skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Photoshop you can increase/decrease a value with more control by holding Shift (+/- 10) or Option (+/- 0.1). Similar shortcuts might aid in finer value control without adding anything to the UI.
By that definition all laws of physics are laws of observation.
Thanks! Slowing down next year, but with much bigger projects!
A good "UPS Beep" ringtone never fails.
A lot of people cite that lack of NumPy support is what's keeping them from moving to Python 3, I've seen this comment more times than I can count. It seems most of them haven't done their research and found that NumPy/SciPy has had complete support for Python 3 for 4 years now.
How the hell is James Clapper still in office?? Isn't what he did so obviously perjury?

The America of 2013 is absolute bullshit. I can't even fathom how corrupt this country is.
Need criteria defined like "do you need to shower"

For example your bodies thermoregulation system has not evolved to understand clothing, so when its 0F out and you're snowshoeing if you sweat and soak your clothes you'll more or less promptly die of hypothermia, or at least its going to really suck. So do my couple mile snowshoe hikes count if I carefully never break a sweat? If I knock back 2+ miles walking after lunch and dinner (only takes 45 mins or so each time) is that real exercise or not? It adds up to a marathon or so every week, its not like I'm only walking to the vending machine or something.
I work about 65 hours per week. Exercise is a top priority. I either run 10k per day, spin for an hour, or do kettlebells. Eating well is also a priority. I prepare a salad every day without exception.

It's all habitual at this point. 36 y/o, 6', 150lbs. My wife is very supportive and eats well with me. I've had to sacrifice television and video games to dedicate the time to staying fit.

As a side effect, people tend to yield more professional respect to people who have this lifestyle, not that it has an iota an influence over whether or not I do it. However, overall, I'd classify it as a great career move.

My big gap is getting enough sleep. I average about 6.5 hours.
"...nearly no one agrees with you on"

But at least you have Giorgio Tsoukalos.
I read the article, and obviously Google isn’t as good at filtering out overly optimized anchors as they claim. But I don't understand how this favors big brands over little ones (other then the fact that big brands probably have more money to throw at people to write the overly optimized anchors in the first place)?
Certainly not in the EU. If you sell it yourself you can charge what you like and there may be agency models where you pay distributors to deliver to retailers at agreed prices but I think in those cases you probably have to own the stock until sold. If you sell to a distributor they can sell a whatever price they like.
Go has broken backwards compatibility in the core libraries a few times over its short life.
Well skimp on the hardening and the regulator shuts your atm network down - only have to do it the once.
> which is making the core open-source OS less and less maintained

Which parts of the "core open-source OS" are "less and less maintained"?
In my experience, most operators wouldn't have mentioned it. The first thing I'll do is interview them about any problem I'm investigating, and while they are masters of hindsight, they'll not always be masters of foresight. My coworkers and I have spent a lot of time talking about this sort of thing, and we're often flabbergasted that they don't point out these obvious things sooner. As in, your typical person just gets used to broken things, or they just never think about it. Literally, they'll never think "there's got to be a better way". But the operators who do have that foresight, they are just living gold (though not quite as rare).

Mind, I've had my share of "why not get a 100 foot tape measure" instead of attempting to use laser measurements, but they're in the minority. I emphasize them in practice because people need to feel like they're smart enough to see the simple solutions (because they _are_), but often I have to work to merge their solutions into something workable.

TL;DR: operators should be consulted first, last, and during the development. But engineering is still hard to keep simple.
The funny thing is I was getting downvoted by the peanut gallery on proggit and other sites when I was pointing out, years ago, that there is no such thing as "Python", but really "Python 2" and "Python 3".

It's nice to see that pythonistas are starting to accept what an outsider saw give years ago.

Frankly the problem is a culture of overpromising and underdelivering that is endemic to Python. The situation with threading in PHP and Python is really the same: "it almost works" but the PHP community is responsible and says you shouldn't really use threads and the Python community is irresponsible and says "come in the water is fine".

The developers of languages such as PHP, C# and Java value backwards compatibility. Certainly things break from release to release, but some effort is made to minimize the effect, whereas in Python 3 they rewrote important APIs and broke a lot of stuff that they didn't have to break.
The trouble with this kind of survey is what falls under exercising? Does a daily hour of walk or having a regular sex life qualify as doing exercise? What about biking to work daily or nearly so?

It kinds of remind me of a survey that a friend conducted a few years back in Nantes (France) on alcoholism. To the question, how many liters of alcohol per day do you drink?, alcoholics would reply a certain amount. The next question was: how many liters of beer or wine do you drink in addition? Quite a few added liters. Go figure.
I like these questions but they feel like a review of "Javascript: The Good Parts." Still, there's no doubt that someone who does well with these questions is going to have excellent javascript-fu.

My first concern when hiring front-end engineers is the engineering part. It's just too easy for a front-end dev to have excellent javascript knowledge and still create intolerable code.

I'll actually be doing an interview in two days so I'll give the above a whirl and see.
From the cases I saw(might be biased), a lot of new projects start to use Python3. These projects don't need to consider backward compatibilities. Majority of people will use python 3 in python world.
Regarding Ruby, it is more elegant and consistent.And also seems Mats has clearer idea where Ruby will go. so in a long run. Ruby will catch up python in my own opinion.
M# FAQ
Because at this point in time, walking around in another gravity well is kind of bad-ass.

If all you want is soil samples, definitely send the robot. But if you want to be bad-ass, send some humans.
Alternate take away: Visibility of key metrics/information (bell on expensive machine) is a strong motivator. Worthwhile when considering spending resources on things like creating informative dashboards and proper instrumentation to focus the a team on key metrics.
This is pretty impressive :)

What I would recommend is that instead of distributing your time and energy to this many apps, you should stick to one concept and channel all your time into it. I like the games, but they could use some improvement in concept and overall quality, which shouldn't be hard for you if you spend enough time on each and every one. Focusing on one app would allow you to spend enough time, and would help you succeed further in the Windows App Market :)
I used to raise that objection when debating immortalists. What got me to stop raising it was the realization that in the form of business corporations or multigenerational trusts, we already have those problems.

It's almost comforting, knowing you already live in Dystopia.
Note: this is about the name clash, not the "old" M# language.
I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face. Now I really know that I need to start moving more in that direction. Somehow. I'm already in bioinformatics, but wasn't very focused on any subdomain of biology, so there's a lot to catch up on. I'm excited about Calico, but there's so little information available that it's hard to know if there's going to be any way for someone with just an MS in bioinformatics to wedge their way into helping with that effort (though I'm going to try!).

It would just suck to fail at figuring it out (result: death) and it might also suck to succeed (crazy fundamentalist shoots me in the head, result: death) but indefinite procrastination is probably the most assured way to die and be unfulfilled on top that... so it's worth having a go. Maybe I should work on cryopreservation instead, and leave the living forever bit to someone else to figure out?

Thanks for the mprize link, hadn't heard of that.
Six ways to breathe new life into an old Mac Pro
Your reasoning seems too ceteris paribus. I'd say that widespread immortality would have big social consequences other than just people not dying.
Google: let me swap accounts on the GA page using the same dropdown on all your other apps.
I was being somewhat sarcastic, but I'd suggest that students and professors get some self-interested benefit from the system, or it wouldn't have come to exist.

The schools get to make it look like they are producing high-quality students with publications, without the professors actually having to do much work to make this true.

The students get to graduate, and get a publication credit, regardless of the quality of their work, so long as they can pay.
Surf every day there are surfable waves, which means 3 or 4 times a week down here in southern Portugal -- winter swells have been huge for a month straight, so 5+ days per week has not been possible (unless you enjoy getting pounded by 4 meter bombs that is ;-))

Compared to my urban past, beats the hell out of going to the gym...
I just fixed it.
That's very interesting, I've never heard of that (but assumed it would be something pretty much along those lines).

What's the Obj-C runtime used on Windows for those apps? Is it a descendant of the NeXT runtime which did run on Win32 at one point, or something else?
They're still a thing, but I don't see the relevance. Many LAN parties are that loud, dirty and disorganized; I've seen enough PCs destroyed by coke spills or similar to believe that the LAN party atmosphere really is as bad as it seems.
Exactly. This is why something like Java 8 is admirable. They've been able to introduce two major new features from newer "productive" languages – lambdas and traits – without breaking anything; not only that, old libraries will actually enjoy better APIs thanks to the new features without recompilation. Sure, there might be better ways to implement these features, but introducing them in a way that feels natural to a language with millions of professional developers without breaking source or binary compatibility is a commendable achievement.
When you omit the humans, you omit the humanity of spaceflight. Neil deGrasse Tyson sums it up best:

Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium,
agreed with his interviewer in saying that "the manned program is a force
of nature on the educational pipeline of America. It is the force that excites
people to want to become scientists in the first place." [1]

Plus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi636wl6a1w

[1] http://www.space.com/8184-robots-humans-space-colbert-tyson-...
You're right: jokes like this only perpetuate bad attitudes- "oh, let's laugh at management/engineering, they think they're so clever."

From my time working in improvement in factories, I'm very confident that the single largest factor that determined whether they would achieve any improvements was the attitude of the team in place. "We've tried it before and it didn't work" is the enemy. Rarely is the enemy "let's spend $8mm on un-necessary consulting help." That's really, really rare. Most people hate spending money on outside help, they see it as a failure (which is also a harmful attitude).
Congrats. I hope I can be this productive with my personal projects in 2014.
You test "intermediate" commits the same way you test any other sort of commit. They are just commits, not something special.

You don't seem to be comprehending the divide between committing something, and actually giving that something to the world. In git it is perfectly natural to test after a commit. If it doesn't work, you just edit the commit. Of course testing after pushing should be treated delicately...
Just out of curiosity, have you actually tried getting NumPy/SciPy working on Python 3? Because they've been fully supported for quite a while now. I don't understand how this myth keep perpetuating itself.
I neither exercise, nor pay much attention to what I eat; if it's delicious, I eat until I'm physically in pain. I don't see myself as having any less energy than my peers who do exercise (if anything, I have more focus), and nor do I have any physical difficulties of any kind.

I weigh about 60kg (~130 lbs) and am about 1.75m tall. I've been about this weight since I was 14 or so, with almost no variance. It puts me just on the border between underweight and normal weight based on BMI.

AFAICT, exercise is a fad that wastes an enormous amount of time, and is only worthwhile if you enjoy it. (I'm being a little facetious, but thus far in my life, I see only downside, no upside.)
I develop Python code that helps automate the design of Intel CPUs (& graphics), and we recently (last week) upgraded to Python 3.3.3. Thankfully, I am less pessimistic than Alex on the subject.
I teach Karate twice a week and compete occasionally. It's the only exercise I've ever been able to maintain as it's masked as learning/practicing a skill as opposed to exercise for the sake of general fitness. I find jogging, going to the gym, cycling etc all very boring.
It bothers me that 8 is the "magic number." Did Gompertz simply round? I find it hard to believe that the real number is not 7.7 or 8.3, and those would have vastly different effects. Why should evolution mark itself by whole rotations around the sun?
2-3 times a week, strength training, following "Starting Strength":

http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength-3rd-Mark-Rippetoe/dp...

Just a few sets of bench presses, shoulder presses, squats and deadlifts, a couple times a week, seems to do wonders for both appearance (and posture) and mood (hugely). Because it's so efficient, and actually feels good, going to the gym is something I now actually look forward to.
Really? We have too many poets?
There actually is: http://python3wos.appspot.com/

A lot of those libraries have Python 3 port branches where you can help the effort. For example: https://github.com/boto/boto/tree/py3kport/py3kport
Eric Schmidt admits Google missed on social & says it’s his fault
Another option is reciprocal multiplication, possibly with a larger integer type. Reciprocal multiplication is an important element of my software's ability to run a Kinect at ~30fps on an ARM cpu with no FPU and no division instruction.
I don't really see what's wrong since they're exploiting the way the Chinese do business. There isn't an implied bribe here, but JPMorgan knows clearly that Chinese officials (many of whom are corrupt) will steer business to their children's firms. Put another way, JPMorgan just hacked hiring.
Much of our ruling class graduated from selective universities with legacy preferences and "development" cases. Making a stink about nepotism in China is hypocritical.
This is what you get when people keep on voting in big government types all in the name of safety, security and social justice.
"Functional programming" and "dataflow" are things that very much overlap. One could argue that FP is a superset of dataflow. But, both terms are pretty high-level and vague, so it's tough to exactly say what they are or aren't.
On the other hand look at fields like programming, where due to ageism and such, you've got a shorter career than a pro football quarterback before you get replaced by a cheap new grad. So you'd have genius grade programmers working at walmart as people greeters from age 30 to age 90, contributing to open source and stuff. This has both good points and bad points.

Another interesting one to think about on the other side, is its not entirely unusual for academics to spend a large fraction of their working years as minions before getting a professorship and tenure and a serious paycheck... imagine having to do grunt work twice as long as now.
That is what I want/am going to do. I was just seeing all the things I could make and get some experience in submitting an app.
i think it was '97, I was 23 and I met internet for the first time. Never programmed before. But there and then, I fell in love with computers. Sarted making music on the computers. Started doing illustrations on the computer. Learned programming.
>I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face.

Glad to read this. The enterprise will be very difficult, but your heart (or brain) is in the right place.
I understand what you're saying about how to bring computers into perspective for the younger generations. So .. My kids have a working 8-bit computer setup in their bedroom. It was my first 'real' computer, 48k. (Oric-1) They learned to hack on that before they got to a PC. The 6-year old regularly totes his OLPC along to the grandparents, just to run the emulators of these old machines. There is something magnificent about being able to plot something in BASIC and see the results immediately. My kids, I think, got just as much fundamental understanding of what the computer was doing, because of this interface, as I did when I was younger. There is much value to not throwing things away.
Number of questions on SO correlates to number of people using the language that are likely to ask questions on SO.

SO skews towards web-programmers and MS stack developers. That clearly affects a lot of rankings.

Github similarly skews towards web-programmers (as a lot of the first users of it were RoR related) so you see the upper-right of this graph is mostly web related.

Also, some langauges have their own preferred forums for support, with a lack of the critical mass of SO users. If you want an answer to a Common Lisp question, please visit #lisp on freenode; if you post to SO it will go unanswered for weeks; it's likely to get answered in a few hours on #lisp.

[edit] And SO also skews towards homework questions.
To be fair, it took about as long for PHP 5 to gain traction. PHP 5.0 was released in 2004, but it wasn't until PHP 5.2's release in 2006 that PHP 5 really became viable and PHP 4's EOL in 2008 that people started pushing for the widespread adoption of PHP 5 (via the GoPHP5 movement[1]). Arguably, it wasn't until the release of PHP 5.3 in 2009 with its namespace support that really spurred people to take a PHP 5-only approach to development.

Heck, one of the largest PHP 4 projects, Drupal, still supports a version of their product on PHP4: it will drop that support this March.[1]

[1]: http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/go-php-5-go

[2]: https://groups.drupal.org/node/390343
Lobsters: a transparent alternative to Hacker News
Yes its like in the 70's when the UK had massive power cuts and the entire country worked a 3 day week - output did not decline by 2/5's

And say you take a half day off to visit the DMV your in 95% of the cases not going to get more or less things done that week - unless your a piece worker on a production line which for HN readers is probably zero
CERN Scavenger Hunt
But the eight million dollar project is more efficient than waiting for a random twenty dollar fix. And as it seemed to be meeting the goals set for it, it was also likely more efficient than allowing bad product out the door, which is what this is really gauged against.

Honestly, I was expecting the punch line to be that they found it cost more in the end because it shut the blasted line down for each bad box. I'm an engineer in a plant, and frankly that just seems insane, even if localized (accumulators are never big enough!)
A mentally disabled teen at that.
How do I find the longest palindrome in a string?
#code2013: The most popular languages of the last year
Using Hashtags To Your Advantage
Seeing The Secret State: Six Landscapes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j56s46e97Lo

> In this talk, artist Trevor Paglen discusses his work attempting to “see” the various aspects of the secret state. In examples ranging from tracking spy satellites to foraging through the bureaucratic refuse of CIA front companies, Paglen will discuss methods used to identify and exploit structural contradictions in classified programs which render them visible, and comment on the aesthetics and politics of attempting to “see” secrecy.

source: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/Fahrplan/events/5604.html
This article is just copy/pasted snippets from http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/atf-uses-ro...
The title is misleading! I was so excited... and then abruptly disappointed. :(
> If you need macros to hack C to enable some functionality not inherent to the language, you should change the approach or switch to a different language.

I think if you continue to do serious C hacking, you'll find a lot of places where macros are legitimately a good choice.

For example, I've found that macros are very, very useful when it comes to implementing error handling in a robust way. In C, the only real way to detect whether a function has failed is to return an error code. The caller then has to test for the error code and take the appropriate action if there was an error. I'm working on a side project now that was doing a LOT of this because it does a lot of IO and memory allocation (and basically any operation you do on a file or any call to `malloc` or a function that calls `malloc` can spontaneously fail in C). So my source code, after a while, ended up looking more or less like this:

if ((f = open_file()) == NULL)
return ERROR_CODE;
if ((s = allocate_string()) == NULL)
return ERROR_CODE;
if (write_string_to_file(s, f) < 0)
return ERROR_CODE;

... and so on, and so forth. It got to the point where basically all of the function calls I did needed to be manually checked for an error, which made all of my code really messy and hard to read. The only real way to refactor these checks in pure C without sacrificing robustness is to use a macro:

#define MY_ASSERT(c) do { if (!(c)) return ERROR_CODE; } while (0)
MY_ASSERT((f = open_file()) != NULL);
MY_ASSERT((s = allocate_string()) != NULL);
MY_ASSERT(write_string_to_file(s, f) >= 0);

This has the same effect as the code above, without sacrificing comprehensibility or readability.

> Also macros are usually used to "speed up" the code. You should never optimize before finding the real bottleneck in your code. And thus always use functions instead of macros.

I think a lot of people on HN and /r/programming fail to understand why premature optimization is a bad thing. A lot of programmers hide behind the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" thing to justify their pre-existing biases or their inefficient code. The point is that you shouldn't spend a great deal of time optimizing functions or algorithms unless optimizing those functions or algorithms will be productive. It's wasteful to spend a bunch of time optimizing your IO operations, for example, if 95% of the time is being spent in the database. The macro-vs-function debate has nothing to do with that. Writing a macro definition takes no more effort than writing a function definition, so you shouldn't be opposed to writing

#define SOME_OPERATION(x) (((x) * 100) / 3 + 500)

rather than

int some_operation(int x) { return (x * 100) / 3 + 500; }

That isn't premature optimization, you're just guaranteeing that the compiler won't introduce the overhead of a function call.