skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I misread your comment, usually people challenge that point. I totally agree that it is difficult to talk about maintainability in an objective fashion, but there is something to be said about having as many of your assumptions in your codebase vs. your test suite. My experiences working in a Ruby code base is that many assumptions have been encoded in the tests, and not notated in the main code base. When those assumptions change there is a large burden on the programmer of having to unify ad-hoc assumptions from both the test cases and main code base. Validating whether those assumptions still hold, or if it is a test from 3 years ago, and has only been vacuously passing.

I found working in a big Ruby code base that this required spending a non trivial amount of time unifying the two. In that regard by minimizing the amount of test code one has to write and maintain I would argue that maintainability goes up. I've also seen a lot of FP practitioners boasting about relatively low test to code ratios, while in the Ruby world often times you have at least 2x test code, since often times you even have to validate assumptions like `object.responds_to? :foo`.
considering that we now already have rifle attached directional sound detection of a source of [enemy] shot and experimental helmet mounted phase array radars that are realtime tracking individual flying bullets, the end of people's participation in any kind of duel/battlefield seems to be visible on the horizon.
Tesla signs deal for 2 billion battery cells from Panasonic
"equal rights for all"

Equal rights to what?

the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy

Which, in the age of the Internet, is easy. The problem is not knowledge: the problem is acting on that knowledge.

For example, Apple has been criticized for employing sweatshop labor in places like China. (Notice that Mr. Cook conveniently does not mention that in his paean to workplace equality.) If you don't think that's a good thing, will you refuse to buy Apple products? Judging by market share, most people's answer appears to be "no".
Looks cool! I tried searching for C and Go programmers and got no results. I saw one for JS, though. Just signed up and will check back.

It would be cool if there was more info about the site's role in the marketplace. Will CodeDoor be the go-between? Any guarantees? Any vetting?
On Windows Phone 8 everything is native, even .NET code.
Feature Request: Host on infrastructure outside of the US.

EDIT: DISREGARD. It's already hosted outside the US. (Germany: https://www.ip-projects.de/)
You might wish to try http://hmpgr.com/apps/pins

We are in beta. Invite Code: HN

disclaimer: I am the developer behind it.
What happens when Google, Netflix, Microsoft wise up and start charging AT&T and Verizon to access their services? This is how cable works, Comcast pays Fox, ESPN. This will backfire on Verizon and AT&T.
Dynamic hill shading in the browser
Thanks, I was worried about that:)
Cool idea though, once it's a little more structured, that could be helpful.
Introducing the Sohālo Offer Builder Demo
See how often a Python package is used by other packages
A good way to gauge the quality of a package is to see who else is using it. Cheerio is a small command-line utility that shows you other packages that use a given package.
Other package managers like npm do this already, but I hadn't seen anything like it for Python.
This explains how I kept losing to the hobo with the robotic hand set up on a table outside that nightclub in Tokyo.
A good way to gauge the quality of a package is to see who else is using it. Cheerio is a small command-line utility that shows you other packages that use a given package.
Other package managers like npm do this already, but I hadn't seen anything like it for Python.
You should probably block EXE files for the safety of your users.
Wayback machine gets a facelift, new features
An awesome way to learn glossary?

Gamification to school learning in a fun way?
Why even make family part of the equation?...

"Do you have any reasons why you couldn't pick up and move to another country next week?"
Bhewes may be right--but ESPN is special. Most companies, including YC companies, would have to pay. Only the very very few could charge the carriers.
I was thinking more of my parents, girlfriend, and her family who have never heard of this website and are definitely not tech savvy. I think that it's hard to separate marketing/branding from software, though. Her family definitely just assumes that anything not Apple is cheap, while she decided to switch to an Android phone not too long ago - once she made that choice, she went with the phone that looked the coolest (HTC One).

It's hard to say who's average, though. At the end of the day, I think it's probably brand name recognition more than anything else which drives purchasing decisions. I'd like to see what the manufacturers know...

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it what I think drove my girlfriend to Android more than anything else is probably how poorly her macbook aged (although with any laptop you can only expect a couple of good years, so she might be being a bit unfair) - especially how awful iTunes is on that thing. Just opening iTunes completely grinds that thing to a halt.
Curious, are there any safety implications? What happens if the light shines directly into someone's eyes? Like if you projected on a building and the laser light went through a window and hit someone in the eye.
So a step further, you could add a user input feature and let people track any word they want.
yes, sure, but this is not about that, all CSS unit have the fixed relations clearly defined. Angular pixels are just about relative scale between the size on the screen and the real-world size (whatever that would be, because a print size is again relative to the chosen dpi, so it's not an absolute measure)
Hi, author of the post here -- I hadn't been aware this book existed, thanks for bringing it to my attention! Adding to my must-read list now...
That is a really interesting criteria, we have a long list of things we'd like to measure. If you have other thoughts on what we should track I'd love to hear them.
On December 19th 2012 I responded to an invite to a YSV event with the following:

I have a few questions:

How many startups that have been funded as a direct result of this and
prior events hosted by New England Venture Summit?
What is the ratio to startups presenting and startups getting funded?
Why do the investors not bear the cost of startup entry fees? Is there the
option to waive the fee?
What is your vetting process to ensure the quality of startups?

Here was the response I received from Kineret Weiss, note the sample of success cases and a reluctance to track the only metrics that matter for an organization like this - how effective are your conferences:

Hi Dinyar – Thanks for your interest. We evaluate each company based on the components of the summary outline (management team, business model, market potential, financials, etc.) which is needed to apply.

As far as stats, we don’t have the manpower or ability to track that information, but we do know of several companies (such as Mojiva, Peminic, UTest, etc) that have received funding as a direct result of our programs.

At the same time your question and outlook is flawed and I’ll tell you why.

Say I take your company today and sit you in front of the three most active VCs in your space. After the meetings they each get up telling you that they appreciate you coming by but that it’s not a fit for them at this time. According to your data request, we would be offering you no value but the fact is we placed you in front of the three most active VCs in your space.

Additionally, there is always a good mix of returning and new investors in attendance, pointing to the fact that investors see great value in the high level of startups that present at our conferences. You can view the video highlights at the end of this email to see several top VCs (who I’m sure you’ll recognize) who have found our summits to be of great value.

I have included further details below about the venture summit and the opportunity to be showcased including pricing, benefits, testimonials and a link to the conference website etc.
And indeed, any CSS selector can be converted to an equivalent XPath query, at least for selectors on XML and HTML. http://pythonhosted.org/cssselect/ is a Python implementation of such a conversion. (Note that there is no XPath to CSS selector converter, as XPath can express certain things CSS selectors cannot, as CSS selectors are designed such that they can be matched using a streaming parser as soon as the first child of the element appears.)
Hi,

We literally just launched, so that's why we don't have that many developers yet.

CodeDoor is the go-between, although we haven't implemented payments yet. Soon!

The vetting is the open source contributions- the idea is that technical clients can decide for themselves if the OSS contributions makes a programmer worthy of hire.
> I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX

Is there some program that converts Markdown into TeX? Or are you saying that you do this manually?
I would argue (as a recent, if older college grad) that the problem is even deeper than this article suggests. A large part of the problem is that Millenials are disenchanted with what they discover once they get out of college. Where they had expected to be challenged and rewarded and free, they discover that a job is still just a job (in many cases). You're expected to show up at a certain time everyday, and put your head down and work hard on tasks which often seem devoid of meaning and intrinsic value. To put it mildly, this reality is a major buzz kill and hard to stomach. The world seems like your oyster in college, and then you discover upon graduation that it is not. You're just another cog in a machine so large you cannot fathom how your contributions matter.

Millenials are simply discovering this and rejecting it. They don't know how, but they want more or of life than just a step above indentured servitude. They want freedom, and to see directly how what they do matters. They don't just want a job, they want a calling.

The sad truth is that corporations lack the flexibility and forethought in many cases to see the writing on the wall. I suspect that our economy is in for some rocky days ahead--as it is trapped between a rapidly aging workforce willing to work traditional corporate jobs, and new generations who refuse to accept the same. Companies will either need to radically rethink their business from the top down in order to attract and retain valued employees, or die. Those companies which survive will be those which are asked and responsive not just to their external customers, but also their internal customers (employees). They will need to offer more challenge, non-linear rewards and incentives, and above all freedom: require less hours worked, more flexibility in how and where work can be accomplished, etc. Millenials simply do not want a job where they punch in and out and work forty hours (or more) a week for a paycheck. We want a life beyond work and for our work to be meaningful.
mehmet ben
Interesting. Could fungi photosynthesize? I thought not. Unless the earth was covered as a marshland, it would be unlikely mushrooms covered earth. It is likely they are popular around coastal area.
Problem is upstream will either charge for handling take-down requests, null route the IP, or ask that they take their business elsewhere. I can imagine this generating dozens of abuse requests a day. It doesn't matter if you auto-comply within 12 hours - upstream still has to put time figuring things out.
Amen.

If you need an example, Google "TFK426".
No, it's not a tuning fork, it's an 8-pin DIL.

Same goes for the brokers: "SAA1084P".

Those are just 2 examples I found last Friday. They're components on an old PLC I need to fix and they're just laughing in my face. I suspect they're opamps but I'll probably never know and I'll end up telling someone to just buy a new system.
There's a spectrum. On one end are the large organizations stuck in analysis paralysis. On the other end are firms too busy getting shit done to fix root causes. You can put Google and Facebook at spots somewhere in the middle - where they are relative to each other says a lot about their culture.

Neither extreme fits 100% of the solutions. When your company (or market) is on life support, you need to only worry about the present. When it becomes habit, you can't move from saving the company to rebuilding it. And as others say, too much GSD is terrible for morale. It's good for 6 months to save a company. It's bad for 2 years of floundering.
combat arms eu
The question is usually "is the author of this XML actually using namespaces in a reasonable manner?"

And the answer is usually "no".

I have seen SOAP responses with 20+ namespaces, all of them being essentially implementation details -- every different section of their internal API getting its own namespace. Inevitably, the elements are also prefixed in a way that makes them distinct, or wrapped in a distinguishing element (i.e. Contact/NameInfo/FirstName rather than FirstName xmlns="contact-name").

In situations like that, your best case scenario is that you do the grunt work of setting up aliases for all the namespaces, putting them into your XPaths, and you're done. The worst case scenario (which I've encountered) is when a version update of the API changes the URIs for half the namespaces, even though the structure of the data hasn't changed. In a case like that, you're actually penalized for doing the 'right' thing and not just stripping the damn things off.
Leaseweb (Netherlands), not exactly "super" cheap, but great hosting for a very fair price.

For a reference, even MegaUpload had a lot of servers from them.

Want superbe service, you should consider Combell (Belgium).
iOS has been fully native from day one.

Microsoft dropped the JIT model from Windows Phone 7 and moved to fully native starting with Windows Phone 8.
These Guys Just Built the Website Healthcare.gov Should Have Been
The worst thing to do when learning Haskell is to think that you will be comfortable in just a week. Learning Haskell for most is like relearning to program. It takes time to build up intuition and understanding of the language. I know that it took me multiple tries at Haskell over a few months before it finally "clicked" for me and became comfortable to work in.
Link for the lazy: http://wowpedia.org/Zangarmarsh
It doesn't make a difference in the solution if Point A is fixed or moving. The band is getting longer, and the and is standing on it - moving with it either way.
I suspect that among the current generation of tablet buyers, it's more well known than in the US.
Major upvotes to you - ignore these other comments, you're entirely correct.

A lot of these mundane jobs do need to be done, but a lot of people enjoy stable mundane jobs. Leave these kinds of jobs to them, they will actually thank you for it. If you're more interesting in accomplishing something, there are far more jobs that really need someone with some skill to come and do them - or, more realistically, find them.

I agree completely in the terribleness and lack of will in a statement like "That's life". No it most certainly is not. Life is entirely what you make of it and we are a long, long way from being forced to perform mundane tasks. If you can handle the stress of doing something new instead of doing something mundane - the door is always right over there. Walk through it and find your own path.
I'm not sure how using a platform specific library is more maintainable than an open standard with myriad implementations.
well, the current market situation for smartphones will be stable...but that likely means the cutting edge of innovation shifts to another frontier (which I think we are already beginning to see, as smartphone innovation plateaus and interest in wearables and IoT speeds up).

I for one think it is entirely feasible that the smartphone itself could become a glorified cellular hotspot (a "dumb pipe" if you will), a hub connecting you and a personal area network of micro-gadget sensors and nearby displays to the Internet at large. In which case "where the value is" will once again shift from today's winners to tomorrow's winners.

All glory is fleeting.
Ask HN: Should I quit IT and become a Programmer?
Hi HN,

I'm looking for some advice. I love coding, but really don't want to code for anyone who doesn't really respect the profession (my current employer does not).

Additional information:
-I have worked in IT for 8+ years, mostly in database & server operations
-past 3 years I have been a manager
-I have a CS degree
-I code on the side, have built startups, webapps
-I live in the southeast US and can't relocate
-I make $120k+ and am the sole earner in the family, can't tolerate too much of a pay cut, or much risk in employer
-I work 60-80 hours/week, only 3-5 hours/week can be devoted to side projects, startups, or job searching.

What do you think? Should I look for coding jobs or something else? And how do you recommend I start?
First the Go developers need to overcome a few religious issues, like support for dynamic loading.
Site should be performing better now. W3edge helped with caching. Thanks for reading.
government action was effective in almost entirely eliminating that form of discrimination

After government action had enabled it in the first place. Jim Crow laws didn't just prevent blacks from riding at the front of the bus: it prevented blacks from starting their own bus companies.

The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation.

If all the bus services in town discriminate against blacks by making them ride at the back of the bus, but there's no government regulation, a new bus service, even if it's just a single bus, that does not impose that restriction has an immediate customer base: all the blacks that don't want to ride at the back of the bus. (We're assuming that this is a substantial number, which seems historically accurate.) Similar remarks apply to any other product or service where discrimination exists. I find it extremely implausible that, in the absence of government regulation, there would not have been many, many entrepreneurs willing to take advantage of such opportunities, or people to fund them.
The WebSockets is supported by default on all Nitrous boxes.
Apparently I have very narrow thumbs...
Eventually we will be obsoleted by the machines, but this will not happen soon and we'll be the second last to go (entertainers will be the last).
But that doesn't mean we need to reinvent the wheel every single time. Now look at something like Macaw and tell me that doesn't look like a useful tool: http://macaw.co/peek/
they'd need a lot of wrenches
I just dumped all my job titles
Why would you expect a corporate job to give a shit about you?

Why would I expect the company to treat me decently? Why do I expect the company to treat me decently? It's because people do not only have rights, they have duties towards their fellow man, that's why!

This is a long-standing idea in German political thought - it's called Sozialpflichtigkeit des Eigentums, and it made its way into both the Weimar and present constitution. "Eigentum verpflichtet", it says there. Americans have a hard time understanding this.
As a Nokia R&D employee (staying in Nokia), I'm glad other people are starting to get the insane potential of New Nokia (with its retained R&D labs and talent, its mountain of patents, and its newly found mountain of cash--and no longer dividing attention between smartphone improvements and going after "the next big thing")

That said, I'm still emotionally bummed at what happened to Nokia in the last few years, and don't think it was inevitable that this had to happen to Nokia.
Makes one wonder if the pipes in Super Mario Bros. led to not where- but when?
I don't believe most industries are less competitive because of regulatory capture.

How would you know?

Purely competitive markets are a mathematical abstraction

So are government regulations that magically apply just the "right" correction for a "market failure".
Nexus 5 Camera Performance
Or the HN community has some crossover with the 4chan one.
Cool, thanks for the info and the reply. I think there may be something to that type of design for comparing locations vs listings, it is similar to what sites like airbnb use. I generally like to think that those types of sites have done the testing already and came to that design (or stuck with it) for a reason.
Fair point. How about an additional amendment spelling out an alternative method for elections to the legislative branch? Do away with plurality and introduce enumerated preferences?
Ask HN: Tech/IT support in SF
Anyone know a good provider of outsourced tech support / IT in San Francisco?
We (ehrm, I) are based in Germany, along with all servers.
I'm not really sure you understand the things that you are saying. You're the one saying that it's feasible to gain 34 lbs. of muscle in one month eating only 3500 kcal/day. Then you said that this guy did it working out for four hours a day, and strenuous lifting burns only ~ 500 kcal/hour. Then you say that all he'd need to eat is one additional large pizza in a month. None of this adds up to a coherent point.

4 hours * 500 kcal/hr = 2000 kcal

This would be IN EXCESS of what he would have to eat to maintain homeostasis, which means that he'd need somewhere in the ballpark of 4000 kcal/day JUST TO MAINTAIN HIS WEIGHT. Then he would need an ADDITIONAL amount of calories to allow his body to repair muscles and form new muscle. I'm not even saying it's impossible to gain 34 lbs. of muscle in a month -- just that it would take at least 6000-7000 kcal/day to gain weight that rapidly, not one large pizza/month. Or 3500 kcal/day. It's all nonsense.
I switched back to Firefox, after a long stint with Chrome, because of things like this...

The Firefox Dev team has really been stepping up their game (relative to the other browsers) and is incredibly receptive to feedback (especially the dev tools). The browser has been getting faster, and the dev tools are starting to be on par, and in some cases, better than Chrome's.

Also, for those appreciate Chrome's aesthetics, the "UX" build is pretty damn sexy these days... and is actually quite stable. I'd give it a strong recommendation!

http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/
In other words, Cook gives no reason for believing that the government should pass laws requiring workplace equality; he just "endorses" such laws. Why should I care?
Yes, but addition of chrome that I then hide isn't better chrome (for me).
There're few other things you can do to possibly speed up the second code snippet, by reducing dimensionality:

1) recognize q1 * q2 = 2^p1 * 2^p2 = 2^(p1 + p2), so instead of iterating over q1 then q2, iterate over p = p1 + p2

2) memorize some of the combinations; e.g. if you iterate over p, r1 & r2, then you know that all you're trying to find is two integers f1 & f2 that are equal to output * r1 * r2 * 2^p / input; so before you start solving the problem, calculate table T:

for (int f1 = 1; f1 <= 256; ++f1)
for (int f2 = 1; f2 <= 256; ++f2)
T[f1 * f2] = f1

now you can check whether integer pair (f1,f2) exists, you can just check whether T[output * r1 * f2 * 2^p / input] is non-zero.
Also, output * r1 * r2 * 2^p has to be divisible by input, so after you iterate over p & r1, you can iterate only over r2's being multiples of input / gcd(input, output * r1 * 2^p)

There could be possibly some more tricks found.
Yes. When I have my phone resting on a flat surface in front of me (say, a bar) I use the outside side of my pinky to scroll. I find it very natural since when my arms are in a neutral position in front of me, my palms are facing inwards and my pinkies are therefore closest to the bar (and the phone).

Also if I am eating a sandwich, my pinkies stay the cleanest.