skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd love to read an article about "Growth Hacking Gone Good"...because I'm sure there are a few good cases to follow, in situations that were more difficult to get growth than Rap genius.

The first thing that comes to mind is Imgur. I've only read about the site's growth casually, but what I remember as a user was that one day, someone announced the service to Redditors, people loved it, I liked it, but assumed it was a small minnow in an ocean that include Flickr, Picasa, Tinypic, Twitter-friendly services like yFrog, and so forth. Even more problematic was that the feature that made Imgur likeable -- hotlinking hosted images -- was basically impossible to attach user-retaining measures/loyalty/SEO-hacks, etc, all the while sucking up massive bandwidth.

Edit: also worth noting: not only is Imgur not a place to (easily) search and revisit, as a domain, it has the same copyright-infringing/duplicative-content risk that RapGenius does too.

And yet Imgur is now a behemoth, by not jilting its main feature for easy profit...I'm still wondering..how the hell did they do that? I pay attention to imgur because I'm a geek who often looks at URLs. Even among redditors I must be a rare case, but my perception is that Imgur did things so right and so well that, now they're close to becoming a near-essential service of the Internet
They won't, because they only know that everybody else has brown eyes. They do not know if they themselves have brown/pink/green/purple eyes. They only know they don't have blue eyes.
Big government has nothing to do with this. The protesters themselves are the problem. Not because of their current protests, but because of their previous protests against more housing.

The government has tried, many times, to zone and build more dense housing which would have prevented this problem. The people of SF have been organizing and protesting every step of the way against that for the last 15 years.

Hell, even today they are protesting the increase in housing costs while simultaneously protesting against increased housing.
That's a good point, but then the critical factor is that nobody knows how many people have blue eyes. More specifically, each person has to hold the possibility that n = observed persons with blue eyes + 1, which is himself.
The Difficulty Of Private Contact Discovery
Ah, good catch! I mistakenly assumed there was a 1:1 eviction to tenant correlation. I can't seem to find any data indicating the total number of tenants evicted (or, at least, an average count of tenants evicted per eviction on average), so I can't really estimate the % of population impacted anymore, so I've edited that bit out.
I feel your pain. I'm finding even the web browser on the first gen ipad isn't working on some sites I visit.

sigh..
I'm in what I call "frozen" mode right now. No news updates for a week to see what I feel like. Then my brain kicks in and clearly states "THERE ARE SO MANY COOL STORIES !!!!". It's a struggle to change it up, but I think it's helping. The never ending chase for traffic :)
The students of the course had the same problem.

We advised the students to look critically at recent open (or just closed) issues and pull requests, as well as e.g., the mailing list for the project at hand. Based on that they could get a feeling what was happening at the moment, and what a typical contribution looks like.

If you want to contribute code, we found that it works best if you work on parts of the code that are currently under active development. This also means that you do not have to have a deep understanding of the full code base: A broad overview suffices.

Some of our students also offered documentation for, e.g., installation or deployment: they struggled themselves, and offered what they learned back to the project.
I use pyodbc[1] to connect to SQL Server from my Python 3 code and it works just fine. Does it not work well with MySQL? I couldn't find any indication of that in an admittedly cursory search. Are there advanced features you need that are outside ODBC's scope?

I agree completely on the graphics side, though. Terrible.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/pyodbc/
Government dictating what may and may not be done with private property. Not in the spending sense as it is normally used, but definitely in the invasive sense.
Who codes. Or was the objectification intentional?
> Now suppose inductively that n is larger than 1. Each blue-eyed person will reason as follows: “If I am not blue-eyed, then there will only be n-1 blue-eyed people on this island, and so they will all commit suicide n-1 days after the traveler’s address”.

Why should not a brown-eyed person reason as follows as well? It is at this stage that an implicit "counting" of the blue-eyed population creeps into the flawed proof.

EDIT: I misidentified the place where the flaw comes in. Will repost a better explanation.
Flagged.

It's a question with ill-posed definitions--what is a family, what is a value, what is a family value, are they gone, do they need to be brought back?

Garbage.
I have not read it.
At present you should not view Docker as a significant security enhancement. It makes processes less visible to each other, and you can use it as part of a strategy to isolate network traffic, but the kernel attack surface is unchanged.
BZGFormViewController - iOS library for dynamically validating forms
There's no article at all, just a ridiculous website design.

Edit: You can downvote all you like, but the fact is this website needs Javascript enabled to render text, which means its fundamentally broken.
There should always be a time limit on this sort of clause (preferably short).
Given the cost of high quality ink and paper, one wonders how much less than $1 those bills cost to make.
Most of my traffic for Hipster or Homeless comes from Facebook likes and a Wikipedia article in another country.
There's an infuriating variant, which I have as yet been unable to solve:

An infinite sequence of people have either blue or brown eyes. They must shout out a guess as to their own colour of eyes, simultaneously. Is there a way for them to do it so that only finitely many of them guess incorrectly?
Good luck to Kerik on his reform crusade. But now that he's an American dalit, please forgive my pessimism.
No discussion on this story!? It's the best article I've ever read on the subject. Drilling down to the projects was quite illuminating and entertaining for me.

Projects such as Embrace (http://embraceglobal.org/) show how cheap products with simple design can actually have substantial impact.

The principle is universal - after you have a clear vision, creating a great product is all about tinkering & hacking.
Well for your case you might as well have done your backend in Node since you didn't know Python and you had to learn JavaScript for the frontend anyway.
I feel that this is blatantly wrong to do in the first place--is it not? It's like creating another social network and adding the keyword 'Facebook' to your app. I can imagine how using the competition's name(s) as keywords is problematic.
> The problem here is that UNIX tools and shell are not a solution for a generic consumer device.

Not for every person or every problem, but people like pessimizer seem to have found use for UNIX tools. N900 has built in functionality for backups, too, but like the iPhone backup system I guess it's not as flexible as rsync in combination with various other system tools.

> Moreover, I would add that file-based manipulation in my opinion is useful when the single files do expose some value.

Agreed.

> If I backup the settings of my phone, I wouldn't even want to know HOW they are stored.

To each their own, but you have to agree that its reasonable for someone else not to share that opinion.

> So, to rephrase, does the shell on a smartphone empower you to do things that you couldn't reasonably expect to be implemented as consumer-level features?

If it enables me to run the specific software I prefer to use and otherwise couldn't, it's by definition empowering me to do so. The answer is obvious. It's not compensation for a missing feature of the platform; it _is_ a feature of the platform, whether non-power users will make use of it or not
I think a variation of your idea is a winner. The top of the delivery truck can have lots of instrumentation to determine whether the final approach is safe, and help guide the landing. The human does the last 50 feet of delivery.

A computer can know exactly where the trucks are and when they will be in the vicinity. The delivery time can be fairly accurately estimated on the spot.

In an urban environment, bikes could do the last mile, with the robots delivered to pre-designated drop off points. A predetermined location would be easy on the computer.

But I think your idea works better in a suburban zone. The trucks exist and are constantly driving around. It is a question of how to re-prioritize the work on the fly.
UberX is essentially Lyft. Do you know if the driver involved was an UberX driver or a professional driver? His car make/model seems to indicate UberX.
Very amusing, such cryptocurrency, much means of exchange!
Interestingly the python experience has been incredibly different from 20 years ago. Back then I was hunting memory leaks in C. In python I program at a much higher and more efficient level. The Web side, however,is much more like the old days. Instead of memory leaks I hunt obtuse bugs in angular that make me want to pull my hair out. The biggest positive change is stack overflow, which is really so amazing. And the whole open source community - creating all these great frameworks, and even responding to the occasional plea for help.
Good idea, but needs more info pre-request. I click on 'Genesis', it tells me 'Request an Invite', but doesn't give me any incentive.

Why should I sign up? What are you doing? What projects are going on? Entice me :)
If you still have one I'd take it
Ethnic makeup and degree of local homogeniety. Urban density. Use of public transportation. Historical points of interest. Dominant industries. Automobile culture. Access to green space. Consumer habits. Weather patterns. Air quality. Even the color of the surrounding landscape is different. Is it not clear to you that they just "feel" like completely different places, and that different kinds of people live there?
I'm optimistic. I also want to deploy Plan B vending machines, and eventually 3D printers for pharmaceuticals.

I have first hand experience with the brutal realities of the disgustingly low standard of healthcare in the US.
To which culture in Atlas Shrugged do you refer: the Galt types or everybody else? And to which subject of the article would you draw the analogy?
This actually happened when they brought the Iowa-class battleships out of mothballs in the 80's. They found out that the 16" guns needed to be re-barreled. In order to make new ones, they'd either have to have them made in places like Japan or Germany (ironic, eh?), or rebuild a significant portion of the US steel industry (they had gone to mini-mills, which can't produce a forging that size). Luckily they found some in a warehouse left over from WW-II.
They would. The traveller has accidentally doomed them all.

edit: this is based on an unfounded assumption because of the wording of the problem - they may only know they don't have blue eyes. But when I read "100 have blue eyes and 900 have brown" it makes it sound binary and I assumed that's knowledge the tribes people have as well, i.e. we have only either blue or brown eyes.
One thing you may want to consider is the "call to action"; most movie trailers that we see are for Hollywood movies, which end with "in theaters May 4!" or whatever. If that's not how your distribution is going to work, you may want to consider how you get from the announcement to the actual movie. I've seen a couple of ads on TheEscapist.com for some Japanese movies that I assume somebody is importing, but I don't even know how to get from here to there sometimes.
Famous hacker Barnaby Jack's death ruled a drug overdose
some people are born on third base and think they hit a triple.
Me too..Would love an invite..

Thanks
And we do. My coworkers both give generously to charity and volunteer for local organizations and my maligned techie employer actively encourages this (by putting up fliers around the office for local charities to volunteer for, holding volunteering drives, and matching charitable gift donations).
All they know is that every blue-eyed person killed themselves. So they know they have non-blue eyes, but not which color.
Exactly. Why is anything useful done, has to be done on a *nix? Oh wait ... that's how things GET DONE.
Mr. Andreessen: In my opinion, there's nothing broad-based that's happening. There's no bubble, per se. Bubbles are a very specific phenomenon where you've got mass psychology and you've got every mom and pop investor and every cabdriver and every shoe-shine boy buying stock in whatever it is—going all the way back to the South Sea Bubble all the way through to the dot-com bubble.

The 1990's were a retail/buy side bubble. The current bubble is a sell-side one, driven by the Fed. They are completely different. Disproving a retail bubble does not exist (correctly) does not speak to a liquidity driven bubble existing / or not. The people funding VC firms...have too much cash. That's good for VC firms...and the reason you won't seem them point out this fact.

It would be more interesting to hear marc's view on the amount of money chasing deals. Perhaps he will chime in.
If there are 100 blue eyed people, each of them will kill themselves on day 99 (because they can only see 99 other blue-eyed people). However, the brown eyed people will wait until day 100.

On day 100, a brown eyed person won't know that he is brown eyed, only that he is not blue eyed, so he could have green eyes, purple eyes, etc.
How I test a Puppet Host and handle Modules with Vagrant
Deleting then resubmitting a link is a bannable offense on Hacker News. This is the third time I've seen this link by the same submitter in as many days.
That's why it takes n days.

Each blue eyed person can see n-1 others. If nothing happens on day n-1, they learn that they have blue eyes.
"Based on history, it's always unwise to say that something futuristic can't be done."

especially when that history is fictional like that quote. i think you're roughly equally likely to be wrong to say that something futuristic can or can not be done.
Outstanding device review by readwrite staff
My current site and the hundreds of posts are currently a Wordpress site. I wonder if there is an easy way to port it over to Jekyll? I'll take a look and see what I can come up with. Thank you !
hm. Maybe it's just because I don't personally excel at this sort of question, but I don't like "trick" questions like this where the interviewer is not forthright with what they're looking for- another way to describe this is "playing mind games" with someone, which is typically considered impolite/antisocial.

I much prefer "Here's a domain problem, how would you solve it" to a vague question where the interviewer has a specific, hard to determine answer in mind. The former directly tests my ability to solve relevant problems, the latter just tests my ability to guess what the interviewer is thinking. In this case I'm perfectly aware of how variable & function declarations are hoisted in JS, but it wasn't clear to me that this was the answer sought- I know the answer but I don't know that's the answer being angled for so I fail at the question. Should this reflect badly on me? I am not sure- this sort of guessing skill may be what this interviewer is looking for. (?)
That's right.

Which suggests some follow-on puzzles:

1. What happens if one blue-eyed person is somewhere else on the island when the foreigner makes his statement (and his absence is known to everyone)?

2. What happens if the next day a blue-eyed stranger wanders into the village, thereby establishing common knowledge that the day before there was in fact an additional blue-eyed person on the island (though no one in the village knew it at the time)?

3. What happens if the next day a blue-eyed baby is born in the village?
> at which point they now know they have brown eyes

.... and so have to kill themselves
I run d1 track in college right now. Would love to talk about this with you if you want. milesrichardson@gmail.com
I moved away from Tornado recently; I was quickly getting lost in callback hell. This was at least partially due to using libraries which did not support Tornado's method of async io natively, and a lot more fear that even putting these outputs in threads would still cause delays we could not afford.

I moved this project to Go, though I've quickly run into quirks there as well.
.. and no shot of a healthy Safe Harbor gift a few months down. I got, on top of three months' severance a surprise $2K Safe Harbor gift, only having worked for the company for just over a year. And they were effective references, including the man who sacked me.

Leaving gracefully (and briskly without making a scene) can indeed be helpful, though perhaps not in the Times author's circumstances.
http://www.texashillcountry.com/Stories/RuralTelephoneSystem...
...and their world
This also plays out in the turn-out of voters on election day - its just a disconnect in community. Not saying its bad -or- good, but its reflective of how diluted our outlets are and the lack of trust we all have in everything and it becomes a culture of indifference.
Because the blue eyed person see 99 blue eyed people and the brown eyed person sees 100 blue eyed people.

So, every brown eyed person was one day away from leaving when all the blue eyed people spontaneously left.

However, now everyone left knows they have brown eyes.

Update: To herge's point they probably don't know there are only two possibilities.
It is not necessary for the blue-eyed people to know the total number of blue-eyed people in the tribe, they can deduce it at day 100:

* A blue-eyed person observes 99 blue-eyed people.
* On day 99, the blue-eyed people do not commit ritual
suicide.
* Thus each blue-eyed person learns that all the blue-eyed
people also observe 99 blue-eyed people.
* Thus the blue-eyed person knows that the other blue-eyed
people must observe that he/she has blue eyes.
Well, yes. But then you have to use GIMP, which constitutes a punishment in its own right. ("...not a sin, but a penance.)
Quantum physics proves that death is an illusion
Best talk from Peter Thiel - provocative & inspiring
Appreciate the heads up
This is a great counterpoint. And as someone who has done incredibly difficult physical labor (former US Marine with multiple deployments) I can tell you that what has been much harder for me has been the CompSci courses I've taken, thousands of hours of pouring over API documentation, and countless late nights coding. Just because we aren't sweating in some warehouse somewhere doesn't mean that the work isn't incredibly complex and difficult. I'd argue that we work quite harder than guys who makes sandwiches, and we are paid for it accordingly. Working in tech takes a lot of sacrifices early on.
Sure. And I feel more goodwill when the company doesn't try to bribe me in to not talking bad about them. As it says in the article, any company that can't survive some disparagement is maybe a company too fragile to survive anyway.
BlackBerry files patent infringement suit against Ryan Seacrest startup
Why Good Programmers are Good Designers
Make that "obscure" angular bugs :)
I think it's awfully reductionist to blame the "government" and stop there. It simplifies a lot of what is really going on and threatens to become a thought-terminating cliche; "Well, that's big government for you."

This is the democratic reaction of a lot of city residents (many of whom are blue collar) to the new economic realities within their hometown. That leads to many more paths of resolution than just saying "big government".

In other words, government isn't the problem here. The SF housing crisis, the coming class war, the inequities of late-era capitalism -- these are the real problems.
Given that it was a decade and a half ago, and that even today's vending machine recognizers probably don't do much beyond making sure a few relatively gross features are present, I doubt the cost per counterfeit was all that close to $1.
My first car (an '87 Subaru DL, which I had in 2000-2002 IIRC) started shaking between 70 and 75 MPH. My parents regarded this as a feature, because as a new driver I really had no business going faster than that. They were probably right.
No information is added, it just gives all islanders a synchronized reference point to sort themselves into groups. It's the synchronization that matters, not the info itself, per se. Once they all start sorting themselves on the same day (and KNOW that all other residents are doing the same) they start the countdown to day 100.
Houten: A cyclist’s mecca, with lessons for Boston
There's a sales pitch -- "Need to counterfeit money? Use Linux!"
Scrypt ASIC chip prototype
No, it actually does both - which is why I was so interested in it initially.

from the above link: "generates code to be used to easily build RPC clients and servers"

TBF, I haven't used it as a developer, but I did contract work with a company that had invested in it heavily. From what I saw of their workflow, it ended up being a pretty nice bootstrap tool and little more.

edit: Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes, you're correct - thrift does not wrap existing APIs.
"Tweet augmentation." What a job description.
Kerik's reform crusade is just material for a fresh-out-of-prison tour. He's about as much of a Dalit as anybody who has congressmen helicoptering to his prison for visits.

I hope he gets an opportunity for more hands-on study of the US prison system soon.
Facebook accused of mining private messages
I'm looking to adverbialize a gerund. Gerrymanderingly? Gerrymandrically? Gerrymanderibly?

How it's done now is by politicians counting votes and setting the boundaries for their own benefit. This would be another--more permanent--opportunity for them to do that.
Hah! The WP Super Cache "Activate" button was actually giving me 503 responses the first few tries. Now it's nice and speedy.
It depends what you want to do with it, honestly. It's definitely "cool", but I'm not sure about its prospects outside a niche market. I personally wouldn't have spent $1500 on it (and still wouldn't, after playing with it), but my employer got it for me.
Anyone who throws their hands up in the air (and I'm talking to you yodsanklai and JoeAltmaier, dobbsbob...and basically 80% of the people on this thread) but YOU are a big part of the problem. It doesn't matter even if the petition is totally ineffectual to change things on it's own: it's value is in it's very existence, and it signals a strong position against something that is very, very wrong with our society at the moment. No movement ever started fully formed like Aphrodite from the head of Zues - they all must start somewhere.

So please, if you agree with the desired outcome, why would you naysay ANY attempt to change things, no matter how "naive" or "ineffectual" or "pointless"? Is it not better to have good people speaking truth to power, even if they are not listened to?

All I ask is that you consider this question before criticizing someone else's attempt to advocate for positions that you yourselves agree with.
BlackBerry Sues Ryan Seacrest's Startup Over iPhone Keyboard
The only part that I'm aware of being fake is the entitled Google employee (who was not a Google employee, but a union activist posting as an entitled tech worker).

That was a terrible play. It cost the good guys a lot of credibility and anyone with half a brain would realize that people would find out almost immediately that he wasn't a Googler.
SecOps failure: GPG+Gmail on OSX may store unencrypted drafts