skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of those charts would do well in a "Most confusing graph" competition, especially as a series.

For example, the "HOW HAPPY VERIFIED REVIEWERS ARE WITH THEIR CONSOLE" pie chart at first glance makes PS4 look a bit better than the Xbox, because the graph above it uses black for PS4.

You have to click he radio button to see that that is correct, by a tiny (I expect not statistically significant) margin. Whether that holds for 4-star reviews, too is kept hidden from the readers.

One could just as easily show the distribution over all star rating for both devices in one graph. More information, easier to grasp.
Vimium is mainly for in-page keyboard interactions (like opening a link or scrolling down). Ferro is for interacting with Chrome itself, for instance pinning a tab, saving/opening sessions, extension management, deleting bookmarks, etc.

Ferro does not suffer from the same keyboard shortcut problem as Vimium. Vimium injects code into every tab you have open (called "content scripts" in Chrome extensions) and uses javascript key listeners. Ferro uses the recently-introduced Chrome keyboard shortcut API. To manage your keyboard shortcuts for all extensions that use the API, go to "chrome://extensions" and click the "Keyboard shortcuts" link on the bottom-right.
> Without going into debate about DSM and psychiatric clinical practice ...

A wise choice, since that debate took place, psychology was found wanting, and is being abandoned as a result. Which part of this are you not clear about?

> ... psychology has little to do with this.

Psychology has everything to do with this. Psychology's basic premise is that there is a normal behavior, a "good thing", and we should all aspire to it. Meanwhile, in reality, evolution requires diversity to function. Diversity stands at odds with the idea that there is a single correct model for behavior.

The important thing to understand about evolution is that it's strongly backed by scientific evidence, unlike psychology's belief system. One piece of evidence in favor of evolution, by no means the only piece, is us -- we arose by way of natural selection, and this happened by way of innumerable failed experiments. No natural selection, no humans. That's strong evidence for how badly psychology pictures reality.

> Terminology should be used properly, and we should be aware what words mean, especially if we criticize sloppy science or health care.

Don't tell me, tell the director of the NIMH and the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country, who is arguing for the abandonment of the DSM:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...

I cannot impress on you strongly enough that the present criticism of the field of psychology is entirely justified by facts.
Try automating some of your work. Pick one simple thing that you do a lot, and write a small script or program to automate it: getting a handful of files from somewhere; putting a handful of files somewhere; opening one or a handful of files; creating the skeleton of a file that you will later flesh out.

I'm guessing you probably work in Windows because most people do at work; their shells are either too simplistic and awkward (cmd) or nuclear-capable (psh). Install cygwin and use the bash shell. Or do everything in Scheme/Racket and don't worry about a shell.

Automate something today, something almost too simple to automate. Repeat.
Let's say that this passed and became law. With this law in effect, why would I want to work as an executive in Switzerland when I can get much better pay elsewhere?
Important tips to keep in mind when using freelancers to outsource work.
Decentralizing with Mesh Networks
It's horrifying how dependent we are on a few powerful Internet Service Providers. Without them, our WIFI networks would become isolated and, for the most part, useless.

In the coming years, this is only going to emerge as a bigger problem as technology becomes more critical in our lives. The temptation will be there for governments and malicious groups to shutdown or interfere with ISPs, and we should do something to avoid disaster.

I've been reading about and experimenting with mesh networks, more interconnected, decentralized systems. The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking) provides a nice introduction, but the general idea is to distribute servers across households worldwide, and to have requests routed through the network, directly toward their destination, rather than through ISPs and large-scale servers. That way, the Internet would be free, and no small group of corporations would control it.

I'm experimenting with different protocol and possibilities right now! Thoughts?
It seems like Yahoo is spending too much money, and nothing lucrative is coming out of it.
> How would you legally define "software patent"?

Software patent: A patent that can be infringed by executing a software program on a general purpose computer.

> It's actually only 25% of all software startups in the survey, but 67% of VC-backed startups.

Which does tell you something, doesn't it? Unless VC-backed startups are an incredibly small percentage of startups, the patents filed by non-VC-backed startups would have to be significantly smaller than 24% (I assume 25% was a typo, see table on page 1277 of the report). Moreover, given the stark contrast in the numbers, query whether the VCs are interested in patents as patents vs. interested in them as a method for weeding out uncommitted startup founders.

But I'm less concerned about the number of patents software startups are applying for. If nobody was applying for software patents at all, obviously the patent system wouldn't be doing any good there, but it wouldn't really be the strongest call for abolishing them -- no harm no foul, right? The problem isn't (just) the lack of usefulness or cost effectiveness of patents to innovators, it's the harm created by mass producing land mines. Because if software startups aren't getting many software patents, but the number of software patents being issued keeps going up, guess who is.
::Yawn:: The insurance contract approach is lame as it makes you lose your funds if the other party suffers an honest failure (e.g. they get hit by a bus).

Better protocols are possible: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321228 (CoinSwap)

Describing it as "laundering" is more than a little hopeful-eyed. These sorts of things are privacy mechanisms, which make Bitcoin's privacy a bit closer to traditional banking... but they don't provide an apparent legitimate origin of the funds, so they aren't themselves useful for money laundering.
Because you like living in Switzerland, you love what you do, you make generous compensation and you add value to the company. Quite simple, actually.
You can list the actions he's taken personally to disprove he's not a 'good net citizen', or you can blame Google for not being a 'good net company', but you absolutely are not allowed to speak for what he thinks.
Anything that is "general purpose" can have many many variations. This is exactly the case with general purpose programming languages. Special purpose language (eg: SQL) doesn't lead to such situations.
Micron's Automata Exploits Parallelism to Solve Big Data Problems
Fairly irrelevant if the company says "do the hours and tasks we want you to do or you get none at all".
Paul Frampton is hardly an underachiever, but he's still under house arrest in Argentina for drug smuggling.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the...
The link in the article has more detail[0], which includes an expanded "critical thinking" section. Also from the comments on that page, from one of the authors: "...separate articles focused on each of the outcomes described here are currently under review at journals. This is a summary of the combined results".

[0] http://educationnext.org/the-educational-value-of-field-trip...
Precisely. It seems it was more motivated by jealousy than any realistic possibility of changing anything.

Instead of attempting to attack a symptom of the growing gap between super rich and the rest of us, they should be looking at underlying causes. Hint: regulatory capture and central banking.
> 1. There is no substitute for the hours spent coding. Sure, you can waste a lot of time, but there's a high correlation between hours spent and skill attained.

Even the time wasted is valuable, and not just for racking up hours. Wasted time includes making mistakes, and once you've made a mistake then you've seen that mistake. This means that when you later see the results of that mistake, made by you or a colleague, you can quickly consider if it's that same mistake; often it is.

We've all asked someone for help about something weird, and that someone gives us an immediate suggestion. Chances are it's because they've made and seen that mistake in the past.

Cherish your bugs, and cherish your mistakes.
I'd also add `-j' to that list.

j = bzip2

I find a lot of packages with the `.tar.bz2' extension. Just replace `z' with `j' in your tar command and you're good.
The sad thing, from a technical perspective, about most of the recent consoles, is they are basically PCs. There is no more crazy ASIC design leading to graphics performance light years ahead of non-console computers, or the last console generation. For a while there we got used to the new gen consoles being leaps ahead of the current state of the art anywhere (including PCs). However, once GPUs got commoditized and mass produced, continuing that trend became impractical. The good news is that while next gen consoles won't be leaps ahead of state of the art, this is not necessary to have good games, and an extremely fun gaming experience not possible on any other platform.

The sad thing I mentioned above is at the same time very exciting to me--once there is no crazy custom ASIC design, developers won't have as much trouble writing games. You basically get a PC with a blessed system configuration and a well known API that will lead to more and better performing games than during the last generation.

As far as console vs. phone or PC, I don't see them going away any time soon. They have many advantages over both.
I totally support this statement. Longterm thinking is based on first principles.

[edit] Should be based on first principles.
I also imagine him to be more than 12x as valuable than a janitor (and, if this is Google, a masseuse.)
Yes. And then they project their disagreement into some negative emotion on my part; I'm being arrogant, or dismissive, or cold.
Very good and intelligent article. One point I don't fully agree with is the actual cut-off price. For iOS devices I have noticed that anything above $5 has the exact effect the author described - it forces to pay more attention and cut the app more slack. Also, I would not even consider buying a $25 game for iPad. But then if it were a desktop game, I would, meaning that that magic price depends not just on the game, but also on the platform.
That was due to an improper update the community made to the code, not the code that SN wrote himself.
"I just dislike when people tie political ideology into their evaluation of new technology."

Tying political ideology to the evaluation of new technology is the MO of Bitcoin's supporters. If you wanted to focus strictly on technology, Bitcoin would never have gotten off the ground. No security definition, design documents spread across human language and source code, no attention given to the various ways distributed systems can be attacked or can fail, etc. The only reason Bitcoin became popular in the first place is that people with a particular political ideology saw a chance to realize their dreams.
Installed it and am impressed as well. Wonder how this has stayed underneath the radar. Can turn off that bulky GitLab droplet now.
You might realise that parsing HTML or C with regular expressions is a bad idea.
Has anyone played Democracy 3? I found Democracy 2 relatively shallow and toy-like - the RockPaperShotgun "Wot I think" didn't make it Democracy 3 sound like a significantly deeper experience http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/10/31/wot-i-think-democ...
Yes, you are correct. But going to college, or learning to code nights and weekends, or contributing to OSS projects doesn't pay the mortgage either.

It's an investment. You do it in hopes that current work will yield a larger future gain, be it through experience, wisdom, exposure, or something else.
This post inspired me to up-vote. It's amazing how popular hacker news tends to be among the people I talk to but how few votes it can take to be on the front page.
why is G+ the only way to share?
I was never a fan of consoles - the interface is so low-bandwidth I give up in frustration in a few minutes.

So I find nothing to be sad about, that quality gaming has become available on more platforms.
I see that it could be used that way, I guess, but I don't think it's an appropriate interpretation. If X actually is Y then there is a connection, and they deserve some credit, just less than if they'd said "X is Y". If X is not Y then they "weren't incorrect" because they weren't incorrect, so parent is incorrect to label them as such. If X is not Y and there is some other interesting connection, they were correct and deserve just as much credit as if the two wind up shown to be the same person.
One of the components of the Dokku project[1] is a component named gitreceive[2]. It creates bare git repositories on the fly when you push to your git server, and then runs a general receiver script.

[1]: https://github.com/progrium/dokku

[2]: https://github.com/progrium/gitreceive
Would you recommend those books to someone who is just familiar with the Linux command line and knows the basics of C? I want to start understanding the system I use everyday, in depth, but am not sure where to start.
Well that was cool. I use duckduckgo in firefox. I copied the phrase, and did the following:

<ctrl-k>!t <ctrl-v><enter>

<ctrl-k> puts me in the search bar. Duckduckgo's !t bang code takes you to google's translate page, and google guessed it was Portuguese and translated it for me, additionally suggesting an alternate source with proper accents.

Good times, good times.

EDIT: !gt, not !t.
Copying and pasting a few dozen commands and one of them is very likely to fail. I've installed GitLab 3 times and something has failed all 3 times. There's no excuse not to provide a tarball that includes (1) both gitlabhq and gitlab-shell (2) all gems needed. Everything else can be apt-get installed, which is fine. But at least provide a tarball of your application's code.
At least in the United States, contractors at all of the companies (ranging from 50, 500, to 5000 employees) I've worked at have had the least ability to set their own hours and no ability to pick the tasks they work on. They work for third party contracting agencies, get no stock, and aren't invited to the all-hands or the company parties. On the flip side, if they work a 60 hour work week, they get paid for 60 hours. And, in mature companies, they seem to get paid a higher hourly salary than employees - but, they get few, if any, benefits like medical/vision/dental.
From the stark monetary perspective, in many large partnership-based corporations (not Google) - it is all about the client money you are directly responsible for bringing in to the firm. Especially in Law. Partners in law/accounting/consulting firms are invited to partnership based on the client business they bring in. And then they have to "buy in".

The ratios vary. I recall one Andersen (now Accenture) partner telling me that he brought in about $10M of business. For a Big-4 (or is it Big-3?) accounting firm, the revenue per partner was $2.66 million. [1]

Law firms are notorious for PPP. [2]

[1] "Total firm revenue was $22 billion and global partnership was 8,280 partners giving a revenue per partner ratio of $2.66 million."

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_firms_by_profits_pe...
Sid: Raspberry Pi Driven Robot Arm-Ball Game For 45 Seconds
Trade journo here (not tech). No need for blacklists in some/many/most segments. Upset corp. hatchetman calls publisher, says either the offending reporter goes or our ads do. I haven't seen a whole lot of publishing backbone/pushback out here lately. (Not that that's changed much.)

Flipside is fancy junketeering, with publishers letting corporations host journos for new product events or 'market updates' held in resort destinations. That's the list journos want to be on, 'but it doesn't impact our objectivity.'
We're using Gitlab at work, our sysops set it up so I can't speak to the pain of dealing with that but overall the experience has been positive switching from Gitolite and Gitblit. If I had known about stash before they started implementing gitlab I may have suggested it though. I much prefer the Bitbucket interface to the Github.

Few pain points about Gitlab, large diffs cannot be merged or diffed through a merge request which is our preferred way to merge branches since you can autoclose the branches from there and provide the per line comments on the diff. The diff display currently has no option to hide whitespace (though they are open to pull requests that implement the `?w=1` convention github does.

Other than that thought I can't say I've had a negative experience with Gitlab.
"in real life", it would have been closer to 1:21 actually due to the bill's proposed salary span calculations:

- calculated based on hourly rate instead of monthly salary

- bottom is defined as the top hourly wage of the bottom 10% wages (1:12 => ~1:14)

- bottom wages: 40hrs/week vs top wages: 60hrs/week (~1:14 => ~1:21)

one pro-bill study therefore calculated only 2500 persons would be affected; their cut salaries would be almost entirely spent on new jobs; only minor insurance/tax losses ; and no company would leave Switzerland - all of which was wishful thinking at best.
Aren't attributes in closing tags meaningless?
Maybe the inverse (or is it reverse?) is better, the lowest salary can't get below 1/12th of the top salary?
I set Gitlab up for the internal development team at work and we love it. The installation isn't a one-click affair that many people are used to nowadays but it's not hard.

One of the reasons that we chose Gitlab is because it's open source. We've made some tweaks to it so that it better fits our needs.
thats why i think the Xbox Ones direction with voice controls and extended media capabilities is more future proof than the PS4s which is more or less just a gaming box. I guess the console market is ready for a new competitor in the coming years though, Valve or Apple is my bet.
Improve your communication: from first impressions to winning a negotiation
Would you please elaborate. My experience has been that formal understanding of theory (say of state machines) equips one to handle complex problems and in no way indicates how well the code is written. For example, a GUI application code (say) making use of a framework wouldn't give any indication of whether the author had any formal understanding of state machines or not. In my opinion to write a good readable code one need not have a formal understanding of CS theory, but the understanding of CS theory is paramount in writing code for complex problems (say writing a compiler).
CUBIST: Explore and visually analyze relations, dependencies, and clusters
Not a good sell - OP talks around the point for 3 pages, including some scare tactics about copyright transfer and how confusing it is (how about a boilerplate transfer?) then the video about how easy it is with their product.

This is an example of engineers writing copy. My copyediting spouse calls it the 'mystery story' where they make their point, then reveal the big surprising conclusion somewhere on page three.

Could have put the product link on top of the page, then all the backstory. If I have any interest I get to the meat immediately instead of losing interest somewhere along word 500.
a smartphone app that syncs content to a server that scales out and up

This made me chuckle. I recently designed an entirely new way of doing just that (to me, at least), and it's probably the 20th or more end-to-end approach I've developed over the last seven years on that specific problem.

I don't know why scalable sync interests me, but it does. :)
That won't fly in many European countries. If the worker can prove s/he had fixed hours, a manager, etc, s/he's entitled to the same rights as a salaried worker.
But you can do all those things and have as good a quality of life for your family in London or New York or even Paris, for now anyway.
A solution: Out-bribe the corrupt congress. That is not feeding them?
That is exactly what I meant. The abbreviation that is the company name used to stand for "Advanced RISC Machines", but "an advanced RISC machine" is clearly a generic description of something that could come from any manufacturer.

As Wikipedia says[1]:

"A trademark which is popularly used to describe a product or service (rather than to distinguish the product or services from those of third parties) is sometimes known as a genericized trademark[2]. If such a mark becomes synonymous with that product or service to the extent that the trademark owner can no longer enforce its proprietary rights, the mark becomes generic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark

The point is that "ARM" as it is used in the text doesn't refer specifically to the products of the trademark owner. If such usage becomes acceptable, anyone could sell "ARM servers" and the trademark becomes useless.
That book has me in tears every time.
Related: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/

> this is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed.
Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
Cute.

pv and lolcat are in the ubuntu repos. I didn't want to go track down btree or flute, this works fine in the console:

cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -C | pv -qL 1k | lolcat -f
Agreed, with the caveat that I can only handle a couple of posts this deep before feeling intimidated and longing for something more lightweight. I like the mix of articles because if all of them were this deep it would feel like I don't belong here without years of prerequisite study.
angular-translate is really a pleasure to use. I used it in two separate smallish apps and wouldn't hesitate to do it again. Very compact, easy API and great docs.
Mistakes which included publicly posting an email address with his full legal name on a bitcoin forum while using that same nickname to post on a drug forum, all in the same time period.

Additionally he baited and trolled the mainstream press. The US government & US prosecutors do not react well to criminals who attempt to repeatedly publicly humiliate their failure to catch them.

My honest opinion was this guy was a fucking idiot.
Any discussion of Linux shell tricks/tips is incomplete without a mention of the readline shortcuts: http://www.bigsmoke.us/readline/shortcuts
Sure, but in such cases that will generally come down to employer vs. government regarding taxes etc. (and sometimes about employee rights too), it won't lead to a contractor working the hours/tasks they want to do because then they'd just lose the work immediately.
I'm just speculating, but I suspect Oracle Database is a pretty huge cash cow - it's one of those enterprise products you can't get a quote for without a phone call.

You're not going to have every small website owner make a big purchase like that, so something like MySQL is pretty much unavoidable for them. If it can become competitive with Oracle itself for enterprise users, though, I guess the numbers could be big enough it's worth breaking some promises to protect the cash cow.