skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how that works out if they want to recruit someone who is allergic to cats?

I like cats, but being (mildly) allergic, I don't think I could work every day in the same room as one (sadly).
The Switchboard: The NSA still has no idea how much information Snowden took
Trying to figure out what this gives me that Selenium doesn't? If I already have a large code base using Selenium why should I switch?
How to get this in india?
The Documented Life
Well, damn. I apologize for creating yet more confusion.
$35/yr + $2/hr. in Manhattan, no less: http://www.efanyc.org/rbpmw/

The introductory 4-day (2-weekend) class was like $250 or something.
Linus Torvalds on C++ vs. C
I'm more a fan of 'seat of your pants' programming but to be fair, if abstractions are good they are meant to be a solid bedrock upon which to build a higher level mental model. For example, assembly is one such bedrock - you don't need to understand microcode or transistors to get the most out of it. C is arguably another, Java arguably another (understanding the JVM is nice but not essential).

It's only due to the deficiencies within certain abstractions that it frequently becomes necessary to subordinate and go lower down the chain.
>"I'll pay someone who already knows this stuff to phone in the answers for me" - which isn't generally an applicable skill in the real world.

I would argue that this is also a valuable skill. Knowing who to hire, assessing the person's abilities, figuring out if they can actually get the job done in the time allotted. Sure it's not at the same level that a hiring manager at a tech company in the real world would have to make, but then again the normal CS test questions aren't at that level either.
If and only if the abstraction isn't leaky. Unfortunately, non-leaky abstraction layers are exceedingly rare, to the point that I now believe most software engineers don't even aim at trying to avoid leakage in their designs.
Advice for entrepreneurs from a 15 year old
Ask HN: Posts being unjustly removed from front page?
Today I browsed to Hacker News as I do every day and noticed a front page post on "How I Made $6,000 in 7 Days with my Ebook." A friend of mine, Jeremy Olson, has a similar success story. Jeremy and his partner Nathan Barry wrote "The App Design Handbook" and pulled in $36,297 in the first 24 hours and over $56,000 in the first month. He posted these earnings on Twitter at which point I urged him to write up a blog post regarding his success. Jeremy replied with the following disheartening tweet:

"@cballou kind of like this? [url redacted]

That actually hit HN homepage but the mods
took it down :("

He also followed up our conversation with:

"@cballou yeah, actually we’ve had several posts taken
off the front page. Don’t get it"

My question to the HN community, and particularly the mods, is WTFMATE?

Jeremy is a well respected member of the community with an Apple Design Award under his belt. He has a substantial following in the iOS community and my initial inclination is that him sharing the blog post led to upvotes which triggered flagging/deleting his post. I believe that in the case of a post deemed to be as beneficial to the community as this one, you'd realize it's likely not upvote gaming but true interest.

I'll follow up with links to the Twitter conversation and the original article that was removed.
For anyone interested here is a link to the petition, i couldn't find one in the article.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/increase-nasa-fund...
Ironically, they are chartered to secure our signals as well, what exactly are they doing to that end?
In that case, it will write into #foobar because it is smart enough to understand that <input/>s can be written to, and not labels.
It works in a way that is very similar to us humans: If someone tells us to "write 'Michael' into the 'First Name' field", we look for the text "First Name" and then to the right and bottom of this text if there is a field that can be written to. So, position in this case is position on the page in (x, y) coordinates.

If there are multiple occurrences (eg. two "First Name" fields) then Helium scans the page top-to-bottom, and closest to the element you last interacted with. Like a human would normally also do.
Good question. I guess the only reason I didn't ditch PayPal before was that in the past Gumroad would deposit your money in your PayPal account (i.e. you'd need PayPal anyway). Now that Gumroad deposits directly to your bank account, I'm looking forward to move to a Gumroad-only solution,
Everyone wants a full stack dev these days… how many are there really?
Mining social media data in context of crowdfunding data - Part 1: Social Side
If a Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding We'd Ground Our Fleet
Yes, this is surprising. Twilio has a reputation of being awfully transparent -- they had a billing systems issue back in July and handled it quite well, IIRC. They also do a great job with their developer evangelist program.

I wonder if someone has created a pricing matrix/table that updates and compares the SMS/voice API providers. For example, I know Plivo is slightly cheaper for SMS, domestically (USA). A price comparison table might make a good holiday project :)

Although I understand this wouldn't help your case. As you pointed out, the SMS provider would have already increased rates by the time you could be notified of increases.
If you think elisp is bad, you never tried Mocklisp in Gosling/UniPress emacs.
It's sort of like self-checkout - people don't like it, but if there are no humans, they'll (try to) use it.
No, you read the analogy wrong.

Alexander is saying "He's already committed a crime and is promising to do another. How do we give him a free pass on the first crime if he promises not to do the second?"
Here's the accompanying Twitter conversation that led to me posting:

https://twitter.com/jerols/status/408977497255337984

Here's the initial blog post that was removed:

$36,297 IN 24 HOURS: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE APP DESIGN HANDBOOK LAUNCH

http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-stats/
Love the ticker at the top! Maybe some tiny charts to go with it?
Whoa there you FOSS commie!

(just kidding, I know mapleoin)
coins dont attract VAT - thats why they have a face value
"Even if you know what you're doing, in the worst case you just need to browse to the wrong URL to get instantly owned without user interaction"

You'll have to make a better case. In the exploit in your link, the user was tricked by social engineering, had his computer configured to automatically run Java applets from arbitrary sources, and in all probability was running Microsoft Windows - hardly someone practicing good security.
Yes, this stood out at me too. As soon as I read that statement, I knew the author was either lying or underinformed. Thanks for providing the article.
The object-relational mismatch is still a huge problem. I'm quite interested by this supposed solution. But I spent 5 minutes chasing links and couldn't find an example of what the syntax actually looks like, only a suggestion that I buy some book to understand the language. This "D" thing sounds pretty cool, but it seriously needs some more user-friendly marketing (and a non-colliding, googleable name).
This is the stuff that dreams are made of. This kid will no doubt remember this for the rest of their life. If this would have happened to me when I was a kid I would have went nuts.
When a philosophy graduate is unhappy that collective, voluntary trade on the market doesn't benefit his 'trade', he will see it as evil, repressive capitalism. While, in an anarchist, decentralised, collective society there will be people who will no be able to realise their dreams and ambitions and they too will resent this repression imposed on them by the evil collective.
I am tired of Google behaving like they are untouchable/above others.

Follow the rules everyone follows, you aren't above the law and certainly do not deserve to be treated as a special entity.

Pay your taxes, respect privacy and stop pretending to be saint.
I didn't say anything about what causes Bangladesh's economic problems. I used Bangladesh as an example because it's a particularly stark illustration of the social costs of unaddressed poverty. Speaking from first-hand experience: it's a place where you can be rich, live in the most exclusive enclave in the capital city, yet still be panhandled by orphan kids with missing hands when you walk out your door. There's a dollar value you can place on alleviating that state of affairs, even based on purely selfish reasons like your own quality of life. The problem with private charities is that, for very basic economic reasons, they cannot be expected to fully capture the dollar value of alleviating poverty in the society.
App for selling digital products
I think its good to remember that these people are professionals in disinformation and psyops. If we don't understand what they are attempting then it's more likely due to our lack of experience in the area rather then their incompetence.

One plausible explanation is it is an effort to give cover to friendly politicians during political campaigns. They can't just leave these people without a story. They need to supply them with something to counter all the negative news. The story doesn't have to be airtight. It just needs to be good enough for the majority of the population to remain accepting of the status quo.

As an example of another bit in this campaign I would point to the recent instances of politicians claiming that Snowden must have had help from the Chinese or Russians. No proof was given but he just had to have help because how else could he have done it.

It would be good to remember that the first goal of any organization is survival. There is no reason to think that the offensive capabilities of the NSA and the rest of the defense establishment aren't being used to protect themselves.
Can you recommend any books?
How I Passed My U.S. Citizenship Test: By Keeping the Right Answers to Myself
This is a bad application of the quote.

Most of the Lisp hackers are usually knowledgeable about analysis of algorithm complexity.

Alan Perlis comment talks about inefficiency of Lisp programs due to a lot of (meta) abstraction and indirect mapping of abstract software to hardware.
I do a ton of code reviews, often as part of an interview process, less often, for embedded developers. Conditionals written with literal lvalues is something of which I tend to take note. You're right, it's not natural, and it's less readable, but there's usually a reason why people do it: experience. If you often work in weakly typed languages, or those which allow for weird coercion in conditional statements, it's sadly often easier to form a habit which guarantees fewer bugs than it is to say "I'll always type the boolean equality/strict equality operator."

"But why don't you use better languages, then?" Because in many cases (low-level resource-constrained systems programming), it's much, much easier to deal with these weird gotchas than to attempt to get exotic [1] languages such as Python, Ruby, Java, and sometimes even C++ (heap? who needs a heap??), to work. Even in cases where you're able to get these languages to work easily, you're just forcing yourself to become intimately familiar with the internals of some language with which you'll ultimately wind up wrestling [2]. Normally the point of such languages is to abstract away the system. This is the exact opposite of what you need in these environments.

"But it annoys me when people use literal lvalues where they don't need to." Ah, but this is the rub of forming a habit.

1: I'm mostly sarcastic in my use of the word "exotic" here. Don't go crazy, now. ;-)

2: Though to totally contradict myself, I will say that both Rust and Go look very, very interesting here.
That's still stupid. Put the assignment on its own line.
How does it change this that he was given the questions ahead of time? He is not a low level employes, he has the ears of people at the highest levels and could have requested a closed hearing. He probably could have asked the president to request one. Was this an orchestrated lie?

If there wasn't a policy change to acknowledge the program, it would be closed.
So was it a hate affair with Bush that led them to unquestioningly believe something they wanted so hard to be true with the memos?
It's a matter of sound business decisions more than anything. This is a classic example of not understanding your target audience. Look at the competition: on one end, you have a flexible, open source web testing framework like CasperJS (targeted at developers); on the other hand, you have end-user oriented products like Fake.app that are paid and closed source. One could even argue that Selenium itself (also free) has a nice enough GUI to be considered power user friendly. When you start charging devs for closed source, paid applications, you're getting into the territories of Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. Is that really how this independent team wants to position itself? Can this team even support the kinds of problems that enterprise clients have every day? Seems like a really terrible segment to target. And if this team was really thinking that indie devs would go and blindly purchase a product like this from an unheard-of company with no established reputation, then, again, they need to go back to the drawing board with their business model and/or hire someone who can provide guidance.
Mostly I agree with you. I guess I also want to agree, but, here's what happens with me: no matter how much I try, the interactions I have with people through email and IM are never, never, as interesting and as deep as the conversations I have with the remaining three people that I still correspond with letters (yes, I mean snailmail, paper letters). It's unfortunate, I guess, and I wish it wasn't so, but as one writer said once, a long time ago when he didn't even know about email, "the letter has always been the most sophisticated means of conversation".
Looking back at my 2013
And the first example they use is a "pirate"??!! That justifies a lack of privacy and an ungodly sum of tax money?!

:throws up in mouth:
You're just going to have to get used to the fact that discovering cool websites is not as rewarding as it used to be, and go find some activity which is more rewarding.

It helps, when you catch yourself in the addictive activity, to focus on its drawbacks. And when you're doing something more rewarding, it helps to focus on its benefits.
Show HN: HNNotify has changed the way I interact with HN
Bottom 40% are responsible for maintenance - without them there can be no production (i.e. they're vital). It's not easy to write code or work on 3D printers when your toilet is clogged and there are no people unloading trucks at the local stores :-)
Show HN - A startup that fights both climate change and global poverty
COTAP.org is a global crowdfunding site for forestry carbon projects in Mozambique, Uganda, Nicaragua, Malawi (+ India soon) which create life-changing income for the world's poorest people. Give us feedback!
This reminds me a bit of what Intel said about the Pentium 4 when it first came out
Here's the highest upvoted version of it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712226

It seems to have been submitted a few times in short succession:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%2436%2C297+IN...

It's possible that the original submission just wasn't noticed, so a couple of submitters tried resubmitting it, and a wary mod treated it as spam.
Engineers prepare real humanoid robots for government competition
The Last Re-Org You'll Ever Do
First of all, Arian, congratulations.

I am the first to admit that I still have a passing HN addiction at times. And that - when I had a lousy day at work or at life, I would feel good if some article I had sluiced the Internet tech stream for turned out to be gold and got up voted. Or even better - if a comment of mine was timed right (this is key, you know, early comments that are cogent gain lots of momentum). It all meant that somewhere out there - someone was giving me approval (that one point up vote was someone liking what I had to offer).

Now, of course, I realize that the virtual world is not as rich as the real world - retreat though I may from time to time.

My advice to you is to turn off the computer and meet up with some friends. If you don't want to meet up with some friends, go find something in the real world that is interesting to do - you very often find interesting people to meet if you find something of interest to do. Interest is the greatest filter in life - something that dating sites try to approximate - but really showing up at something, especially on a snowy day - is one of the best filters.

Good luck! It's ok to not go cold turkey. That's hard, I know.

The real world is more real than the virtual.

Knowledge, as another article said recently - is to - watch someone do it, do it, and then teach someone do it.

That is the formula I've been applying to my endeavors recently. And it seems to be working.
Well if it doesn't fully solve the problem, does it solve it at all?

That's the thing about BG; you can keep increasing the chances, but if your requirement is that you must be certain that all the other generals will attack, and at the same time, then we know of no solution. We also have more than one good proof that this is impossible.
The best optimisation I made was rewriting 2,650 lines of C as a seven line shell script. The previous programming team had written a data transfer program with its own implementation of ftp. I just used the one that was already on the computer.
The point I took from the article was that it's better for managerial tasks to be distributed across the team than reside with specific individuals. Of course there's no free lunch - an self-managed coder can get less coding done than a managed one, because they have to spend some of their time on managerial tasks. But it's possible they'll be more effective at it than an external manager.
This is so stupid. Snowden hasnt leaked documents since he initially gave it to the first few reporters. Those reporters have stated from the beginning it was in their hands now to determine what is reported to the public.

> This is analogous to a hostage taker taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10, and then say, 'if you give me full amnesty, I'll let the other 40 go'. What do you do?

That is absolutely absurd. No lives are put in harms way like they could've been with the unredatcted wikileaks data. I believe the reporters are being cautious on what type of data they post.
I 2nd that. Given this is the eighth company to be acquired by Google in the last 6 months this will be interesting to see where Google takes this.
If that's honestly true, you're punching well above the majority of people who work in the industry, and you have a highly valuable skillset. Plus you come with free ice cream :)
Curious, why are those bugs?
Or Hindi.
A Seismic Shift in Object Detection
I've been saying for a while now that the only problem with the 9-to-5 schedule is its adherents' insistence that it's the only valid lifestyle.
Awesome call. Props to both the kid, and his new favorite astronaut!
Amazon Strikers Take Their Fight to Seattle
Show HN: jQuery Audit – Chrome dev tools extension
Good question. It can't do anything that Selenium can't, but it's a lot easier to work with. It's like developing in Assembler vs developing in C: Both are equally powerful in what they can achieve, but the former is much more technical to use than the latter.

The analogy extends further: We were invited to write an article about Helium in the December issue of Professional Tester (professionaltester.com) in which we compared automating Gmail with Helium vs pure Selenium. The code with Helium was 66% shorter, but ran on average 26% slower than an (optimized) Selenium script. You can find a thorough analysis covering the differences between Helium and Selenium here: http://heliumhq.com/AutomatingGmailWithHelium.pdf
More details in /r/netsec:
http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1sqppp/ebay_remoteco...
Designing for Win/Loss
Great success! I suspect that it was A LOT more than 7 days of effort to put it all together. It was 7 days harvesting a lot of prior effort. (And I hope the harvesting turns into a lot more than $6K!)
Perhaps, but I don't see any way around it: you've got to call it something. At the moment, bitcoin is a lot more like bullion than currency: it's possible to store and exchange raw value with it, but except in a very few cases, you're not able to walk into a store and buy something.

Laws can be changed. If Bitcoin starts acting more like a currency, then the laws can be changed to suit. Right now, it is not very currency-like, and that is unlikely to change very much in the next five years or so, and so treating it as one doesn't make a lot of sense.
If the company is american, then what I emphasized doesn't apply at all, it's absolutely normal that most things must be done the american way, and selecting people for their ability to speak with the headquarter makes sense.
Thanks for the feedback, will me on the todo list :)
It's okay when we do it.
I see where Kevin is wanting to create a connection between the reader and the blogger. In my opinion this platform seems distracting.
New simple, inexpensive graphene treatment method could unleash new uses
Infinio Announces a $12M Series B Round of Funding
> GCC is indeed not the only compiler around, which is why I said "at least" :-) Even if you're stuck with some other compiler for production builds, it's handy to be compiling regularly with a variety of compilers so as to benefit from the union of the diagnostic abilities of all of them.

In my case, at least one of the compilers in question was for the 8051, the platform that won't fucking die. Due to the peculiarities of the aforementioned piece of silicon crap, the compiler was not entirely ANSI-compliant (various #pragmas were actually required to produce working code, indicating various parameters related to memory organisation and the such), thus making it rather difficult to compile the codebase with anything but that particular compiler.

> The construct is a useful idiom, but oftentimes there would be or ought to be a local coding standard recommending that you make what you're doing explicit by comparing the assignment result to the appropriate flavour of zero

This is the solution I adhere to as well.
Tl;dr, have to get to work. But

a. For a cooler look at Karl Kraus, check out the essay on him in Clive James's Cultural Amnesia.
b. The PC/Mac/whatever bit is tedious and silly.
c. Comparing the US to the Austro-Hungarian empire is also silly. One might stipulate that we comprise wildly different cultures also; but that would require that one skip the "Roman Catholic empire" bit and notice that the empire had quantities of Protestants, Orthodox, Jews, and Muslims.
Regardless of how you feel about the word, or how you use any word, there are a few facts to understand.

1) Some people are legitimately hurt by the use of the word retarded in a derogatory manner (eg. http://www.r-word.org/r-word-effects-of-the-word.aspx).

2) You are choosing to use it and offending them.

Argue all you want, but the fact remains, you have no doubt offended someone. Is using whatever word _you_ want (ie. being a bit selfish) worth hurting someone else? Would it be that much trouble if you used another word, was still able to make your point, and not hurt someone's feelings?

It's one thing to accidentally stumble upon something that might offend someone, but it's quite another when you ignore the fact that your actions hurt someone and continue to engage in that activity willingly.

I don't mean to single you out as others below have used similar language, but it's something to think about.
Yes, I realize (hope) this is a joke, but this is the most "programmer" response to a drinking problem I've ever seen.

I know, I'll externalize and automate my impulse control!