skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The GOP had majorities in both the House and Senate...

No, they didn't. By then, Senator Jim Jeffords had become an independent, caucusing with the Democrats and giving them a one-vote majority control of the chamber. Also, FWIW, Norm Mineta was the token Democrat in the Bush cabinet.

And of course everyone voted for the bill once it was clear it would pass. Who wanted to be against enhanced airline security?

I'm not saying the GOP put up the fight of the century on the TSA, far from it. But it's a mischaracterization of history to say that Bush demanded a dramatic expansion of the Federal workforce as some kind of economic smokescreen. If that were so, you'd expect to find accounts of Democrats at least raising token opposition to this brilliant political stratagem.
I largely stopped coding and python and have moved to node.js and go (mainly because I'm most interested in 'real time' webapps and gevent/twisted offer nothing compelling compare to either nodejs or go).

Where I have continued to use Python is statistics and helping biology PhD students do basic modeling. (To be fair, none of this really requires Python 3)
and to help my dad clean up his ridiculous Rails 2 apps
I don't really agree with the people saying the income axis should be zero-based. The income drop is not tiny, it's 8%, and a zero-based axis wouldn't show that.
Another disaster about to happen is Games for Windows Live, a online DRM scheme, used by many games, but in particular GTA IV, which doesn't have much on online features except for the DRM check. It has been announted that GFWL is going to shutdown July 1st. Many developers/publishers have indicated that they are going to remove/replace it, but Rockstar not only hasn't mentioned anything in that sense, it has recently updated the fine print on the steam store for GTA IV adding new clauses:

Access to special features may require internet connection, may not be available to all users, and may, upon 30 days’ notice, be terminated, modified, or offered under different terms.
Unauthorized copying, reverse engineering, transmission, public performance, rental, pay for play, or circumvention of copy protection is strictly prohibited
Partner Requirements: Please check the terms of service of this site before purchasing this software. rockstargames.com/eula

So while Rockstar is washing their hands if their offline, single player, triple-A game stops working in six months, and also prohibiting circumvention of this 'protection', GTA IV is happily being sold by Steam, even today being promoted in their store front page as a daily deal of their winter sale.
Java: Using the specification pattern with JPA
This has some nice tips, but seems overly complex. Try using the "Unread First" inbox, and simply mark email that you need to take action on as Unread, whether you've replied to it or not.
Couldn't this be used to watch peoples movements in a house from the street?

In any case with the NSA's ubiquitous tracking and ability to compromise networked systems at will... this scares me and the privacy risks absolutely outweigh any potential benefit
private servers on WoW are illegal, and you might have to downgrade to be able to join one.
Gotchas, when parsing html/xml with PHP
Especially since that's literally the only thing the video shows. It does not even elaborate on the concept and shows only one example.
Great sales people can sell anything to anyone. Selling the things you believe in to people that really need it is easy. Selling people mediocre products they don't need and probably can't afford, that is actually difficult.

If anything convincing a developer to take your money (assuming you have any) to write code should be orders of magnitude easier than convincing a client to give you money for something that doesn't yet exist.
Excellent attitude, and good luck. Honestly, when the ratio of 'business people' to technical people in a start up is that high, that raises all sorts of red flags to me.
What leads you to believe that a and b are mutually exclusive? OK a has probably not been caught and charged with anything, but may well have committed criminal acts. Is there not a statistic that the average American commits 3 criminal acts a day without realizing it?
Captable.io, a simple tool for your startup's capitalization table
Not arguing that you're wrong, but Unix/Linux is not a sane world by your definition. Whether we like it or not (I do like it), this is the world many of us live in. Python3 adds a burden in this world where none existed in Python2. In exchange, there is good Unicode support, but not everyone uses that. I can't help but wonder if good Unicode support could have been added in a way that preserved Python2 convenience with Unix strings.

(Please note that I'm not making any statement as to what's appropriate to send down a TCP socket.)
Lost Images Come To Life A Century After Antarctic Expedition
How to Identify Outliers in your Data
Hardly, no, one mistake that I didn't mention (because I am still processing it) is how long we took to have v1 (more than a year). This was a mix of my incompetence, too many features and also an inexperienced developer (in fact we changed developers once too).

So, yeah, a looooot of the time was put into building the product, refining it, getting bugs out of the way, testing it again, finding the same bugs...

Then there was marketing. Finding more clients, because we believed finding more people meant someone would buy the product.

PS: I was not completely full time, the developer was. In those 2 years, I have been freelancing (one needs to eat).
Total debt per student has substantially increased, and the number of students taking out debt has substantially increased. But actual monthly student loan payments for students with debt are only nominally higher, and perhaps largely due to jobs paying less:

"In 2009 65.6% of first-time bachelor's degree recipients took out student loans, compared with 49.3% in 1994. Of those who borrowed, the cumulative amount borrowed was $24,700 in 2009, as compared with $14,700 (2009 dollars) in 1994. [...]

Among first-time bachelor's degree recipients with loans and who were employed and repaying their loans 1 year after bachelor's degree receipt, the average monthly loan repayments were 13.1% of monthly salary in 2009, as compared with 11.1% in 1994. The median monthly loan repayments were 8.0% in 2009, as compared with 6.8% in 1994.

In 2009 51.7% had monthly loan repayments that were 1-8% of their monthly salary, 17.1% had monthly loan repayments that were 9-12% of their monthly salary, 11.7% had monthly loan repayments that were 13-17% of their monthly salary, and 19.4% had monthly loan repayments that were more than 17% of their monthly salary." Source: Tables 1, 6, 7: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013156.pdf

So basically the macroeconomic view wildly exaggerates the situation; while it is a problem that students with bachelors degrees are getting shitty jobs, the idea that it's impossible for students to get an education without outrageous monthly loan payments is just wrong. The people getting fucked over by college debt are mainly the ones who enroll in scam for-profit colleges, rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt, and then don't graduate. Getting an actual bachelors degree is only nominally to moderately more expensive than it was 40 years ago. The fact that college graduates aren't well-educated enough to get good jobs is an enormous problem, but the idea that college is suddenly unaffordable because of cost increases is complete BS. Consider also:

"The net TFRB (tuition/room/fees/board sticker price minus total grant aid and tax benefits) at public 4-year colleges for in-state residents increased from $7,400 in 1990-91 (2012 dollars) to $12,110 in 2012-13. At private non-profit institution the net price increased from $18,330 in 1990-91 to $23,840 in 2012-13." Source: CollegeBoard - Tuition and Fee and Room and Board Charges over Time in 2012 Dollars, 1972-73 through 2012-13, Selected Years, Table 7 - Average Net Price for Full-Time Students over Time - Public Institutions, Table 8 - Average Net Price for Full-Time Students over Time - Private Institutions

"The average net tuition (tuition and fees minus all grants) in 2007-08 was $4,900 at public doctorate-granting institutions, $16,400 at private non-profit doctorate-granting institutions, and $9,200 at for-profit institutions." Source:
http://nces.ed.gov/datalab/tableslibrary/viewtable.aspx?tabl...
http://nces.ed.gov/datalab/tableslibrary/viewtable.aspx?tabl...
As Schneier recently said, assume everything is vulnerable by default [1], and work with the machines having that in mind. Until everything from the hardware level to the OS and applications is open source (which is pretty much the way FSF has always told us it should be, because they feared the outcome we've already seen), we can't trust them, and even then we have to be very careful about bugs.

[1] - http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/an-interview-with-bruce-sch...
Lilypond 2.18.0 released
But why only one? It might be optimal to have many more robots than humans.
I forgot that one! I have even a saying for this learning "be local before being global".
It's not a monopoly for me, but it is a monopoly for those who want to appear in search.

It's not a monopoly for products, it's a monopoly for clients.
For the company I currently work for, and at a previous company I worked for, v1 was built by an outsourced development firm long before the first fulltime engineer was hired. Yes it sucked and has since been completly rewitten. But it was a working product that started bringing in revenue and helped raise more money.
Best moment: Tutorialize getting its first paying customer

Learning: If you're going to use a technology like MongoDB make sure you're using it the way it was intended to be used.
I think that defeats the simplicity of this design. If you plan to view the thread / spend some time deliberating a response you just tap the notification to be taken to the Messages app. The reply action gives you a chance to respond and kill the notification in a single action — useful.
I'd personally include the upswing on static site generators. Not exactly a traditional CMS, but still a system that manages content.

In particular, I'd site NPR's work on their static site process:

http://blog.apps.npr.org/2013/02/14/app-template-redux.html
Bsdnt – A BSD-licensed bignum library
I had this exact same thing.
>> you should still strive to learn enough development

Definitely not. Unles your app is all about printing "Hello World" onscreen, you'll have to invest lots time to properly build the sketchiest of the apps. And this as long as programming is not the kind of thing that chokes you up.
I have to say that this sounds like a good idea to me.

A few months ago I found a way to reduce a particular AI algorithm's memory usage from O(n) to O(1), but I've been bogged-down in irrelevant details when trying to implement this improved version.

I think I'll take SPJ's advice and write up a theoretical/motivational paper describing the improvement, and leave the actual implementation for afterwards.

I've been holding off writing up since I'm an amateur, and AI has a reputation for attracting cranks with hand-wavey conjectures :S
It's not really informative to compare the average casualties of hijackings after the period where airport security increased. And with the exception of 9/11? That's like saying that the 1940s were a very peaceful and harmonious time, with the exception of World War II.

Look at the deaths per hijacking incident before 9/11 - well before, when we might glean some useful data to compare.
how does SQLAlchemy support for PostGIS compare to GeoDjango ORM?
> Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent?

i'm guessing most people thought that spying of US agencies was an activity that was carried out abroad, and aimed at real threats.
I think you're saying its a lie because there is no product yet? I can see how you think that. If he did build the product first though and one person signed up and he had to pivot to something fairly different, that'd be a lie too then effectively. Except, now he wasted a lot of time building.
My POV is if you're only taking email addresses for people to know when it's available anything on the site is just your plan. Plans always change.
It doesn't matter, because Square Enix doesn't own the games that were in players' libraries.
That's actually exactly what I did. But it seems like everything in Netflix is in SD now.

(But perhaps I'm only watching things that come in SD anyway?)
Every time I see those ads, I can't help but wonder how many people that had never heard of a Chromebook before went out and researched (and then purchased) one.
It's not to do with the age, some processes are inherently non parallelizable due to the way the dependencies work. E.g. You can't have a lot of parallel processes making payments because you have to make sure there is enough money in the account for each one.
I'm not the best at writing the papers, but this is precisely how I approach giving talks. I take my idea, submit the talk, then as I build the talk I understand my idea better and better and finally, when I am on stage, explaining my idea using the structure I developed while preparing the talk, I have moments of inspiration that I never get elsewhere.

I have, mid-sentence, come to understand truths about my subject that had evaded detection for months prior. My talks thrive, but now I need to transition to papers. I'm going to try to put this method into practice for myself.
Keeping your email address private
So I was having a debate with a colleague a few weeks ago: the suggestion was that in 20 years time the a large percentage of surgeries done in hospitals will be done by robots .

Importantly, we didn't specify which surgeries, but through the conversation the implication was not that robots would be removing millions of weird moles and skin marks - we're talking serious, long surgeries.

I'd be really interested to hear the HN community's view on this. I have my own (strong) opinions based on my knowledge of AI and ML as a field, but perhaps other people have their own strong opinions (and perhaps people can change my mind!)
My dad lived in a small town and his phone number (which we found in phone book from certain occupation before Russians), was 55.

So the phone lines were there for a while.
Correct, and pg is not writing code for startups now, but investing in them, sharing his experience with them (mentoring), connecting them to follow-on investors, and supporting the process of growing those startups in which he has an active interest.

Hence, YC, etc.
Does that count if you are a white male?
Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil and Food
In PL and systems, related work almost always comes at the end. HCI is the only field I know where related work is front loaded. Pandering to the PC in related work is also bad form.
Things that are formulaic, repetitive and doesn't necessarily need "human" input will inherently be reached barring any catastrophic events that set all of humanity back. Terminator is robots with agency bias added, so that scenario happening is a bit unlikely. Elysium on other hand might be a slightly better portrayal of things to come.

There are some other serious implications of the rise of such technology too, political ones. The "elite" & "powerful" have depended on the masses for labor, economic output etc. When a good chunk of the masses become somewhat "useless", what happens to them? Thanks to drones and "big dogs", it can be somewhat ensured that a massive population of people will have no real recourse to socio-economic or other inequities and injustices.
Localization matters for mobile apps.

addendum: this might be even more true for niche apps. My $5 iOS app sells way more in non-US/non-English stores.
What is different now, compared to five years ago? Did I miss some major break-through?
Yeoman for Three.js or Zero to Nyancat in 30 Seconds Flat
You have to specify what you mean by "done by robots". Will a qualified surgeon still need to be present for the operation to take place?
You can download the documents from CryptoMe:

ANT Files (16.2M ZIP) : http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-catalog.zip

QUANTUM Tasking (5.7M) - http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-quantum-tasking.pdf

QUANTUM Theory (2.5M) - http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-quantumtheory.pdf
Spot on. I mostly agree with the content of mjburgess' comments, but I feel they're not really justified in this context. I occasionally read a comment here that seems to be fawning a bit too much over pg, and just shrug and move on. I don't get the impression that there's a serious personality cult thing going on, nor do I get the impression that pg actively cultivates such a thing.

pg writes candidly (but respectfully) from the perspective of someone who has been very successful in some areas, and has opinions on other areas. His world view shines through clearly and he doesn't seem to claim authority (or not too often, anyways) on the issues. In fact, I started enjoying his articles long before I was even aware of HN or of who he was. He just seemed like a bright dude with interesting articles to me.

I find everything he writes fascinating, and the closer to his expertise, the more 'value' I ascribe to his writing. But he isn't, nor does he seem to want to be, some kind of guru on all matters of life. He seems pretty honest.

The fact that he has a relatively small group of starry-eyed followers exhibiting cult-like behavior is not really his fault, but just a natural consequence of his fame/success. I don't think it warrants mjburgess' response.

But maybe I'm missing something or underestimating the degree of cult-like following going on?
Two quotes come to mind:

"Never send a human to do a machine's job."
-- Agent Smith

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
-- Buckminster Fuller
> we're talking serious, long surgeries

well, 20 years is a long time, so it is hard so speculate. But I'll say, probably not.
Since explots can be done through hardware, firmware and software, how is a GNU phone better (genuine question)?
I think you're missing the point that I'm making that only looking for hacker-founders (and landing mostly with young men) is sexist in and of itself because it both perpetuates existing stereotypes and reinforces sexist roles. Note that I'm not saying that YC should change its selection criteria—I understand what they're looking for and why. But they don't get to wash their hands of this societal/systemic problem and say that it's Just That Way. Change has to be proactive.

YC is in a position to help make a difference. It has disproportionately large mindshare in the tech industry. Maybe it's next non-profit needs to be something to address the gender imbalance in tech.
You can't even average that out, because the vast majority of those 13,000 "terrorist attacks", if true, are certainly inside countries where they are basically at war with each other. And in many of those countries, US contributes to the kill count, although I assume these reports don't count that as "terrorism", even as they blow up 15 people going to a wedding.
Interesting. Most of the papers I read are mathematics.
Go change how an entire industry works, help found more successful startups than you can count on your fingers, pile up few billions while you are also coding a prime destination on web for hackers - and then you too would get a cult-like reverence for your pseudo-intellect.
You want to know how to validate your idea faster? Don't have a free plan. Will people give you their credit card... that's what you want to know. And those are the people you want feedback from.
I find it sadly amusing to see people enamored with yet another prop for Gmail workflow, when just a few months ago we learned that our Gmail is being casually read by NSA, likely with Google's knowledge and assistance.
I only access my email on trusted devices. All of my trusted devices have IMAP clients on them. I can see that webmail is useful for people who are willing to access their email on untrusted devices (a friends computer etc) which wont have email clients pre-configured, but I'm not one of those people.
You didn't. It's just the usual exponential growth finally produced enough computing power that formerly nearly-impossible things have become tantalizingly practical.
It looks nice, I like the appeal of quickly replying to a notification and it dismissing automatically afterwards.

However, I don't think this will go into iOS8, in fact I think it's going to look different again. I like iOS7, it's smooth for me and I feel like I know where everything is.
Make that just "the new Windows" and I'd agree. There's plenty of standardizing on "Server 2003" and other Windows versions, that didn't stop with XP.

Or, in other words, both platforms have firms that like to standardize on particular versions for stability. Which isn't really much of an attribute of Windows or Linux themselves, really.
And it fails to solve the biggest problem with iOS notifications; they cover up action buttons at the top of apps. People who get lots of notifications complain about this the most.
The article doesn't mention API based CMSes, which are IMO a better approach to content management.

http://prismic.io seems promising.
One company I interviewed at had a whiteboard where everyone wrote down the days they were taking vacation. It was titled "slackers".

I know they thought it was a funny joke, but I think even jokes can send a message.
Write a standalone app based on something I have done at work.
See if it makes any money, if not use it as a decent example of what I can do - most freelance gigs seem to expect you to have an example of your work. All my stuff is in house.
Whenever I hear of these static content generators, I think of Fog Creek's City Desk [1]. Time for it to make a come back?

[1]http://www.fogcreek.com/citydesk/
Nothing. It is just sitting there.
This kind of sounds like the Joel test [1]. At least the technical parts.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
I would also disagree. I've almost finished v1 (literally, a bare bones MVP) of my SaaS idea, and my God, it took so much more time than I expected. And I'm a veteran developer who's shipped tens of projects.

The thing is, there's a lot more that goes into a viable product than just the core features.
I seem to get the active/passive voice criticism a lot. It comes from both sides of the table. Do you have references on what to prefer? They can be opinionated, but preferably I would like to see something backed up by a reading comprehension study. Thanks in advance.
NPR stuff looks good, but their focus (from an initial skim) appears to be we apps - correct? That might be running before we can walk - how about getting all content-driven sites (blogs, portfolios, etc.) onto SSGs first - I think that's where the really big wins are.
> I know this headline generates traffic by being about the iPhone, but this is a minor point.

I disagree, the article implies that Apple might (probably?) is helping them with their spying. This is not a minor point for me. I think it's very important to expose which tech companies are betraying their customers, and conversely which are not.