skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So in this post, Tim mentions that he has seen a therapist "for the first time ever" because he was possibly doomed to life long pessimism, yet he implies that he is manic depressive, which may well be true, but then he wraps up his post with some 'tips' on how to manage, and if they work for him, great... or maybe not.

I don't feel so good about him throwing about this manic depressive stuff, especially in the coffee table self help circle-jerk industry. Bipolar disorder is a serious goddamn illness and it ruins peoples lives.

The average age people are diagnosed with bipolar is around 30, and that's a lot of life to live flipping from left to right listening to whimsy advise like this. This is really dangerous.

You can't give a list of '10 things to do' to someone with bipolar and expect them to sort themselves out. If Tim is truly suffering from biploar, that 'list of things that work' changes from week to week, possibly even day to day and hour to hour. The drive he feels is from his hypomania (that leads to a post like this and incredulous books like the 4 hour body) that inevitably leads to an exhausted crash and period of debilitating depression. Hell, he might even have a mixed episode and in a manic 'clarity' moment of the depression he decided to hang himself. This isn't simple conjecture, these are the kinds of things that happen.

For what it's worth, if you want to see what the many sides of bipolar are like you should watch "The life of a Manic Depressive" with Steven Fry. He interviews many famous people and regular civilians regarding their illness, and you'll find that the sample there are mostly not living 'inspired lives' like Tim, and his advise isn't going to help them in the long run I fear, if anything I fear it'll cause more people suffering to delay that first visit to a psychiatrist to seek help.

EDIT: I'd like to point out that if Tim's writings are a product of his hypomania/mania you can't blame him for it. But whatever.
I noticed a few douchebags were pictured here.
Google building more and more stuff directly into search has been going on since the early 2000s. Why are you uneasy now?
Yes, how dare they not make a Plan 9 phone!
Agreed. That could be a similar argument for the crop of 'Learn To Code/Hack in X Months' schools popping up all over the place. Lot's of shovels being sold for sure.
No. Kien's CtrlP plugin is inspired by Sublime's Ctrl+P (the name is the hint) feature which itself extends TextMate's Cmd+T and Cmd+Shift+T which inspired numerous other Vim plugins like Command-T (hint), FuzzyFinder, LustyExplorer, Unite and many others.
Angel group requires $3000 and up to 8% of the money raised as due diligence fee
Pandoc does almost exactly what you want. Much of my academic writing is written in markdown and then pandoc converts that to LaTeX. For conference papers it doesn't work as well (due to the conferences having specific style requirements) but for notes and presentations it works wonderfully.
Man, I don't know. That's not open source - they don't seem to intend for you to easily be able to see and understand the code. There's less peer review that way.

They're also an ad (analytics?) company. I just don't trust them.
Can I see certain aspects of coding becoming automated? Certainly. And I can think of some visual ways of presenting code that are very attractive in the extra information they give to the programmer.

But something like, 'give me the set of all things that....'

(let
((set1 (remove-if
#'(lambda (x) (not (things that....)))
from-lst)))
'BODY)

How'd you do that in Excel? Probably something like SUMIF - (I don't really use Excel much so I don't know if there's something that returns a list of things matching a predicate.)

Yes, doubtless that can be expressed more concisely than the code. Heck you could wrap that up and just call it fetchset and have it go.

(set1 (fetchset (things-that) from-lst))

But there you're putting more load on the person learning the arcana of certain macros or functions - and it's honestly not that much more concise in terms of headspace, you still have to think about sets for it to make any sense at all. It's not clear how that would translate into a visual interface of any significant power or how doing so would simplify the concepts that one would have to learn.

You know? Will programming get more efficient? Count on it. Will we automate tasks that are just following a pattern? Yeah. But will we stop coding?

Well, if you think about coding as being typing, then maybe we will. I don't think that visual interfaces are efficient enough to let you stick together all the concepts you need in a reasonable space of time without actually typing - but it's possible.

But will we stop thinking computationally? (Which is the real essence of coding I feel.) I don't think so. It seems to me that you have to know what you want a computer to do, or you have to have the computer guess at it. And the problem with guessing at it, other than the computer being wrong, is that if you're not a precise thinker; if don't know fairly precisely what you want to do; then you can't even mean certain things. Assuming quicksort hasn't been invented yet, how do you tell the computer that you want quicksort if it's guessing, what cues does the computer take from a general expression that you want a faster kind of sort?

Now whether that will reduce coding to mathematics I don't know. I'd tend to think not, if for no better reason than that programming includes a kind of coevolutionary mastery that can be a more fitting route for some people into thinking about things like transformations and sets and so on. I'm deeply indebted to programming for helping me think about maths in a way other than my teacher just reading black-box formula at the class.
Edward Snowden blasts U.S., UK as 'worst offenders' of criminal surveillance
It's a good thing you talked your friend down from creating something. The world has too many creators as it is. Don't they know that everything good has been created already? If it hasn't been done then it isn't possible!
It's already down (it's the database... why does it always gotta be the database... sigh. Actually, it's probably a blog post so why is it even hitting the database to begin with instead of being served from cache?)

I guess someone didn't prioritize "getting shit done" haha
Clifford Nass, Stanford Professor, died of a heart attack at age 55.
I didn't end up trying it, but I thought this looked good (and appears to be recently maintained):

https://github.com/samg/timetrap/
So, the situations in which I would use LaTeX rather than something cruder but friendlier are these: (1) I am typesetting something with nontrivial mathematical formulae in it. (2) I want the excellent typographical quality that comes from, e.g., the very nice Knuth-Plass dynamic-programming algorithm for line breaks. (3) I want to use some clever thing someone has implemented in LaTeX (say, to add Feynman diagrams to what I write). (4) I want to interoperate with other people who are using LaTeX. (5) I want to typeset something big and complicated that triggers misbehaviour in things like Word.

This system, at least so far, (1) doesn't do formulae, (2) doesn't have Knuth-Plass line breaking, (3) isn't compatible with LaTeX, (4) isn't compatible with LaTeX, and (5) takes almost 1s/page to do its thing.

It may very well be an excellent system, and deserve to take over the world of typesetting -- but at the moment it surely shouldn't be called "a modern LaTeX".
Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable
Oculus Rift + Stationary bike + kinect = Paperboy in VR
Another site reporting "Error establishing a database connection". For anyone posting blog entries telling people that they are doing things wrong, it really destroys your credibility when you can't set up a server that continues to function with a moderate amount of traffic.

Mirror:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&s...
My wife has been using this for about a month to help teach Greek and Latin roots to her 7th grade language arts students. It's a great tool for them to use since they already know how to google.
To save the world we'd need to get rid of humans. Saving humans instead of the world would probably end up with a Matrix-style future of charred earth and blackened skies, with human beings thriving on internet-connected stasis pods to efficiently create "renewable" energy.
For computing power, it would be ridiculously expensive to try and use AWS to stream all their video.
The name of the person who wrote the story:

http://steveblank.com/about/
Twitter’s IPO could now be bigger than Google’s
Canadian papers have circulated rumors

Which papers? I've seen no such rumors. You don't flippantly make $5 billion dollar bids -- the problem Fairfax encountered was that in such a deal they need some banks to sidle up with them, and few (or no) banks wanted to.

Also, Fairfax wanted to take the company private. You can't do that secretly or incrementally. It is an all-out endeavor, exactly as they attempted.

I believe their bid was sincere.
Introducing Circle: new Bitcoin startup with record funding
Not accurate. They're flush with cash.

End of fiscal 2010, they had $16.4 billion in cash.

Today they have $12 billion in cash. With zero long term liabilities.

They have drastically more money than they would need to remake their business and target Android.

If it didn't work, that might be the last shot they get at it however.
Stops after the first one for me...
This mirror doesn't work. : (

edit: It does now! Strange. Thanks!
Mondays: The best day to apply for a job
Don't think so. It's simply a file format like markdown. Github will render org files. Think they use this Ruby gem.

https://github.com/bdewey/org-ruby

Perhaps we need more complete implementations but there's nothing preventing anyone from finishing the job.
Dear God this was my life at a past employer. The biggest issue is that Get Shit Done usually turns to Get Shit Done exactly how I want even though I won't tell you what it is because I'm "Getting Shit Done!". I know better now. If I see that at an interview now, I'll run, not walk, run away. People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. Then bitch about them not being good enough. It's like buying a sports car and putting shitty watered down gas in it and complaining about how the car doesn't perform like it should.
Hacking Public Education
You can always define a template via `--template=MyTemplate`. You just have to place the template in `.pandoc/templates/MyTemplate.[latex|html|...]`.
What I do to save space in papers: Squeeze figures, shorten pseudo code, remove paragraph breaks, and finally decrease font size of bibliography.
Eh, sincerity does not make a person right. Look into the eyes of any religious extremist for evidence of that. Gates thinks the internet won't save the world, but he's dead wrong. The internet, in it's current form, allows information to flow at will. And if there is any silver bullet for society's ills, it's certainly education. Teach a man to fish...
Pretty well for Samsung. It hasn't for HTC, LG, Motorola...
The Hackpad team are serious hustlers. I use it all the time as well and love what they've built.
Yes.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/08/75-percent-of-skull-repla...
One wonders if they are using ML to harvest/choose the spam list.
Coinkite - Bitcoin Debit Card / Merchant POS Solution
> Pretty much every Desktop application where you want
> newer versions is simply not available.

I'll never understand why this argument is made so frequently. The only explanation I can think of is that I use entirely different apps than most people do.

I use Debian Stable on my desktop computer, and I have the latest, or nearly the latest, versions of the apps that I use most. I use backports, third-party repos, and binaries that I download directly from upstream. For example, I get the following apps from the sources listed below:

Firefox - http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/late...

Google Chome - https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linu...

Thunderbird - http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/...

Emacs - http://emacs.naquadah.org/

LibreOffice - http://packages.debian.org/wheezy-backports/libreoffice-kde

VirtualBox - https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

PostgreSQL - http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/debian/

> Even finding a browser which simply runs on all websites tends
> to be a constant pain.

Huh?

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/late...

http://mozilla.debian.net/

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linu...

http://packages.debian.org/chromium
About the I want to put a float where I define it problem maybe look at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Capti...
Climate Corporation / Can a tech firm help farmers survive global warming?
A theory on why the "ugly banking site" did so well. Out of all of the designs, that was the most traditional, and probably most "comfortable" to the user. The site to me feels like it has depth, and it's friendly to the user, encouraging them to explore. The others while more effective (conversion rate) felt like they were engineered to spoon feed me just the right data, and didn't feel like "complete" sites open to browsing.

This of course is all anecdotal based on my years of being a web geek but sometimes the "feel" of the design speaks volumes where data and raw number crunching cannot.
I randomly returned to this conversation and boy are there a lot of assholes here who commented after I left. I think I'm more on your side now. I like to think I'm a nice guy, but there's clearly a lot to learn... and to teach to other guys.
yes, i also received email from them. But when i see this symbol in email subject

<>

i found that this is some kind of promotional email.
Simulations Show how Snakes Can Fly
You want a drop-in LaTeX replacement. Use LuaTeX.
"No, you got the wrong shit done! What's wrong with you?!"
Depends. The price of laser sintering CNC machines is coming down quickly, as they're just CO2 lasers (depending on the metal you're fusing together). I can create objects from titanium powder, which as you can imagine is pretty durable.

EDIT: Open source laser sintering [http://makezine.com/2012/02/01/an-open-source-laser-sinterin...]
I've rewritten my entire Hacker News client for iPhone to be a lot cleaner and use libHN now too, so you can see it in use here on GitHub: https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone
Also got an email, because I'm "engaged" with Django framework on Github but I hadn't starred PredictionIO at this point. Sent a reply, no response. Seems they just want visibility among devs and are using the fact they're open-source as an excuse to directly contact people. Good product or not I really don't like being deceived.
Is this an actual thing? Are there really people out there who think running around yelling "Get Shit Done!" constitutes actual project management?

We are doomed.
Bitcoin Seeks Mainstream
Native Graph Databases Do Not Exist
The Story of Pngine - something that is reinvented
Just installed it on ubuntu using sublime text 3 (installed from sublime-text_build-3047_amd64.deb). I get into vim mode when creating new files; however, when opening existing .py files on disk I don't get the vim editor.
"Ready, fire, aim!"
And more to the point, shouldn't this be caught by a sub-editor prior to publishing? I find it incredibly hard to believe that publishers would blindly publish what they're sent without first checking it...
1) There's $12 billion in cash in Nokia, representing 42% of their market valuation

2) There's a lot of intellectual property

3) There's a global brand

4) I think it's safe to assume there are a lot of excellent people that still work for Nokia

There's a lot to be "saved." Whether Nokia could be turned around on its own is another matter.
Samsung controls the whole stack?
On Facebook, a growing teenage wasteland
Give Every Pixel a Purpose
> High real interest rates means that capital is scarce.

That is an insightful observation, though I would argue that the scarcity of capital in a high-interest environment is an effect rather than a cause.

The root cause of our current low-interest rates is actually the Fed and their unlimited printing press creating an endless supply of US dollars via quantitative easing.

Honest Question: If real interest rates continue to remain low (indicating a scarcity of productive uses for capital) what happens over the medium/long-term?
Is this similar to Myrrix?

http://myrrix.com/
It appears that Bill really loves his
wife and, now, is following the values
she got from the nuns in her schooling.
Brazilian high-profile magazine accepts bitcoin as payment
WP started to get some traction recently, nothing earth-shattering but still... http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/04/report-windows-phon...
Hooray for WordPress!
This problem is all over the place in Wikipedia. Almost every page with any kind of math on it assumes you're in grad school for a Master in Mathematics. And I'm pretty sure any injection of a lay person explanation will anger those who know the source material. Annoying but it is what it is with regards to Wikipedia...
There is a huge misinterpretation here: we should read the context first. Gates was asked which was more important, Zuckerberg's plan for internet access for all, or a malaria cure. The question itself is a silly one, because both can be done simultaneously.
What browser? Should keep going.
It would have sufficed to find out if he was willing to travel.

Ah, but it would not have sufficed. They were planning to go whoring in Korea. (Yes I am reading between the lines here.)

That's why they asked, "are you single?" A committed man is more likely to spoil their fun. He might abstain, he might look askance at the other men, he might underscore their infidelity.
It was Steve Blank's first job. "Training Manager, ESL, 1976-1978" [0]

The article mentions the author and has a link to his profile =)

[0] http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=95015
RECESS - Twitter's CSS Hinter
I saw my first 3D printer this weekend in the MSoft store. Thought it was really cool and was going for a cool $2100.00.
Show HN parents or teachers only pls
Thanx for your constructive feedback on my app project and (failed) campaign
What does a QA Architect do in a team, and what skills are needed for this job?
This is really cool - I signed up and enjoy it.

However - I end up using the google doc spreadsheet more than the doc to informally sketch up projects and share information.

It would be great to have that option.
BlackBerry Drops Effort to Sell Itself; C.E.O. to Step Down
Well, I think we all expected a "modern LaTeX" based on the title, not something that's much closer to a PDF producer than a LaTeX equivalent. The title is the issue.
"The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people. What is bought with money or with goods is purchased by labour, as much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. That money or those goods indeed save us this toil. They contain the value of a certain quantity of labour which we exchange for what is supposed at the time to contain the value of an equal quantity." (TWON, Bk. 1, ch. V, p. 30)

The full answer is a bit more complex than that: it's also true that Smith says contradictory things. I'm not enough of a Smith scholar to give a definitive answer, but it seems that Smith mostly purposed it for rhetorical effect, since it is so compelling on a folk level. Other classical economists like Ricardo bought into it much more heavily as an analytic tool.
You're definitely not wrong, its generally the fastest. Efficient is a bit of a loaded worded in these contexts, and I feel as though when discussiing algorithms, unless otherwise specified, the assumption is you're discussing worst-case efficiency (because while worst case isn't always the most useful metric, is usually the most easily defined and derived one). And randomizing data doesn't necessarily guarantee that you won't still land on a worst-case starting order (as is the nature of randomness). As I said though, that is an entirely nitpicky point.
Ask HN: What are your favorite blogs about social media, startups & web culture?
I'm currently working on a top 100 list of the most important websites - what are YOUR favorite news sources? :)
> People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. Then bitch about them not being good enough. It's like buying a sports car and putting shitty watered down gas in it and complaining about how the car doesn't perform like it should.

Beautifully said!
The whole start-up culture encourages this behaviour. The current fire fast trend, rather than trying find the root cause for example.

Firing someone can completely mess up someones career, but people are being told to fire someone on a whim, if they're not right fit(I mean that could be anything). Turn it around, and put yourself in their shoes.
A couple of other interesting applications of Prolog I haven't seen mentioned yet:

Cascalog, Prolog-inspired data processing and querying library for Clojure: https://github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog

Marelle, test-driven devops in SWI-Prolog: https://github.com/larsyencken/marelle
This is what I was thinking but reading through the article I was thinking I thought wrong. Thanks for clearing that up.
Here's why this needs to pass: we need bold changes, and we won't know what works until we try it. So here's a bold plan, which seems to work on paper. I wish Pennsylvania would try something like this, or at least something better than the "slash public education funding" plan.
I got 2 friends that just started a design studio and they are creating beautiful and affordable prosthetic legs http://www.alleles.ca/
Show HN: Anonymously report when your customers pay you vs. agreed terms
The rendering of the test document is very strange in FF on RHEL 6 on Linux. Acrobat also gave me garbage for a few seconds and then somehow spontaneously figured it out.

I'm skeptical of these sorts of enterprises, but I'm glad the author took the challenge and I look forward to seeing where it goes.
As I understand it, the ideal in Forth is to build up a base that hides those complexities in a domain appropriate API. You don't throw 3 numbers onto a stack and leave them on the stack to represent a vector, you wrap that up with a call to 'make-vector', and from there on you're dealing with 'vectors' as a unit rather than '3 points on the stack'. Or if you don't, you develop an API that deals with them sensibly so that every routine that operates on vectors doesn't have to get into the nitty-gritty. Write a routine that represents the common operations (add-vectors, multiply-by-scalar, dot-product, etc) and build your complex routines on those, so that vector projection could be:

: project-a-onto-b (a b -- c) swap rot dot-product swap scalar-mult;

Ok, 3 stack manipulations but someone who's done more than just toy programs in RPL and Forth might be able to come up with some other routines that can hide those as well. EDIT: And once written, the user of the routine needs to know, "put the two vectors onto the stack, the first one is what I'm projecting, and the second is what I'm projecting onto".

Another point to consider, dynamically typed languages suffer a similar 'failing' if they're to be considered 'high level'. How can they be 'high level' if you can add 1+"b"? (in code, won't work in runtime unless it's weakly typed, similar to having too few items on the data stack). How can any language be considered 'high level' if you have to remember how many parameters, their types and in what order for every function call?