skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some games solve this by having different modes of play. "Highscore Mode", "Campaign Mode (Easy/Medium/Hard/etc)". If you did, for example, have a dynamic scaling system, you could have that in some kind of alternate play mode that lets the user just practice, vs. a separate/more static mode that allows eligibility for highscores.
Ah, I see what you're saying. I'm still not sure it makes complete sense. I think it requires people not figuring out what they're doing is pointless. Otherwise, I think you're better off just giving them unemployment checks. But better still to send them to school, or give them productive work of the sort that no individual can pay for.
German politician meets with Snowden in Moscow
Two things - one v boring - can I hook it up to a RPi? I suspect yes so we shall see.

Bit that light switch just killed me. they painted on a light switch. With Zwave that means no electrician, no installation. I have been looking around at what all this neans - how will we be doing the same things in the future - but how will they be different.

And that hit me. Houses at the moment are analogue, lacking co-ordination, shared protocols etc. I mean I have a new build with some top dog heating control thing. it's sooo counter intuitive, that I just press up or down.

but a little home automation and people can paint on their own controls. Buy sticker packs from B&Q. EInk will be able to turn a paint on wall to a display. It's the same thing (turning lights in) just different
Except governments in other countries have a better solution for it than the US government does.

Sure. But they haven't solved it.

My main point being the the idea that government is the sole entity that can be relied upon to solve it, as claimed earlier post is false. At best they will play a role along with other entities.

I'm saying it's a minority which has the power to, for example, shut down the government by blocking certain legislation because they think a health care plan created by the Heritage Foundation is Socialism.

But what actually happened? The government was shut down briefly, then all went back to as it was. The GOP looked like even bigger fools. The AHCA is still the law of the land. What was blocked?

A well-positioned minority can halt things, even to the point of disaster, by digging in its heels far enough.

Yes, but my belief (clearly not argued well, I concede) is that many times things get halted because the majority has, for political reasons, decided to acquiesce, not because they lack the means to overcome the resistance of the minority.

This is not always a bad thing, but it suggests that even if the government, in the abstract, has the means to accomplish something in practice they cannot be relied on to do it, because of political self-interest (including, for example, being beholden to their campaign financial sources).
Same thing here. Also when two words come at you on top of each other, hard to see what I should be spelling ;-)

Ideas:

> Smaller words protected by a "forcefield" of a bigger word.

> Wrong letter halfway through spelling could make the enemy ship shoot a "backspace" torpedo that can only be destroyed with the backspace key. So three wrong letters would shoot 3 backspace torpedoes at you.

> Two long words reaching out could a tractor beam.
the trick is to start with something that people are already interested in- this is why youtube artists start by doing covers of popular material, which gets the audience interested. do an interesting cover, do something relevant, exciting, quirky, funny, compelling.
I skimmed through the article...

While referring to a xamarin app there is a screenshot of a sample app with a caption
"The same application with native controls and sharing almost 75% of the code base."

Is this xamarin code base shared somewhere?

Also, if there is a significant growth in the share of Windows phone ? Would you use still use Xamarin to develop for Windows phone or would you use Visual Studio?
How do the three compare on size? I suspect that the blueAir has the smallest fan and the Sharp has the largest fan.
Ditto, did you consider Java to Javascript? It may make sense to you given that you are using AngularJS on the front-end as well as for consolidating skills.

I am a Ruby/Rails dev that switched to using Clojure and Node.js, depending on the use cases. I wouldn't want to use Ruby for anything else than static sites and tooling now.
Some people think that Javascript is a gimmick, but is it vastly superior to Ruby when it comes to concurrency, ability to share back-end and front-end code, and the tools have gotten really good too.

PS: I wouldn't necessarily recommend switching from Java to Scala, the benefits may be low or negative for most people, see Yammer's experience: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/11/yammer-scala
> Now does OpenBSD have an automated installer?

Yes. You can use expect with /install easily and you can simply add your own local "site set" tgz which can be hosted on a local HTTP/FTP server to apply any local customisations.

However, if you're provisioning lots of machines, it's very easy just to "restore" filesystems off a bootable USB stick, mount them, set the hostname then tell ansible/puppet to do the rest. Don't need kickstart or any of that crap.

Personally though I'd just netboot lots of systems off PXE/TFTP, NFS mount all filesystems and have local swap disk only. I used to do that with Sun systems. We had 50 SPARCstation 5's booting off a SPARCserver 1000E on Solaris and it worked nicely. OpenBSD works pretty much the same. Linux is a piece of crap to netboot.

Plenty of ways to skin that cat.
In the US, it's also only 100 books that are available for $1.
> Complaining about git's standard porcelain is a popular sport, but so often the people who play it don't give proposals that make more sense than the status quo.

This is a classic case where the git behavior seems not just unintuitive, but far more complicated than necessary. Why do multiple modes even exist? If I were starting, I'd consider saying that "git push" with no other arguments is the same as what "current" (or even "simple") do now, but you could specify any number of branches or branch wildcards with an argument (including "*"). That is, like ls(1).

I could definitely be missing some important class of use cases, but this feels so much simpler than even having modes, let alone modes that have complex semantics, and still lets the default (very common) case work and supports pushing a manually-specified set of branches, too.
I think one thing they missed here is pointed out by this statement in the article:

"[...] in less than two years, and, says Brandt, require fewer support pylons. “Elon’s estimate calls for about $2.6 billion for concrete, but we’d get that down to more like $1.5 billion,” he says."

The pylons aren't purely for lifting the steel, they're also for distributing the weight of the Hyperloop cars. If anything, an equal length of carbon fiber tube would be more flexible (not less) than the same length as steel and would potentially require the same number or more of pylons.

The air that these cars float over does not negate gravity or the effect of their weight on the tunnel that they travel through.

All that being said, it looks like our current carbon fiber pre-preg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-preg) production is currently able to handle a construction project like this. According to Wolfram Alpha, a cylinder 9 feet in diameter from Los Angeles to San Francisco would have a surface area of approximately 52 million square feet.

According to the book "Boeing 787 Dreamliner" by Mark Wagner and Guy Norris, in 2007 Boeing actually expanded the capacity of carbon fiber plants they had access to in France, Japan, and the US from 125 million square feet per year to 363 million square feet per year. I would hope that 6 years later we would be able to produce 52 million square feet.
I've never heard of it but will add it to my list of things to investigate. Thanks for the tip :-)
http://www.tryfsharp.org/Learn/getting-started#chaining-func...

http://www.tryfsharp.org/Learn/advanced-programming#currying
The game is up if your enemy doesn't exist. Remember MS propping up Apple?
No but it has to do with the claim "waste is never good for any economy". Which is obviously wrong.
I think that as long as the code you commit has full coverage and good quality tests (not only tests to improver coverage) then testing your code after writing it can be equally effective in large projects.

I guide many junior developers and find that TDD is just too much to enforce while learning.
I like the idea. But bribe has a negative feel to it. Why not bounty?
> Medical schools are tweaking admission protocols, looking beyond an A in orgo for future doctors who are less Spock and more Kirk.
> I asked two medical school deans — Dr. Robert Witzburg at Boston University and Dr. Lee Goldman at Columbia University — about admission philosophies. Both are proponents of holistic review, the newish idea that medical schools look beyond grades and test scores to evaluate the whole applicant

You should always read this as code for "to reduce the number of Asian students admitted".
A suggestion: It gets frustrating when you try to type one word, but the game thinks you're typing another. Maybe only have maximum one word starting with each letter on the screen at any given time. Bullets (single characters) could also be punctuation, numbers, etc. Then speed of individual entities could be used to ramp up the difficulty.

Anyway, a lot of fun. Thanks!
Looks cool, are you planning on sharing the source code?
I didn't make it that far, but with 62 words per minute. As the worlds started piling atop each other, the greatest difficulty was trying to figure out which word it believed you were working on to finish it up.
There are two points regarding the relevance of organic chemistry to future doctors that the article could expand on further.

1. Organic chemistry is often the first class that a prospective future doctor takes that requires you to develop proper study habits. One can get away with most other introductory level courses in the sciences by cramming during the day or two before the exam. Organic chemistry is different--it requires structured and daily studying. This is an essential skill for anyone planning to go to medical school.

2. Organic chemistry teaches you to thing and reason about objects in three-dimensional space. Stereochemistry (roughly: if something is right handed or left handed) is an essential idea in organic chemistry. Being able to think about objects in 3D space is a very useful ability (and necessary) for a future doctor.
Show HN: Brushes, iOS painting app, is now open-source
While this is true, every locale in West China essentially runs on "pirate" time, which is adjusted as if it was in its own timezone. So yes, trains and planes are scheduled and run on Beijing time, but everyone else adjusts the time to something that makes sense.
Contact CloudFlare to make them aware of the problem? London system status seems fine, so if there is indeed a problem, they might not be aware of it (https://www.cloudflare.com/system-status). Try a DNS cache flush and/or use Google's nameservers (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) although I'd be surprised if this fixed it.
It works -amazingly- on my iPad mini. Someone build a complete service around this, please!
yes it would be great to avoid the words to overlap. And also when I begin to type in a word I cannot switch to another target, I must finish the current one. It is ok! But could you make the current bigger and red instead of orange please? :-)
Having had more than my share of asshole neighbors, I'd be very worried about their representation in such a constantly churning population.

And I would have little sympathy in compelling the local authorities to enforce any and all laws and regulations that would put a stop to the resulting disruption.

I see far too many instances, today, of people thinking of and acting on "me, me, me", while ignoring those around them whom they are screwing over.
Not extort, just incentivize developers for them.

It's a lot more friendly and fun!
>The big difference is that authoritarian regimes make no secret of their collecting information.

I'm not suer about that, I think it's more of the 'open secret' variety

>They also do not come with a check-and-balance mechanism precisely supposed to prevent the emergence of the new Stasi we're seeing here

So the existence of checks and frameworks make the situation worse? What?
Not just bugs, but adding features too!
We hope that the vast majority of users will not exploit users. There are also many businesses which rely on open source software but there is no system for them to find and pay capable developers to fix bugs or implement new features they need.

One area we have discussed is Wordpress plugins. There are thousands of users using various plugins which may need some updates. They need to be updated as web browsers change and perhaps someone really likes a Wordpress theme but it has not been adapted to work on mobile. This scenario would be a good for Bribe.io which would help lots of people.

We will allow multiple people to join in on a bribe to up the amount to recruit developers to work on the job. So if there are 10 Wordpress users which all put in $10 it may be enough to give a developer the incentive to spend time to take on the challenge.
This is pretty close to Knuth's discussion of Fibonacci Numbers in TAOCP. I'm inclined that's where this came from, and that this is missing an attribution.

In either case, if you enjoyed this post add one to the "I-should-read-TAOCP" (or "I-should-continue-reading-TAOCP") tally. I did...
made it to level 33 then failed horribly as the game thought I was typing a different word, since there was like 100 characters on the screen. wonder if I can script every alpha character per second and cheat :P
The game is neat, but the fact that there is a "current word" state at all makes it frustrating. If I try to type two words at once, too bad. If my "current word" happens to be drawn below a cluster of other words - I am forced to wait, because I can't even type other words while I'm waiting.

Never force the player to wait for anything in a game that has a primary game mechanic focusing on speed. A better solution is as such:

1) If I really have to type exact words (I assume that this is intended to be a learning game where this makes sense) then when I enter a letter find the nearest word with the first occurrence of that letter. Why can't I shoot multiple enemies at once?

2) Initially, I had thought "Maybe I don't need to type words at all" and started just hitting letters that I saw regardless of which word they were in expecting the nearest one to be shot. This might be an interesting mode?

Also, another cool feature would be a bonus in the game like a math equation the causes all of the items in the level to temporarily move more slowly.

For instance, I might see a blue "enemy" that actually has a math equation below it. We'll say it's 17 * 4 / 2. If I type 34, then all enemies slow down for a duration of 3.5 seconds or so.

Then you can also leverage the fact that this is the only place where people can type numbers, so if someone hits the wrong answer - the powerup can become desaturated and becomes disabled. Just an idea!

Thanks for sharing this game :D
Ask HN: Real-world consequences to the NSA of their leaks
So, the NSA has said that the Snowden leaks will compromise much of their information gathering. However, I fail to see how. Here are my points:

Now that there is an open discussion, some people may be able to prove that the information gathering is illegal. However, the government has the power to simply change the law at will. If we can prove that the government is willing to break the law, then I don't think it's too fanciful to think that they are willing to simply change laws to fit their needs.

The NSA clearly doesn't really care about public opinion. They have one of the largest operating budgets in the world, and the American people are literally scared of anything foreign or that our government tells us is a threat. Each time a new threat is identified the NSA gets another $150,000,00 in operating budget (this is an example, but it's probably close to true). So, with that kind of budget, and with the obvious fact that they take great delight in the sorts of technical achievements that they make (and I don't think anyone can deny that they have indeed made great technical achievements, dubious as they are), why should they care if the American people are happy about it? There's nothing we can really do.

Other governments are angry at the scope of the snooping but, again, why should the NSA really care? They are backed up both by the strongest economy in the world and by the strongest military in the world, and I'm guessing they are staffed by the smartest and best hackers in the world.

So, are there any actual, real-world threats to the NSA that will be empowered by the leaks? Or are they just annoyed that they got caught, because that was one of their bragging points?
I also open-sourced Inkpad, my iPad vector illustration app, a few weeks ago: https://github.com/sprang/Inkpad

I'm planning to submit this version of Brushes to Apple within the next week or so. There are still a few outstanding issues.

If you'd like to contribute, I'd appreciate bug fixes, new features, and localizations for your language of choice. Otherwise, I hope you can learn something from it, or find bits and pieces that are useful in your own apps.
The Role Of Personal Chemistry In Investment Selection
I was considering starting a kickstarter like site for this as well. Some projects have stalled development. It would be interesting to have a system where people can create a road plan for a particular stalled open source project, and donate to the development. Once a given target is reached, developers can bid on the project, compleat it, and get paid.

There are some projects, like DoubleCommander, which I would pay money to make it move faster, as it's the only viable TotalCommander clone for MAC. However, I can't afford to hire anyone to work on it by my self, and can't expect the primary developer to work on it for free any harder than he already is.
It's a classic case of negative externalities caused by stupid human decisions and a complete disregard for the commons. People have been shitting in the commons so long in Beijing that the particulates in the air are crazy high. Everyone feels like this have to have a car instead of pushing hard for effective public transportation. Since everyone has to have a car, it hurts everyone on buses because the traffic is so bad the busses can't get anywhere on time anymore[0]. Then everyone has a building that is heated by coal, instead of making an effort to upgrade the buildings to some form of heat that isn't going to dump thousands to millions of pounds of particulates into the atmosphere.

Instead of solving the problem at the root, everyone takes an every man for himself approach to the problem like the one described by the OP. The government should provide some sort of tax incentive to every building willing to upgrade their heating to something cleaner and should tax the hell out of cars in the city and put that money towards public transportation

FWIW, I lived in Beijing back in 2005/2006 and had a solid smoker's cough after a year. It's truly disgusting how everyone is effectively poisoning each other there.

[0] Furthermore, the design of the onramps and offramps on the ring roads are such that they cause a cascading locking condition once the level of traffic hits a certain point. When the line to exit a ring road gets long enough, it blocks the on ramp. This causes locking to cascade through the whole city.
What makes you think F# is unapproachable? Is it because Scala still uses braces whereas F# uses whitespace?

It's odd because Scala and F# are very similar in what they bring to the table.

Losing ReSharper is an arse yes. I've heard that F# vNext will have lots of VS improvements which may also cover some common refactorings.
Science Toys {You Can Make With Your Children}
Twitter is between 9th and 10th street, so comparing the changes between 5th/6th isn't really describing what's happening around Twitter. The whole article talks about some transformation that hasn't happened yet. 5th/6th isn't really that safe anyways. Maybe during the day and when work gets out around 5-6PM, but I wouldn't recommend staying out there after 8PM
Twitter Marks "Philadelphia City Paper" as Spam, Breaks All Links to the Site
Or 'agile' lead by a non-engineer.

Getting tired of 'agile' or 'XP' getting the blame when in reality they are half-assed versions of some scrum masters cook up.
Yes, because requesting to be paid for doing work is a programmers ultimate sin..
I have, perhaps, some degree of sympathy for compensating people whose significant work is subsequently, directly used.

I'm about done with, "You can't do it because I did it first."

The world wants to move forward. Your outsized self-interest, simply doesn't interest me.
People love to say this, but a critical look at the structure of reddit shows how little this argument matches reality. Reddit is a strongly cohesive group of sub-forums. When millions of users are driven to subreddits by reddit's choice of defaults, when popular subreddits are driven more traffic by r/all, when linking to other subreddits is a part of the culture, etc, all of this points to a strong coupling. It is disingenuous to claim that subreddits are completely independent and thus one cannot claim reddit as a whole bears responsibility for its content. Yes, they are independently managed, but there are a thousand other ways in which the strong cohesiveness is created.

This cohesiveness creates responsibility among the larger subreddits to the userbase as a whole. Unfortunately the rules of moderation don't recognize this and as a result you end up with essentially arbitrary users who have had massive amounts of power dumped in their lap through accident of timing (rather than proof that they have the capacity to cultivate a large community). Unilateral decisions are made and their userbase (that they had little to no hand in creating) is forced to suffer as a result. Reddit really needs to rethink how massive subreddits that are/were defaults are moderated.
Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It
Well now you have to elaborate?
Why don't we take the brilliant hackers and programmers at the NSA and task them to fix and re-build the ACA exchange system?

Building a database to track the communications of ever single person in the US and ever foreigner they talk to? Piece of cake.

Building a database to track the health insurance policies for a subset of Americans? Over budget, behind schedule, still doesn't really work yet.

Priorities.
Inside Google’s 1-Million-Square-Foot London Office — 3 Years Before It Opens