skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As the adage says, empty vessels make the most noise.

Or: Those who can, do. Those who can't, talk about it.
"Availability heuristic."

It's certainly possible. And there are definitely a great many devs who don't participate online but are brilliant, don't get me wrong.

But I still think the average person who does participate online is better than the average person who doesn't.

In retrospect, what bothered me was the implication that participating online is detrimental, when I think it's just the opposite, if for no other reason than that people who do participate online tend to care more about programming than people who don't, and are therefore better.

Also, availability cuts both ways. Don't think about the amazing devs you've worked with, think of the averages. Trust me, I've worked with people of wildly, wildly varying ability, I know what's out there. Both on the amazing side, and on the "can't code worth a damn" side.
Of those only 7 and 8 can be considered valid. Liberty, whether you agree with them or not (on some issues I do, on some I don't) no-one can deny is a lobbying group with an agenda. And I am pretty sure even Wikipaedia frowns on using Wikipaedia as a reference, why does the Guardian get a free pass to reference the Guardian? Scriptonite is just some guy's blog!
Excel Unusual - flight simulators, electronic circuits in Excel
Show HN: Quick "Unfollow Everybody" script for Twitter
So I just did my semi-annual "log in to Twitter to see if it's any good yet", and found that in my absence I had followed a few thousand new spam accounts.

Sweet. That explains why they emailed me and forced me to change my password last year.

Being Awesome, Twitter doesn't have any way to simply toss out all your followers and start from scratch. And none of the spammy apps claiming to do so actually will (even seemingly after charging you money to try).

So instead, I just pulled open the Dev console and did this:

setInterval(function(){$(".following").children("button").click();window.scrollBy(0,5000);}, 1000);

Run it while on https://twitter.com/following, and it'll clean your account out nicely at a rate of about 1000 accts/minute.

Figured somebody else might find that useful. Enjoy!
That's a poor comparison. Users expect 4chan to lose that same data as part of normal operation anyways, so you can hardly consider it a problem. That's not the case for HN.
Am I the only one to think they are too expensive? The cheapest ones are more expensive than the most expensive competing console...
> Effectively, this means that machinists' shops can't rearrange their very expensive, very large tools to improve their workflow from job to job without getting permission from the manufacturer (which can take a month!), even if their own the gear.

Have you ever seen such a workshop being rearranged? The people doing it might - for instance - not place the machine on a good enough quality of flooring, or they might be moving to a facility that is totally inappropriate (no good foundations) because they aren't talking to the right people and have a dim and naive view of machinery...

Also my experience of such rearrangements is that they are not to improve workflow, but more usually to satisfy some new management type's desire to have an impact on the workplace.

In short, I think this is prudent - it at least prevents a classic engineering management cock up - and protects the machine manufacturer from having their name tarnished by the sloppy practices of their customers.

The case where people know what they are doing is the exception and not the case in my experience...
Valve Unveils 13 Steam Machines, With Specs And Prices
AppStorm Closing Shop
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. (JFK)

Not sure what they are so affraid of?
They are doing value-based pricing, not cost-based pricing. They feel that the content is worth 5 bucks, and so do their hundreds of thousands of online subscribers. If you don't, no love lost. There are other places you can get your news.
When opera lovers start looting shops, then the police will start handing out citations. You seem to think it's unfair that a group with no history of causing trouble should be treated differently from one that has. And yes I have been both a teenage goth in Camden and in the queue at the ROH to see Turandot (among others).
The Dangerous Rise of "Entrepreneurship Porn"
It's still a method of accepting payment.
Maybe the next series of Black Mirror will have something that covers these things more specifically? I think it's covered some very interesting concepts already.
Kod.io 2014, Developer Conference, Tickets on Sale
This week the British public is being told to be afraid of Romanians and Bulgarians:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/03/romanians-and...
Epic Chase – What happens next? 
A long, long, long…well, a really long time ago Earth was not the Earth you and I know. No, sir…it was a seething, smouldering, swirling, raging ball of fire. Monstrous fire, scary fire…scary as hell! Ask the gases, they’ll tell. They sped, they ran…the fire spared no one. Consuming everything in sight.

Two hydrogen atoms fought against fate as they tried to escape the fire’s hunger. What did fate hold for them? Will they escape?
On my shit dev box, localhost Elasticsearch is indexing (AKA writing) @ approx 2,500 msg/sec.
Ask HN: Social Marketplace for local shopping
I'd love to get some feedback on my startup from HN. We have just launched in beta. www.bringhub.com
I never said I agree with it, I am merely stating opinion of how this law will be (ab)used. I have been to many shows in camden myself and have caused a fair share of trouble "on the pavements". This law is a terrible idea - but make no mistake - the author knows exactly how it will be levied.
Not many are willing to go against the atomistic monoculture, as it would break many liberal ideals held since the enlightenment. There is a case against nanny-state policies in Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, but not sure if it's close to what you mean.
Isn't that a bit paradoxical? If the long term success of BitCoin rides on people using it to make transactions (e.g. paying for games by zynga), then what good is it for businesses to hoard large amounts of it for speculation?
It's your browser cache.
Or otherwise they are being (fakely?) welcomed

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21591865-open-letter-c...
An Awesome Business Idea Everyday in 2014
For anyone interested in LLVM/Clang you might like to know I've just started a weekly summary of developments.

Find the first issue here http://llvmweekly.org/issue/1 and subscribe at http://llvmweekly.org/
It would be surprising if it was the other way around.

Companies like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony make the really big bucks from the publishing fees of the games, the hardware is sold basically at cost (or at loss if we consider production, design and software costs).

Third party Steam Machines sellers can save on software, but they need to have some margin on the hardware itself, unless Valve cuts them a percentage on the actual sales.

I don´t think price will ever be the selling point of Steam Machines.
Achieve More This Year With Habits
Valuable white-paper about iBeacon technology
Why isn't there a service that overlays references on articles instead of having to search for them?
idk, what I'm reading in this article is that it's basically going back in time, i.e. before 1984 where the rich could afford having gated communities.
This is just absolutely insane in a good way, and will at the very least prove to be incredibly valuable as a case study of whether or not being this generous to the open source community can actually be a good, profitable thing for a company to do.

Obviously we all hope it can be, and if this catches on, the Internet would become a much better, freer, more "open" place.

Huge thanks to CodeCombat (gsaines and co)!
With a Maybe/Option type, you are forced to always deal with the possibility of Nothing/None.

And even better, you can use monadic bind to chain together several actions on possibly-nullable things and get either a value or a null at the end.
As a straight male who paints his nails, I find people getting upset over this issue (and the more general issue of gender stereotypes in tech at all) ridiculous, both people who assume negatively and positively.
Great post! I enjoy reading these, thanks for making the info public. I have one question: Is it not very risky to angel invest in only 1-2 companies per year? I thought you needed to invest in around 5-10 in order to have a decent chance at finding the 'hit' business as most of the others will fail.
I wasn't expecting so many different machines. I was thinking of a cheap steam machine (300/400 $) to play indie games and game about 4 years old, a medium spec'd machine for about 700 $ that can play everything in the market, and a 1500 $ machine with high specs.

Still, one of the great points in PCs is the variety of hardware.

I'm just curious on how Valve (or the HW vendors) are gonna market it. With consoles you have the idea that with that unit you can play everything. With a steam machine is different. I'd like a "with version A you can play X, with version B you can play X+Y, with version C you can play X+Y and have 3D"...

I don't care too much for graphics, so hardware specs don't speak too much for me. Tell me how these specs translate in certain game. I just need enough resolution and enought effects to feel imersed to be happy with the graphics.
I was watching a gaming podcast the other day and someone made a good point, if valve were to go aggressively after console users with the steambox right now at the start of a new console round they'd be setting themselves up for a world of hurt. Microsoft/Sony could deliberately pay off developers to hold up the PC version of games for 6+ months after console releases. If you can't play the latest and greatest that would significantly drop the value of a steambox.

So instead, release a steambox version which is only going to be popular with "enthusiasts", bug/beta test the hell out of them and then more aggressively market steamboxes in 2-5 years time when the current console generation is starting to look old.

Valve are playing a long game here I think, the value proposition of a steambox isn't going to make sense until we're about half way through the current console cycle.
llgo (golang frontend for llvm) now uses go.tools/ssa
Given recent revelations, one has to wonder if the working group merely failed by itself or was given a substantial nudge in that direction by someone who wanted TLS to be insecure.
Ruby and Python and Felix and Oscar
A good example here would be C++. Look at how long it took for C++11 to be implemented, but now at least two compilers are feature complete (gcc + clang) and now they're on schedule to be feature complete for C++1y[1], with implementation + specification in sync.

[1] http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html#cxx14
No-one will oppose this more fervently than those employed on very good wages in the present system.
There's nothing wrong with an article referencing something from another article in the same paper. It doesn't count as a circular reference if the articles are by separate, identifiable authors. Wikipedia needs stricter citation rules because it's harder to verify authorship.
reCaptcha was always a free captcha service based on one simple idea: one part is the classical one, hopefully only readable by humans, the other one actually supports Google on doing OCR-like jobs. Previously it were undetected words from Google Books scans, now they are mostly using house numbers.

More interesting is the other change: reCaptcha now tries to detects real users and then only generates a simple number captcha for the classical part. Likely they are using your Google Account cookie or Google Analytics for that.
Both ML and Haskell are really tiny languages syntactically and have very simple core type systems.

Go has both crappy syntax (excusable for appealing to C programmers) and a pathetic type system.
Thanks!

(About $1,200 for anyone else curious.)
You're off by 3 to 5 orders of magnitude depending on the specifications of the machine and kind of work it's doing. Isolating these machines from outside vibrations as well as canceling out their own internal harmonics is no small engineering feat and typically involves pouring a concrete slab custom for the setup. Beyond keeping up export restrictions and avoiding bad installations I can see it as a way of avoiding warranty fraud with user error or crane accidents.
> Or you know, we could vote those people out of office. We keep bashing those clueless politicians but we did put them here in the first place. We don't even have the excuse of dictatorship.

The sad truth is that politics is basically a marketing game. Whoever pours the most money into ads and campaigning has the best chance of winning [1]. There aren't enough people who care enough to do their own research to make a real difference

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/dec/02/conservatives-spent-twice-labour-election-campaign -

In the last general election the results mirrored marketing budgets.
I noticed those when they first started appearing, my first thought was "must be Street View", followed immediately by wondering about the potential for poisoning some kind of machine learning effort with them (and yeah, I know, issue of scale, even a group of people dedicated to ruining the effort would be vastly outnumbered by background reCAPTCHA traffic).
Brazil? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%281985_film%29)
Intel Edison: A Desktop From 1998 In An SD Card
Orwell's thoughts and writing were shaped by his experiences of the British public school [1] system, serving in the colonial police service, living as a homeless person in Paris and London, fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war, and (late in his life) seeing how the second world war played-out. These experiences honed his conscience and anger.

It's hard to imagine people who have lived similar lives now (maybe a minimum-wage warehouse worker from South London who went to fight with the rebels in Syria and came home wounded) believing that society can be changed in useful ways by writing fiction.

And if they did, and they became a threat to power, the daily mail would probably destroy them fairly quickly. Different times.

[1] In the UK, "public schools" are mostly what everyone else on the planet calls private schools.

Edit: s/tramp/homeless person/
Sadly Britain does have a problem in some communities with ingrained, persistent and extremely damaging anti-social behaviour.
Oh I think I found what happens, see http://golang.org/doc/faq#nil_error
They are not accepting bitcoin. They are partnering with a company to handle whatever needs to be done to give them real live USD they can put in their bank accounts.

They are still only accepting USD: just making it easier for people with bitcoin to give USD to them.
lisant.io is a lightweight full text bookmarking service and a feed reader.

The full-text bookmarking works via a bookmarklet that snapshots the DOM
of the current page and uses a heuristic content extraction engine to
clean up the content.

lisant.io provides a full-text search feature across all your bookmarked
content and feeds that you subscribe to. For feeds that don't provide content
within the feed itself, the search is limited to article metadata.

Also, any tweet that you favourite that contains a link will be added to your
bookmarks.

lisant.io is a premium service with a short (1 week) trial. There's no free
plan. This is absolutely intentional: we're bootstrapping this with our own
time and money we don't want to support a free tier.

We take your data seriously:

- at any time, you can cancel your plan and you can download an archive of all of
your bookmarks and subscriptions.

- we take nightly backups of the entire database.

lisant.io also works just great on your mobile!
> So far despite all the people lamenting the lack of generics in Go I've yet to have seen someone propose a viable (eg: backwards compatible, realistic to achieve with the current compilers and runtime, etc.) way to implement, nevermind someone who's produced a prototype.

https://github.com/droundy/gotgo
If you read the follow-ups, it's not just that no-one used TLS 1.2 because it wasn't available, enabling support for it actually broke stuff for end users[1] - and the browser developers knew this was almost certain to be the case even without looking, because it almost always is.

Also, as the linked email points out, we shouldn't have needed TLS 1.2 in the first place in order to be secure. It was already known at the time TLS 1.0 was designed that they were doing things in ways likely to be insecure for no good reason, but they did it anyway.

[1] https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg10614.h...
...Here is a sample publication: http://papermine.com/site/public/eatalian-simple-and-authent...

To create one and play with the editor, you can sign up here: http://papermine.com/sys/register/ (we would actually love it if you did that).

We think the tool would be good for designer to build brochures for clients, travel guides, recipe books, albums for photographers, etc. etc.

What do you think? Do you think it has potential?

Any feedback appreciated. Thanks!
How many people are afraid to walk down a dark alley at night? That's a freedom we should have but plenty of people are forced to get a taxi or stay home because of a real fear of being robbed. I live in a city where it is safe, even for young women alone and I'm amazed when I remember what a restricted life it was in more dangerous, yet more "free" cities. If someone demands money from you in a deserted street, do you have the courage to refuse? If not then you need something, perhaps not these poorly defined laws begging to be abused, but something to protect you from those subtle threats that constantly erode your quality of life.
It blows my mind that this is possible in a country like the UK.

It remains to be seen whether it really is, and if so, for how long.

Remember, this is basically all being done because ASBOs have been a failure by almost any metric you can imagine. They were always controversial on civil liberties grounds. They became a badge of honour, or perhaps I should say an achievement to be unlocked, for many of the very people whose behaviour they were supposed to moderate. They were widely ignored by those supposedly constrained by them. And they didn't get a free ride when they were inevitably challenged in court, either.
I wonder if human-caused antibiotic resistance turns around and harms the critters who were originally using that antibiotic as self defense?
You can build on iOS devices without worrying about the $99/year fee, if you jailbreak them. I would say that Android would probably be the best way for you to go though since you already have some Java experience and only have an old Macbook.
Please see the simple implementations of generics in ocaml and C# (added later).
Neat! But the RSS link is a 404.
Why can't references to (allegedly) biased source be references? Every author has an agenda, knowingly or unknowingly. Unless they referenced papers are false or lie they still may reference facts that allow you to form your own opinion - just don't take every conclusion at face value. At least the author provides you with the references so you can go an check for yourself.

Also: Why are you excluding reference 1? It's a paper written for the RICS, which is an institution of the royal charter. They probably have their own agenda, but I'd not expect them to publish false information.
If you aren't keeping daily (or better) snapshots, you're doing it wrong. git (or any other such system) isn't a backup any more than RAID is. There's always the possibility of running into some massive bug that corrupts the whole repository, and having the damage get propagated as happened to KDE last year.
What they do with the payment after receiving it is irrelevant. You can pay using bitcoin. It doesn't make any difference to the customer that it's going through another company and getting converted to USD
> it's not very difficult to trick a GPS sensor into thinking its somewhere else as long as your signal is a lot better then the ones coming from the satellite

and that's probably the reason why they include a gyro and shut down the machine if it is moved at all, regardless of what the GPS says.
A map of the difference between solar time and clock time around the world.
Same here, and was blown away.
It's a subset of the set cover problem, which is a well-known NP-hard problem.
How would you start such a mailing list from scratch without a blog?

Say one (or more) interesting thing publicly, promise more interesting things in return for signing up for the mailing list.

It's certainly easier to bolt things onto a platform than to build a platform from scratch, but everybody starts with +/- nothing, so having nothing should not deter you from starting that.
Pinterest doesn't own its trademark in the EU
Kindle is good but I prefer a solution I've been working on for a while. I use an app called QuickReader (speed reading app) to read all books my books at about 500 words per minute. The app takes ePub format. You can very easily send it to the app with Calibre (and also convert PDF to ePub).

I had the book Future Perfect in hardcover sitting on my shelf for 3 months. I loaded it in QR and because the app tells you how long it will take at your WPM pace to finish that chapter and the book, I know I will finish this chapter in 6:53 and the book in 1:50:49. It makes books much less intimidating and I usually do 15-30 minute sessions. You don't get bored or distracted because the words are being pushed in front of you. It's amazing.
I've never read more books in a shorter time with this system.

I think I will write a full post on my system. Also protip: Get the audio if available and listen to that when you can't read.
Source is so short, it can only be handcoded ;)
Increasing slow query performance with the parallel query execution
Some people just seem to want to take offense where none is intended.
Question: Is the HNsearch still being worked on? It has broken "link" and "parent" for search results.
Ask HN: What question and answer sites have high quality content?
There are a large number of question and answer sites out there, but very few which provide good answers. The ones I have found that tend to provide good answers are as follows:

StackExchange Network (including StackOverflow)
Ask MetaFilter
Quora
Reddit (on particular sub-reddits such as Ask Science, Ask Historians, Explain Like I'm Five and sometimes Ask Reddit)

Are there any other question and answer sites out there with a high quality of discussion? I'm quite surprised that I haven't been able to find any newer entrants - it's actually easier for new question and answer sites to have a high quality of discussion
Smart watches are not useful if you are idle or nearly idle and the rate of notifications is low. But if you are busy or the rate of notifications is high then that changes dramatically.

What are some examples? Doing any physical work is a perfect example. Maybe you're cooking, or plugging together and configuring a rack full of networking or AV equipment, or soldering, or building a house, or basically doing any of the million things people do every day where an interruption long enough to check a smart phone is a serious disruption to the flow of work.

And what happens when you're not just receiving 1 notification per hour or even every 10 minutes but perhaps 10 notifications in 1 minute? Not all day, but all it takes is 10 notifications per minute to happen once or twice a day to make having a smart watch worthwhile.

It may not be the sort of thing that is ever useful to you, but that's fine, don't buy one. But they are plenty useful for a lot of people.