skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He makes a good point about the difference between users and programmers and how they see software in general. But it seems like the teachers were hopelessly prepared and the subject content poorly put together. I think he also makes some points that are likely incorrect regarding that nature of programmers and their affinity with Unix, probably born out of his bias based on what is popular in Academia.
Kokteili
Sinebrychoff Long Drink ar ledaini atsvaidzinoso garsu pats par sevi ir kluvis par precu zimi.
If You Want to Change, Don’t Read This
Came here hoping that there would be a linux release? :/
one summer in college, i had a research-y project at a respected state school (which shall remain nameless except to say not a UC), wherein one of the program organizers publicly admitted to falsifying data. now this wasn't data that anyone was going to look at too carefully, and the justification was that it would get aid for some noble cause in need (although apparently not as in need as the prof. thought it ought to be), but...

c'mon, "scientists," don't just start lying to people.
They raided him even though everything was through banks and already recorded, and you had to provide ID. His problem is he didn't bribe the right people I guess and they decided to steal his money.
If you want to try an alternative, you could give uberwriter a shot, which I made for an appshowdown not too long ago.

http://uberwriter.wolfvollprecht.de

There is a paid version in the software center, however it's GPL-3 licensed and free from my ppa.
Add Syntax highlighting to the cat command for Rubyists
Show HN: I created voice comments for Facebook.
I see there's a mini-shitstorm going on here, but let's say Google is in fact a business acting in its own self-interest to some degree, which seems reasonable. Let's say they're giving away Chromebooks because a) they wish to do good in the world, and b) they'd like to get more people using Google services, and this seems like a rather effective method of gaining long-term users. Now, ignoring the fact that you can indeed use crouton, enable dev mode, or otherwise "hack the platform" so to speak, where's the actual issue in having these kids using Google services? Google's offering them free computers. Does we honestly think that a poor kid in India wouldn't eagerly give written consent to become a user of Google's services, letting Google benefit from that as they do from any similar user, especially when they're not being forced in any way whatsoever to continue doing so in the future?

I'm a goddamn middle-class American, I believe I have a reasonable knowledge of what Google will get out of this deal (as they do every day from my heavy usage of their services), and I would accept the free computer. Even at that, poor kids without regular access to the internet aren't your average highly tech-literate, open-source-aware HN user, and I really doubt they care about Google's relatively responsible* use of collected information in exchange for a rather nice free netbook, even if they were fully aware of its implications.

*Sure, I understand this is an arguable definition, but in the larger scheme of things, it seems fair to say that Google doesn't have a malicious use of the data in mind.
I prefer Scroll Lock for cycling keyboard layouts
Just linking to it.
Win a free trip to SF, grab coffee with industry experts
Create Symbolic Links in Java 7
I agree that encryption could mitigate the actual threat posed by government mass surveillance, but I also wonder how much of the new language in contracts is about consumer perception and boycotting.
There is an issue here:
"1.x-1=0 giving x=-1"

Should be "giving x=1"
I think that a big part of the problem is pervasive access to global state. Given a block of code, it's impossible to tell what effect it (or its sub-calls) might have on the global state.

A common design pattern in clojure is to have a single massive data-structure that represents all application state, but to take it apart recursively whilst updating so that each function is only passed the pieces of state that are relevant. That way you can look at a function and immediately know what it can and can't read/write out of the global state.

A nice way of doing this in an imperative language might be to pass bits of the global data structure by reference (ala lenses) so that a given function can only read/write state contained in its arguments. The data is still global in the sense that it is all accessible from the root object and is not encapsulated, but access can be restricted on a per-function basis.
Lectures often don't have citations. It breaks up the flow. Basic text books often don't have citations. Citations by themselves are also meaningless.

The ideal of science that we are taught boils down to one premise and one premise only: as part of a scientific statement there will be a recipe. By following this recipe we can replicate the findings of the author.

This ideal is met less and less the more complex and expensive our science gets.

(Thanks for the support and clarification btw!)
Well, if the MacPro is shipping the AMD cards, you can expect better drivers and increased compatibility/performance in the future

Example http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2013/10/mavericks-bonus-opencl...
Scrolling is unusable on mountain lion.
I have a similar resolution. I find that I excessively judge others internally (even though I don't voice it) and that places irrational pressure on myself. I judge because of various reasons, but I think mainly to make myself feel that I'm better. This illusion ended when I realised I'm not actually that good at anything. I wonder if I am the only one.
If Cameron had created an architectural blueprint that was going to be used to build a bridge then a mistake like this would be a problem. I think it's charming and frankly something that's expect with art. How many paintings have you seen that are absolutely perfect? Probably none.

I hope @tolmaskey's idea goes, so I can hang mine, with the mistake and be proud of it.
How to defeat Big Brother
Normally I wouldn't look for such things, but since you mention it, there is a period missing at the end of the bullet point "Then we need to know what we mean by "a sequence that looks like it should converge""

Also, at the end of "Later: Build a sequence"

In later bullets too: "We can list them", for example.
1. Functionality
2. Form
3. Get away from your screen. Life is short.
How The Zebra Got Its Stripes - Scientists Reveal All
Boo hoo you missed my hat in this ring! ;)

https://github.com/bodhi/MarkdownEditor

I'd submit a pull request to your repo, but I'm too lazy...
> The only way to type math notation is LaTeX.

No it isn't. Perhaps by far the best and most practical way, but not the only way ever to type math notation.
The title says "beatiful".
New Scientist: 2013 The Year in Technology
Or http://dillinger.io/
The startup world is so complex and sometimes random that you can't just come up with a general rule, add "almost" and think you nailed it.

There is no general rule when it comes to investing and no "almost" is gonna change that.

Please stop thinking there are general rules to "correctly" doing a startup.
That is what I was saying. Removed it to avoid being unclear, though.
Fixed! Thank you.

Now, how can I buy you a coffee?

Added in edit: Downvote?!? Who would downvote this comment? Bizarre ... <fx: Departs, stage right, shaking head in confusion />
What do Scrooge and John Galt have in common?
I wrote about the related idea of implicit vs. explicit state back in 2005.

http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2005/07/explicit-state...

Briefly, the kind of global state that's needed for debugging should be easy to find "from outside" - which precludes local variables along with other common idioms. It might still be distributed, and that can still be problematic, but the key point is that many ways of avoiding global state are worse than what they avoid. Global state itself is not the problem; inadequately contained or constrained changes to it are, and there are other solutions besides elimination.
Changing India's Electric Grid System For Better
The Obvious Isn't Distributed Evenly Either
It seems to me:

VC funding = 1% chance of being millionaire

Bootstrapping = 15% chance of being hundred-thousandaire
Because this IDE is built on top of Haskell ecosystem I have a serious problem to see the bright future of it regardless of its license.

I mean:

- IDE should have an integrated compiler.

- IDE should download only necessary libaries or functions needed by a program(from central repository, local or remote).

- IDE should catch a bug and allow me to fix it while program is running.

- IDE where I am able to fix a bug on my clients phone or his wrist watch remotely without the need to download whole Haskell Platform there. No JS/HTML5 BS.
The ergonomic considerations of what he proposes are a little terrifying to me.
A mind-numbingly tedious point, even for HN. Unsurprisingly English language courses also require study of written texts [0] but that's irrelevant for the purposes of the analogy.

[0] http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/gcse/english-language...
Hackess – An open transport data hack weekend
Relevant: http://xkcd.com/481/
Ubuntu 12.04 ships with Python 3.2.3, IIRC the 'python3' executable is installed by default (even though the default installation may lack some third party modules).
5 years in prison for Egyptians who publish square massacre sign on social media
> Given a block of code, it's impossible to tell what effect it (or its sub-calls) might have on the global state.

That's true. The equivalent effect in the "all local" paradigm is local objects the state of which can't meaningfully be understood or manipulated by neither the programmer nor other objects, leading again to unexpected behavior that is painful to track down.

A lot of the precautions that are common sense when working with global data are already instinctively followed (or at least understood) by most programmers I think. In effect the lenses are already working when there's an understanding when and where manipulation occurs. This mostly coincides with the notion that complex data should be manipulated by a well-defined model and wherever sensible there should be only one mechanism for doing it.
Growth hacking resources collection
"...but being first-time founders, they are already carrying enormous amounts of risk, because they don't know how to run any kind of business, let alone a mega-successful high-growth tech startup."

I think the author is right if for no other reason than this statement. Running a business is hard enough, but taking investment increases the complexity of the business side of things. And that alone increases risk.
The biggest problem I had with this, was convincing myself this method does list ALL the algebraics. Otherwise a great read.
"Most first-time founders are broke." (...) "new founders should be looking to decrease their risk, not increase it" (...) "And therefore, first-time founders should almost never take funding."

I am a first-time founder, I am broke and I am taking angel money. Because I am broke! In his line of thought, the OP is not considering "broke" as actually broke. He is imagining some kind of "broke" where you still can pay your bills, your food, your rent.

No, I am broke. I have two options for January/2014: (i) get some angel money, aka, be paid to work on my own company or (ii) get a day job and turn my startup on a side-project, aka, killing its chances to be something profitable.

This is not about risk, i am broke. No bootstrapping options for me anymore, this ship has sailed. So, angel money is a much better option. If I make a success out of this company, even if this does not make me rich, now I am a experienced founder, with a track-record and, some money. I can bootstrap my next company with far less risk and even fundraise on much better terms. But now? I am broke, that's the point.
How Quartz’s geopolitical forecasting algorithm fared in 2013
Using CloudFlare to mix domain sharding and SPDY
Google actually has lots of documentation on how to do that.
I agree with your specific point but not with the general feeling implied. I'm the first one to agree that all advice is contextual.

However, my observation there is based on the people I speak to. Many first-time founders that I speak to (in London or parts of the world other than Silicon Valley) think that funding will reduce their risk. For most, that is incorrect. Therefore, saying that in the contexts which I've observed, it's almost never good for first-time founders to raise funding seems like a fair statement, and useful to most readers in the category of first-time founders or people thinking of starting a business.
All fixed - thank you.

I wouldn't normally worry about every last detail of punctuation, especially in lists and/or bullet points, but your comment is perfectly valid, and of value.

So, how can I buy you a coffee?
This theory has already proven to be wrong. Contaminated non-GMO fields, additives, processing aids, flavours, or meat/milk/eggs from animals fed by GMOs, etc. Strict food labelling laws would have been great before the product reached the market...
Show HN: A small language learning app for the very fluent
@Apane, how about you start? Why don't you seed this discussion with at least something other than just a question and "I'd like to hear thoughts..."? Show us that you're invested in this by giving us your thoughts/ideas instead of asking us to "do all of the heavy lifting" here and I suspect you'll get a lot more response.
10 of the Most incredible Open Source Hardware projects born in 2013
Any reasonable text editor will have more efficient ways to capitalize things than dedicating one of the most convenient keys on the keyboard to it. I prefer M-u (by word) or C-x C-u (by region) in emacs.
The reason sourceforge is preferred by some people for binary hosting is that you get download stats. People want to know their impact. I think GitHub would really drive sourceforge out of business if they started offering this.
My Esc key broke, so it seemed logical to make use of the otherwise unused Caps lock key. It works perfectly, and I've got quite used to it...

.. The problem is when I use a normal keyboard layout, and hit Caps lock in Vim and it doesn't DRT. :)
I love quoting RMS.
"What schools should refuse to do is teach dependence. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes to minors: to get children addicted. They will not give discounts to these students once they've grown up and graduated."

Surely this applies only if you consider chromebooks as free and this not true atleast by RMS standards.
> equivalent Mac systems tend to be competitive.

This article only shows that equal Mac systems are competitive (cheaper). An equivalent, however, would be something completely different. No need to buy that exact GPU they have, for instance, when you could get equivalent performance for many thousands dollars less.
The smartest people can still make mistakes.
some info here http://earth.nullschool.net/about.html

it's weird it's so complex. just feels like such a low viscosity system should be simpler than that.
The compose key is also useful outside of programming environments: I'm german but still prefer english keyboard layouts for easier access to several characters (like {}[]\ and so on) which require the use of Alt Gr on german keyboards. The compose key still allows me to use german umlauts like ä by typing <Compose>"a. I've gotten quite fast in doing that because by having compose on Capslock, I can use two fingers of my left hand to press the Shift and Capslock keys (nearly) simultaneously, one finger of my right hand to press the ' key (which, together with Shift, gives me the ") and then press a afterwards.
I hate to be that guy, but what's the big deal? Where's the full disclosure? It looks like they're just documenting the API, which is not really disclosing much. Anyone can fire up burpsuite proxy and inspect HTTP requests and responses from their phone.

Now onto their PoC. So they don't have rate limiting on some API requests. That's pretty dumb for a service with a public API, but in my experience, most websites don't limit requests rate, because it's always a "let's toughen up security" after-thought. I remember GAE having some anti-DDoS measures, so they may be relying on that while growing the business.

The bulk registering of user accounts is more serious though and could be easily fixed (to some extent) with a captcha. This may be worthy of a tweet, maybe. Instead, Gibson listed all of SnapChat's APIs, even though most of them were irrelevant to the PoC, and slapped 'Full Disclosure' on it.

This is high-school level security researching. We were finding the same 'exploits' in high school. You could probably find these with any service that's only starting out. Glad to see that's the best Gibson could do. If I were Snapchat, I'd fix the two issues and then thank Gibson for spending the time to create an API page for SnapChat.
I will be doing my new years resolutions in bursts of 4 (quarters), as I feel this motivates me to keep going and it doesn't feel like such a long time. Plus being able to tell yourself you've done something earlier than you were supposed to feels GREAT! I usually review my goals on the last weekend before the end of the quarter and review what I have (or haven't) achieved and carry it over to the next quarter and add new goals. Plus, It's a lot harder to fail something 4 times compared to 1.

Quarter 1: Jan-Mar

* Get down to 12% body fat (lose ~10kg) - easily doable on keto diet, already lost 11kg last 2 months.

* Sleep earlier

* Spend my weekends more meaningfully instead of just sitting around at home. Explore London while I'm still here and before I move to SF.

* Learn advanced Git.

* Learn more Objective C/iOS development.

* Start a blog

Quarter 2: Apr-Jun

* 10% body fat

* Learn to swim and become a pro at it (follow gym programme)

* Learn basic French (Michel Thomas audio course) and reward myself with a weekend in Paris

* Try out Shotokan karate (complete 8 lesson course)

* Learn something tech (depends on interests at the time), perhaps Lisp.

Quarter 3: Jul-Sep

* Learn something tech (depends on interests at the time)

* Learn something non-tech (depends on interests at the
time)

Quarter 4: Oct - Dec

* Learn something tech (depends on interests at the time)

* Learn something non-tech (depends on interests at the time)
Indeed and this set could be consolidated around an ownCloud API. I would even go further make them isolated from google's API by default with options to enable tight integration with the platform, if you wish. That is for instance, an address book that does not share your contacts and a calendar app that might share it's event if you explicitly say so, an A-GPS that doesn't report automatically your position to Google ...
Yes, they don't have Dvorak only.
So, you think Microsoft developed DoubleSpace by itself, without knowledge of Stac's technology? I'm not sure exactly how they got away with unwilling patent infringement after that. Maybe they formed a new team and never let them read Stac's patents, or something like that. Still, they got US%5.5 for every copy of DOS 6 sold, which is, IMHO, the judge saying that, while there is not enough evidence to rule the infringement was deliberate, Microsoft didn't play nice.

Then you throw a smokescreen by mentioning Apple and Google. We are not discussing Apple and Google, we are discussing Bill Gates and his past as a sub-criminal bully and how he is trying to erase that image by high-profile charity.

As for disk and file compression, you can't sell something like it for Windows Phones either. Or Windows - because NTFS already supports file compression. You can do it for Linux, on servers and desktops, but that's another question. I'm not sure if there is stable support for file compression on any current filesystem. Probably yes, but storage is cheap these days.
It's not blessed by Google. In fact they sent a C&D to CM over it.

http://gizmodo.com/5367420/google-threatens-cyanogen-android...

The site(s) you're downloading it from are committing copyright violations and are subject to a DMCA takedown.
False. It's Ronnie Press:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/yclsa-eom-forum/QhQl...

It's not too hard to google up more documents about Dr Press and this whole business - well worth reading. This is a long interview with Tim Jenkin, one of the ANC's other technical boffins in the UK:

http://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/cis/omalley/OMalleyWeb/...

Which contains this striking passage:

> Our concern became how do you run and how do you operate an underground war by remote control without any contact with your soldiers? It's like running a war with no communications and no-one's ever won a war like that. The prime weapon in any war is your communications. [...] so we bought into it and started using computers from the early eighties. By today's standards these were hardly computers but you could type things on them and you could print them out and you could ultimately produce publications. It was a big step forward and I was in it right from the beginning. The PC itself came on the market in 1982 I think it was so right from that time when the first PCs became available. In those days computers couldn't really do an awful lot. You'd have a word processor and that's all it could do for that moment while you were running the word processor. So if you wanted to do anything else you had to learn how to programme it yourself.

> We got into that, learnt how to programme these things and immediately we could see this application. Whereas before we'd done all this coding by hand, adding numbers together and doing all kinds of strange things with books and so on, why not get the computer to do this. You type in your message and it's done and you press a button and it enciphers the thing and produces a string of non-readable characters.

We're all used to the idea that there is a secret history of World War II fought by geeks in huts in Bletchley Park, Bawdsey Manor, etc. Somehow it still comes as a revelation to me that there was a similar technical strand in the struggle for liberation in South Africa. And it does make me laugh that it was fought from bases in Bristol Polytechnic and a flat in Camden. The compiler is mightier than the AK-47!
PostgreSQL indexing in Rails
I largely agree with the poster, although I would couch the argument in different terms, since I think the global-vs-local dichotomy might be an orthogonal matter.

Our brains struggle to reason about how state evolves over time. Add in concurrency, and the problem easily becomes intractable. On top of this, testing stateful components is burdensome.

So, the state needs to be kept as separate as possible from the complex algorithmic logic of the application, so that the state-handling-parts can be kept as simple as possible, and the complex parts can be kept as easily-testable as possible. If this means that the state is handled globally, then fine, but it is not really about where the state is held, but rather about how easy is it to reason about and test.

My rule of thumb is this: we should be able to test our complex mathematical and algorithmic components as stateless (pure) functions, independently of any stateful parts of the application. The remaining stateful parts of the application should have a simple and well understood lifecycle, preferably well away from any concurrency, and with tightly controlled and documented state transitions. (OOP is handy for this, although it must be kept on a tight leash).