, which probably means one of the villages, or thereabouts.
100k visitors per day is 4k visitors/hour is 1.2 visitors/s. Suppose each visitor clicks on 10 pages (that is very high) and you get a total of 12 requests/s. Now even assuming much higher load during peak hours you're still looking at max 100 requests/s.

My point is that that kind of traffic is truly minuscule. As long as you set it up correctly and use a decent cache it will handle the load fine. Any platform you choose and hosting for ~$200/month will be enough.