skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm 8 years away from 55 years old. I can assure you this is much too young an age to pass into another reality. My thoughts are with his family...
The first HELIUM-FILLED hard drive
The MOOC course is very interesting. Do you know if there's a way to get enrolled? It looks like the registration is closed and there's no upcoming offerings available currently. Thanks.
Well spotted! :)

What is that expression? "All's fair in love and war"
The density of helium is less than 1/7 of the density of nitrogen, which is a good approximation for air.

Two ways that this is helpful come to mind:

1. Aerodynamic effects like drag and vorticity are largely governed by the Reynolds Number, which holding all else constant, varies linearly with density. Changing the density of the fluid can drastically change the aerodynamic situation. See
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/dragsphere.html for an interesting and accessible example.

2. "Flow-induced vibration" is caused by the swirling gases crashing like stormy seas, making platters vibrate and heads flutter. Switching to helium cuts the momentum in these turbulent flows to a seventh of what they would be with air.
Wordpress has good caching available. This is the owner's failure, not WP's.
Six-course meal? No. Are there fully automated kebab stands and such? Already.
Edward Snowden’s leaks could derail a $300 billion trans-Atlantic trade deal
I think Markdown and semantic markup are nearly incompatible, unless you want some kind of highly hacked version of Markdown. You might look into Textile though, which looks similar to Markdown but has built-in support for annotating with HTML classes and IDs and whatnot.
I said this a while back in another thread, but it's actually more on-topic here:

One of the worst things about tech culture is that it's full of socially awkward people who have learned a neat low-effort hack for getting around their poor social skills: be an asshole.

Being an asshole is easy. It requires no actual effort spent in learning the intricacies of human social interaction or human nature. It requires no effort spent getting "outside your own head," trying to connect with other people, investing in forming genuine bonds or understanding the motivation of others. All you have to do is learn to at least feign confidence, to be superficially charming, and to throw your weight around.

The tricks of the asshole trade are status symbols, name dropping, rank-pulling, appeals to credentials (I went to Stanford so I am better than you), fast talking, claiming you have "no time" for anyone who doesn't kowtow to your superior assholery, etc.

Like many low-effort hacks it "works" in the sense that it creates a superficial sense of social proficiency and permits the user to navigate meatspace. Sometimes you can even get things done. But it's a cheap trick and it doesn't scale forward either in size, scope, or time.
This is something I've been working on most of the past year, based on an idea I've had for years. Finally launched it last week as one of the Battlefield finalist companies at Techcrunch Disrupt.

It integrates with a bunch of online accounting services (Freeagent, SageOne, Kashflow, Xero - more to come).

Comments and feedback welcome!
My results here: http://imgur.com/tO9K5fm.png
Yes I know all this regulations, testing, security measure etc, etc..

I'm a bit wondering, in this kinds of regulated and dangerous (at least to the producer via lawsuits), how much quantity of production and consuming would start to beat DIY efficient pricing?
I guess I'm possibly damaged in that I don't find life (including my own) to be inherently valuable unless I'm doing something I'm good at and/or effecting some kind of change on things (it just happens that the things I'm good at and changes I can effect are fairly marketable and so they became my job).

I don't work to live, or live to work, I work to work and live because the alternative (very probably, at least) lacks opportunities for interesting work or socialization.

I try to get into hobbies (which seem to by definition be doing sorts of work which aren't marketable or impactful) but it's hard to find the point in them. I'll likely never get good enough at say, guitar for it to matter in any way.

If I've got nothing social to do on a Sunday evening, closing a ticket at least makes the customer and/or a few hundred of their end users a bit happier come Monday morning. If I'm hourly on the project then it's a few more bucks for my retirement account. All in all, it handily beats feeling like an idiot clumsily flailing on my guitar for a few hours - though I sometimes choose to do that anyway.
I'd like to see them continue on the path that the Lumia 1020 set - premium camera smartphone. I think there's a good niche for them there that is very hard for Apple to get into due to asthetics (a Lumia can have a bump on the back for a large fast lens that would be very unusual for an iPhone).
Ummm, based on my experience in service-related industries, this doesn't ring quite true. Customer-facing work is really really hard.
Also known as "iteration" and "failing fast" and "being quick to pivot."

These are not bad concepts when properly understood. Unfortunately they are rarely properly understood.

Hint: they do not mean "it doesn't matter whether what you do has any merit out of the starting gate," nor do they mean "quality doesn't matter, just fling shit and see if it sticks to the wall."
North Korea’s tablet comes pre-loaded with ‘Gone with the Wind’
But this thing is Vim.
So much this! I hate latex but this is not a replacement in any way.
I would add that the original title "Introducing RinohType the Python document processor", is way better than the one of the HN submission. It is not a "modern LaTeX", let alone a "LaTeX rewrite" (which is implied by the "in 6500 lines of Python").
So should you just use em for everything?
Possibly a kickstarter to code CMYK into gimp would be a good idea? If the gimp team doesn't let you do it, it should be easy enough to fork it with a bit of financial backing from a kickstarter.
How to Stop Reading about Doing (and actually Start Doing)
You are assuming that the person who wrote the article is in charge of the server.
My thoughts exactly. Someone at the publisher is looking at a lot of similarly formatted documents, any deviation should stand out.

And isn't separating content from style what a .sty file is supposed to do anyway?
I see what you mean. Thanks for taking the time out to nitpick.
From Microsoft, more Windows fail
Ditto, in Visual Studio. I use viEmu a lot, but it has strange behavior sometimes and missing features.
I think HN traffic has killed the servers. Getting a 500.
Jake Poznanski - Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain
Yes, it's all wrong on Evince too.

Chrome PDF reader displays it correctly, though.
And education would convince people of the need for vaccines, the need for condoms, and the need of seeking medical help. It's more than just an availability issue, it's also a culture, education and economic issue...

Besides, considering there is massive unemployment and underemployment in most 3rd world countries (especially amongst youth), I really don't think illness has any effect on overall productivity...

Furthermore, history has shown, with few exceptions, that quality of life, healthcare, prevalence of disease and every health metric gets better with economic prosperity...
Doesn't finland also now have an enormously successful 'little' slice of the games industry?
Please DoS this site
What would help is formalizing the Bitcoin security requirements, so that we do not need to apply ad-hoc fixes when this happens.
You're attacking a straw man.

I don't object to Google fighting its competitors, but it must play by the rules. Google is not a country, but part of society and this imposes certain obligations.
I'm not sure that was bunk in Nokia's case. When they realized that Symbian had to go, they also realized that the vast bulk of the company was organized around that one OS. And if sources are to be believed, most of that deadweight was fiefdoms jealously guarded by entrenched groups, which meant they were not going to be conducive to "pivot" to a new direction. Now they had to shed that humongous deadweight and produce a competitive "modern" smartphone. I think it's entirely possible that in that situation whatever resources you have left, you may well have no choice but to bet the farm.

Nokia may have used Android to force Microsoft into a buyout, but I doubt they were going to seriously pursue it, for one big reason: that would have entailed compulsorily licensing Google Maps, which is a direct competitor to their own mapping division. You may think that doesn't sound so bad, but consider this:

1) It dilutes the billions they paid for Navteq.

2) As the SkyHook lawsuits have shown us(IIRC) Google demands all location data produced by Android devices to improve their own geo services. As such, Nokia would have ended up building devices that end up improving a competing service.

3) Considering the mapping division is one of only three divisions Nokia held on to, it's undoubtedly important to them long term. I am not sure, in their eyes, the pros of having an Android phone out there would have outweighed the cons of improving a competing mapping service.
I would argue quite the opposite is true, that being an asshole requires the same amount of work as being nice. Poor social skills are just that, poor social skills. Being an asshole is simply learned behaviour, it doesn't have anything to do with how easy it is..
For most it's just easier to use trashmail.net or mailinator.
[meteor-weekly] Meteor Devshop9, Meteor Marketplace, Meteor UI Update and More
WordPress' inability to stand up to even moderate levels of traffic is well known enough at this point that the product really should come with some kind of caching solution built in, IMO. Yes, there are caching plugins, but the users who need them the most are also the ones least likely to know they need them.
> r = cli.get_itemrec_topn("myEngine", 5, {"pio_latlng":[37.9, 91.2]})

Without the preceding comment I'm sure this line of code is clear as crystal to whomever wrote it. To me it might as well be hieroglyphics. If you write an API, do not abbreviate the public methods.
Sure. Friday on LinkedIn I got one of those "recommended jobs" thingies in my story line. It was full of "you should value execution over planning". It pretty much sounded like a 20hr/day sweatshop of fighting endless bugs and chasing the whims of the founders.

Are the VCs listening to this? You are funding people who don't take spending your money very seriously. There is a huge continuum (shall I say gulf) between not over-engineering something when you don't yet have proven market share and just randomly tossing shit together.
Go with PHP.

It will speed you up. Scalability isn't an issue right now for you, so don't optimize for it.
Do you have a good read for this? I'm always telling people around me that we're running out of helium.
> it will be infeasible to brute force (>100 bits of entropy)

Really? Even a massively distributed attempt?
Da Vinci most certainly worked 80 hour weeks, and I am sure he loved every minute of it. Why? Because he got paid to think up cool shit day in and day out. I have worked jobs that were so mind numbingly boring that I could barely muster 30 hours a week when I was single. Now I am married and could easily pull 60-70 hours a week at my significantly more interesting job. Work is the place you will spend most of your life. Do your best to find a place you can live with.
I really don't care much about backward compatibility with existing plugins. We're using vim not the plugins anyway. I justed wanted an terminal editor with vi bindings.
Name them. What 100 are those? Malaria is one of the single biggest factors in the development of the average African child's life, and the effects of it resonate through a lifetime. It is almost certainly the most Important priority, rather than some photo sharing startup that is "Dropbox meets Quora for Snapchat users". Clearly, no one has to go do what Gates is saying, but the hyperbole here is silly.
How has switching to Android worked out for anyone but Samsung?
I looked at the sample output (http://www.mos6581.org/files/intro_template.pdf) and is it just me or does the vertical spacing seem off? (for example, look at the tables and how the text goes right up to kiss the horizontal bars).
The point of vim and its key bindings is to not have to use anything other than the keyboard (and keys that are not too off from the home row), so it's not the best of both worlds at all. Having to click on something forces someone to use their mouse, breaking their concentration and wasting time on clicking on a tab.
Markdown is very limited and you will soon hit a wall, when you get down to writing a thesis rather than a paper. For example if you want to write something to the Table of Contents which is not the section title itself.

\section[short]{Long Title}

It is also possible within pdfLaTeX or LuaLaTeX to write shorter commands.

A GUI will eventually slow you down and is impossible to cater for the hundreds of commands including commonly used packages.
Possibly not directly, but at least indirectly (by choosing where they're hosted).
The hole in Bitcoin
Track your lost Android phone with Android Device Manager
We're Having a FIRE...Sale (Actual sale)
Regarding Asha: I hear Asha is doing crazy well in low-end markets. Not sure how Microsoft can leverage it, but I'm sure they are aware of this.
If they put their patents and stake in "Rockstar" as collateral, Google would certainly offer them several billion.
Wikipedia early revision history for "iPhone" article (2005)
I wonder if this piece I wrote on one way for organizations to succeed without bureaucracy or heavy top-down management might not be of interest to those suffering from the "fail fast" syndrome: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/how-winners-win-john-boyd-...

Not to say it's the only way to do things, of course, but it's a hell of a lot better than "Get Shit Done" ...

EDIT: Submitted the post to HN for discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669129
I can't read this. Maybe you should get shit done... like a working website ¬_¬
John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations
Amazon Cuts $40 off new Fire tab for 1 day sale
> Trust your instincts
> Showing up a lot increases your odds
> Trust that the dots in your career will connect
> Have a passion for Doing something rather than Being a title on a business card.

So basically, his advice is to just hope everything works out okay. What he doesn't explicitly point out is that all of the success in his story is based on being a really good bullshitter. If you can bullshit well, you can get promotions, you can get jobs, you can get a lot of things. If you can't bullshit well, you're out of a job with barely any cash in a place you're not familiar with, and probably soon calling your parents to wire you gas money to get back home.

I've also been fired the first day on a job. But I had savings to fall back on, and then got a much better job a few months after. Trust your back-up plan, not connecting the dots.
This response is taking issue with the words used, rather than the underlying claim of the original article. In fact, this response contains a whole section and a diagram which are effectively supporting evidence for the original!

The most important thing to take away from the original is that the css unit "px" has no relationship to the actual size of a pixel on the screen, and all the physical units (inch, cm, pt) are defined in terms of the csspixel. So marking a button as "width: 1cm" will almost never render something over 1cm of the screen geometry.

Incidentally, this is why designers like device models with only a few geometries, such as the iPhone. They can do the math themselves to work out how many iphone-pixels are in a cm, and write their styles accordingly.
Think about Steve, the golden rule of product
The World's largest democracy wants to ban opinion polls
Read Then Burn
Not everything - this article is wrong that CSS defines em as being based on "m" [1] (includes actual quote [2] from w3c spec)

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/4531441/1971539

[2] The 'em' unit is equal to the computed value of the 'font-size' property of the element on which it is used. The exception is when 'em' occurs in the value of the 'font-size' property itself, in which case it refers to the font size of the parent element. It may be used for vertical or horizontal measurement.
Why functional programming is awesome
If I would want a comment thread full of jokes I would go to reddit.
I tried submitting a URL of mine http://fmhgifts.com but it doesn't seem to work as the button is greyed out for some reason.
To play devil's advocate, I've been in startups where it seems like very little ever gets done and dithering and playing around with cool code becomes the norm. Eventually, a "bull dog" personality has to be brought in to light some dynamite under the ass of engineering and get them focused on delivery.

GSD works so long as it's focused on shipping.
ArkOS - Funding Campaign
So what? The previous 34lb gain happened about 8 years ago and that was probably his main focus at the time. Then, he was in his late 20s. Now, he's in his late 30s and obviously spread thin.

I love HN, but damn the negativity and dismissal. The guy is opening up on some pretty personal stuff and I for one appreciate it.

[edit: I've explained why I think the original 34lb gain is possibly legitimate in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669680 (though you should note that wasn't the point of this comment.)]
A lot of entrepreneurs, are the engineering equivalent of cowboys. Entrepreneurs who are professional software developers, are quite rare.
Honestly I hope they succeed. Lumia 1020 hardware with Android or Meego would be very enticing.
I need to ask, when did we start routinely describing positive-sum cooperative behavior as "domesticated", implying a crippling or emasculation of the species?
Chrome 30 on Windows 7

Is JavaScript enabled?	Yes

Are Cookies enabled?	Yes

Is Flash installed?	Flash 11.9 is installed Up to date

Is Java installed?	Java 7 (u17) is installed Out of date

YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN:

1920x1080 32 bit

DETECTED ADDONS:

Microsoft Silverlight v5.1

Ad Blocker
em or relative font-sizing seems like a good choice. Also see rem [1] which was introduced with CSS3 to combat issues with font size compounding. Use pt for print stylesheets [2].

For a bit of ancient internet history: http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size/points/font_wars.GIF

[1] http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/font-size-with-rem

[2] http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html
Create stunning homepages using photo backgrounds
got the same email. Pretty targetted spamming and annoying. Good product, SPAM is just pushy.
I'm nervous to think that "get shit done" is likely the current mantra of Healthcare.gov, as contractors are scrambling to fix an untested spaghetti-codebase before Thanksgiving....
Learn how to write a 3D soft engine from scratch in C#, TypeScript or JavaScript
In The Netherlands a lot have migrated to Nokia Windows Phones. KPN have been doing some very good deals which make the phones free and the contract prices very competitive with a guarantee of a new phone yearly if you migrate from their BlackBerry business packages.
The wikipedia article is a good start, follow through to the sources for in depth information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Modern_extraction_and_di...

"According to helium conservationists like Robert Coleman Richardson, the free market price of helium has contributed to "wasteful" usage (e.g. for helium balloons). Prices in the 2000s have been lowered by U.S. Congress' decision to sell off the country's large helium stockpile by 2015."

I'm a bit skeptical of the quoted numbers, but even if they're a magnitude off there's still plenty left to be extracted. The US alone apparently still has enough proven helium in natural gas reserves for the next 40 years of worldwide consumption, and estimated unproven reserves for the next 40.000 years:

"Diffusion of crude natural gas through special semipermeable membranes and other barriers is another method to recover and purify helium.[84] In 1996, the U.S. had proven helium reserves, in such gas well complexes, of about 147 billion standard cubic feet (4.2 billion SCM).[85] At rates of use at that time (72 million SCM per year in the U.S.; see pie chart below) this is enough helium for about 58 years of U.S. use, and less than this (perhaps 80% of the time) at world use rates, although factors in saving and processing impact effective reserve numbers. It is estimated that the resource base for yet-unproven helium in natural gas in the U.S. is 31–53 trillion SCM, about 1000 times the proven reserves."
Setting up Push-to-Deploy with git
The article also mentions that on some devices, the anchor unit is cm and not px. So on those devices setting something to 1cm should render the item at an actual cm in size.
Pretty sure it has to do with him aging. At some point in your life you realize your own mortality and start to decide what really matters in your life.

Even in my 30's, I've consciously started to make decisions about how I want to spend my time. Do I want to play video games for 3 hours, or go out and mountain bike for 90 minutes, or spend time with my dogs or my family? I'm pretty sure Bill went through the same thing, albeit he has a ton more money and those decisions were easy for him to use his resources to try and be a huge agent of change.

It probably also has to do with his legacy. Does he want people to remember him as the tyrant who ruled MS with an iron fist and his idea to rule the world? Or as a kind, gentle billionaire pouring his vast resources into solving some of humanities toughest problems?
LaTeX does a lot of stuff - it'd take a long time to replicate all that functionality.

However, on my todo list is to write some sort of "TeX-down" wrapper for LaTeX - I want to write my dissertation in a modified form of Markdown, with inline LaTeX equations and sectioning of "theorem" and "proof"-type environments, and then run a make to generate the TeX and PDF based off of a type of TeX template. I'm familiar with Pandoc but haven't delved into it far enough to know if it's robust enough to do what I want.
The Academy for Software Engineering: A Manhattan high school for developers
I guess it depends on who you ask. My wife (a surgeon) says that this is often not true for most of the staff. For example if you ask the OR/Floor nurses they will know if the surgeon is truly terrible, but in her experience (hearing from the nurses) she says that she is often surprised by who they think is a good surgeon. She does say however that the anesthesiologists working with the surgeon usually have a good idea.
Add me to the list. I got the same email, except it was in regards to Rails.
I've always been uneasy about it.

Google providing me with definitions was troubling, but online dictionaries are sub-optimal. Google giving me instant conversions was so handy that I didn't care.

But etymologies are handled nicely by http://www.etymonline.com/ and it's sad to think they're going to get a lot less traffic now.
It's an odd trend in part because it doesn't seem like companies can afford it. At least, they complain about the results: can't find and keep enough good programmers. If there were a huge pool of easy to find qualified people, just firing people at the first whiff of difficulty, rather than debugging management, could be a viable strategy. But if good people are hard to find, firing a good engineer for "bad fit", rather than first trying to figure out whether the fit is a management issue, seems shortsighted.

Or at least, if you take that strategy, I'm not going to have a lot of sympathy for complaints that good developers are hard to find! If this strategy works at all, and companies really can take a haphazard approach to management and succeed with it, it would suggest that good developers aren't really in that short supply after all.
QNX?