skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> why the heck do I need to be admin to install packages

This is being solved in mainstream distributions by adding another layer of abstraction, instead of trying to do within "traditional" userspace.

We're rapidly moving towards a multi-VM model (be it full virtualisation or LXC) where all users "have root" inside their own containers.

Not being able to install the packages you want isn't an issue when you can quickly and easily create a VM or container and do it in there, all within your existing userspace privileges on the host system.

It's no longer about who has root on a particular machine. It's now just a distinction between who manages a system and who uses that system.

If you want to manage a system instead of just using it, you can achieve that by having your own entire system by spawning a container or VM, rather than just being limited to your home directory.

The cost in disk space is negligible in today's terms. The cost of memory in a VM is still significant, but LXC eliminates that issue.
This comment cannot go unacknowledged. I love you collypops!
3 Facts About Email Designers
It's heavily dependent on the city you're in as far as I can tell. Google Maps is awful in Madison, but I've had better results with it in Atlanta.
How can I block Google's spammy servers?
For several months I occasionally get spam and use sites to parse the email to find that the server is owned by Google.

If you use either of these sites, you will see the IP of the latest spammer to hit me is owned by Google:

IP to check: 209.85.192.172 (gleaned from sites like SpamCop for one, I've used two to verify the parsing for the above address)

http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address
http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/209.85.192.172.html
After trying Ubuntu Touch on my 2012 Nexus 7, and finding it WAY too unstable for my needs (I averaged maybe 10 minutes of use between hard crashes), I installed Arch on a chroot, accessed via VNC. The specific applications I used are Linux Deploy and bVNC Free. Added an external bluetooth mouse and keyboard (the keyboard being a cheap cover-with-gutter thingie), and presto, a usable desktop Linux in my coat pocket.

It works better than expected (no crashes, slight lag but nothing serious), and I can do 50 wpm on the cheap keyboard (after some extensive remapping), which surprised me (my average speed on a full keyboard is around 100 wpm). I've typed and LaTeXed a few papers on the thing, and just yesterday I built R from source for a biostats class.
Most problems that plage philosophy for milenia are independently solved in minutes, by several different people once they have any kind of impact on the real world.
The title is a bit misleading though. Though it would be real cool, saying we can detect molecule size pattern does not mean we could read Braille alphabet on molecule size dots.
The eye can detect nanometer size patterns: we can make the difference between blue light ( radiation with a 400 nanometers wave length ) and red light ( radiation with a 800 nanometers wave length ). Does not mean we can see nanometer size objects. Bottom line, be careful talking about patterns ....
Just would like to mention: we watched star trek the animated series (1974ish) over the Christmas break and we were really surprised. The animation is cheesy but the stories are way better than they had any right to be for a Saturday morning cartoon.
New York State Cracks Down on 'Patent Trolls'
If the price goes up you would have been better off just keeping your money in litecoin to begin with. There's no way you can win with this, that's why they're selling it.
In the article they talk about making sections of a smartphone's screen feel different (permanently, I assume), but would it be possible to have a type of glass where the texture of the glass can be changed quickly and repeatedly by applying some sort of magnetic/electrical field and an app could, for example, make your phone's glass feel like it has buttons, then you could switch to another app and it would feel like a different set of buttons? I'm obviously not an electrical engineer, but I'd be interested to hear more informed opinions.
Curing Myopia
Visually Raises $8.1M To Build Out Its Marketplace For Infographics
In the future, I'd appreciate if you asked first prior to repurposing something I've written. I'm generally pretty reasonable, and think I've said yes to probably 29 of the last 30 times people have asked me. Things which complicate that for me would include:

1) I occasionally do things with other people, for example interviews. That's sometimes because I want to support them , because it's a favor, or what have you. Having them republished elsewhere without asking first is an anti-favor. I don't even republish my own stuff originally given to third parties without asking first.

2) I know there's a good deal of attempt here at curation to add value, and I appreciate the effort that went into that, but divorcing the answers from the questions in some cases does not capture what I think. I'd prefer to be primarily responsible for screwing up people's interpretations of my writing.

Now I know you Charlie and I know you're a good bloke, but in general, the outcomes are better for everyone when one asks for (and gets) an OK for this sort of thing.
Yes. Waiting for a major release number to break everything is a terrible design strategy.
Has anyone here tried these methods? Are the linked resources anything remotely reasonable, or pure quackery?
The Wikipedia article on the method used to calculate this sum mentions applications to quantum field theory [1]. Links to applications might be an interesting category of metadata for Wikipedia math articles which could be semi-automatically constructed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan_summation
hackers delight
There's only one problem for me with Project Euler. Eventually, the problems become more about coming up with the mathematical algorithm you need to solve it.

That may be what you want. However, a lot of these are outside my math knowledge/ability, without really expanding my programming ability.
Well, people were going to that site to get the content, and now they are not (all) going there. Clearly the site has lost something, especially something that ties directly into their revenue. If one considers the content as a proxy for the lost revenue -- which is reasonable, since it's the content that attracts traffic -- one could say it's been stolen.

Of course, since it's not your work that is being mis-appropriated, you're free to look at it another way :-)
That's an amazing idea for a plugin :) I'll try to investigate this, because the way I do it now is to just open any *.cljs file, connect it to the Light Table UI and eval the expression that way. It is however a lenghty process, as it takes about 10-20 seconds to connect and compile on the frist time.
An indirect attempt to troll for side-effects and hilarious race conditions perhaps?
I love project euler, but I've come to the realization that its purpose is to beat programmers soundly about the head and neck with a big math stick. At work last week, we were working on project euler at lunch, and had the one CS PhD in our midst not jumped up and explained the chinese remainder theorem to us, we wouldn't have had a chance.
Angular JS Gotcha: HTML5 Mode Routing
We've seen several of these trends already for 2013 and are really seeing a buildup for 2014. My startup is a mashup of analytics, targeting neglected industries, SaaS, and quantified self.
Thanks charls. We are focused on making human machine interaction as natural as possible.
In many of them, the naive solution is intractable in terms of time or memory, so some programming skill is required.
On Pinterest-style tile layouts: I think they work for images, where you are scanning primarily images (Pinterest, Google image search). I think they do not work in cases where you want to scan text (headlines, etc.).
I was thinking of modernising some 25 year old code, being pre-ANSI it has some of the same problems, like:

char *malloc();

Of course I am referring to Robert Morris' Worm.
> The NYPD, which did not comment on the suit, has defended the program as a tool to catch people with larceny in their hearts by presenting them with the opportunity to do the wrong thing.

WTF... No, this isn't how policing should work. I'm going to rant a little here. Policing is not a tool to entrap folks or assume folks are negative first and react to it. I'm guessing NYPD has a bigger budget and have more folks and ran out of things to do, so they need these programs to feed their "quota" or something.

I understand that in some situations, being proactive is the only way to tackle the problem but this isn't one of them. Larceny cannot be beaten out of folks, it's been here forever and never going to work with this program.

I'd go as far as saying that in some cases, larceny is a natural reaction to the society (think stealing bread/money to survive on the street due to oppression or no available resources to help folks).

Policing should be about discouraging this in the first place by helping folks and negate the reason to perform larceny in the first place. Why did that person needed to steal the wallet, because it was fun? If yes, then he should be educated in what really happens to the victim. If because he needed money to buy meds for his son, then we as a society need to work on that that no children should ever have to be in that situation (yes, I knew some folks who did this and they were in horrible situations that the city couldn't help them with).

For me, all this program is doing is:

1. Discouraging the society from helping each other. I'm now never ever going to pick up any wallet or anything to return it to its owners or the cops because I don't know if it is a trap or not. This is what China did and well, some of the things the folks ignored were disgusting (such as a kid getting run over by cars and people are just walking around because they fear getting caught doing something wrong).

This is stupid. If thieves are going to steal, they're going to steal but there are many more good people who will do the right thing. I don't see the cops awarding the good behavior.

2. They have better things to do, no? How about instead of spending time entrapping people, walk their beats, and helping the community. Spend time getting to know the folks, know right away if they need help or not based on how they're behaving.

I'm sure many of you will disagree and thinks this is a good program. I understand the reasons behind it, I just think it's not what we need to focus on when we have bigger things to worry about.
I have been working with the CEO off and on for over 2 years now throughout all sorts of Augmented Reality devices and software. We started with Sixth Sense and moved onto other projects. I think he really hit a need space, especially with Mobile apps. I see a real usage and style coming out of this. It is less obtrusive than a watch or using your phone, there is no external piece to acquire and it is readily available.

It is few and far between I see this much foresight put into a product and an idea.

--Mark Rowe, Augmented Developer, A Line Of Code - CTO
The relationship between Germany the US is quite special. After the WWII West Germany was occupied by the US, Britain and France - the East was occupied by the Soviet Union. Germany was under tight control from those countries. The US then decided to build up Germany again to use it as an ally against the Soviet block. The NATO then took over as the institution under which the various troops were deployed in West Germany and under which the various activities were coordinated.

After the reunification many rights of the Nato allies (and especially the US) were still protected.

Germany would need discuss with the allies how to change these older treaties. Plus it would also need to discuss with the US the shutdown of various activities of the US in Germany and against German interests:

* spying on Germany on German ground. The US has lots of installations here.

* spying on Germany from the outside (like tapping communication cables outside Germany which are going to Germany)

* using Germany has a base for various wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, various conflicts in Africa). For example the US has the Central Military Command for Africa in Germany. Drone strikes are coordinated by the US from Germany. The US has logistics centrals for their intelligence agencies in Germany.

* using Germany for various extremely unpopular actions, like using Germany as a transport hub for kidnapped people who were brought to torture camps in Europe or even to places outside Europe

etc.etc.
If you use PHP, you can't CDN your HTML.
If you use PHP, you can't PhoneGap build your HTML.

I recommend pure HTML (and call API/CORS).
(Same is true of ASP, etc.). Pure HTML!
Hi, nice to speak to you.

I agree, this is the right way to go about it. Someone with a nicely repeatable build can go ahead and get that with docker too, someone without still that gets a nicely distributable image. Docker seems to have taken off quickly as there's a benefit very soon after you start using it, and very little to get in the way of you having something running.

There's an issue in that people see the claims of one part and think they apply to the whole (I don't think the poster thinks that, but people reading it might get that impression), but this is a problem of education, not a technical one.
A Better MailChimp Signup Experience
I am attempting to build the best database administration tool for Mongodb.
First pre-release
Ever had to sit and wait for vim to parse a gigantic file to get syntax highlighting correct? Just waiting for it to know the line numbers can take a while.
Pull request flow traps, sad stories.
Why you should say NO to feature branches & pull requests.
Quite an awesome work.
What I don't understand is why we don't just skip the DOM. And by that I mean, currently people are using virtual DOMs like that provided by React.js however this still has to access the DOM when it wants to render, but couldn't we rewrite a DOM/CSS renderer with WebGL (or canvas)?

Or perhaps just skip that step and come up with something nicer for specific use cases.

Why aren't we leaving all of this float/clear stuff behind us?
40 more maps that explain the world
Brazilian hacker creates Twitter-like app shielded from NSA gaze
Glad to see more Erlang/Elixir/OTP articles on HN. With all these newfangled cool kid concurrent languages, people seem to have forgotten the sophisticated, decades old solution. Funny to think telecoms were solving a lot of the same problems web devs are now (High Availability, Low Latency, Fault Tolerance, large amounts of concurrent connections).
Generally, this happens through simplifying assumptions. For example, let's say you need to often check whether an element matches a specific CSS selector. That's easy with `elem.matchesSelector(selector)` but the browser has to assume the selector could be something complex like `#content li > ul input[type="number"]` just as easily as it could be `#phone`. Plus it has to parse the selector every time (or maintain a complex cache). If you as the developer know the selector always an ID you can just check for `elem.id === "phone"` in JavaScript and that will whip the pants off the C++ code that has to deal with an arbitrary selector.

I'd like to see what assumptions famo.us has made and whether they could have just been addressed at the CSS level. An example of that would be things like overlapping elements with rounded corners and drop shadows, which are very expensive for the rendering engine. So perhaps it was a lack of understanding of CSS jank factors that led them to decide a total circumvention was in order? We'd really need to see a side-by-side of the two and understand where the conventional solution was bogging down.
The Two Key Skill Sets Startups Must Develop To Grow
You're quite wrong on that first point. He's discussed that very issue many times. Here is another:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/08/chomsky-on-lib...

"The term "libertarian" has an idiosyncratic usage in the US and Canada, reflecting, I suppose, the unusual power of business in these societies. In the European tradition, "libertarian socialism" ("socialisme libertaire") was the anti-state branch of the socialist movement: anarchism (in the European, not the US sense).

I use the term in the traditional sense, not the US sense."

The farmer is indeed damned if he doesn't. Monsanto crushes him because he can't compete in the market. Did you not hear of the mass suicides among farmers in India, where they took 95% of the seed market?

Monstanto has been very successful in executing the equivalent of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" in the seed market, and now enjoy an 80% - 90% monopoly on seeds depending on the crop. It's now difficult to purchase non-patent-encumbered seeds even if you want to, and if you do so, you're at a severe disadvantage.

Seeds. Think about that for a moment. That small piece of biomatter, the source of life, which grows into staple crops for feeding our planet. This and all future generations of it are patent encumbered, and controlled by a large corporation. To equate this with liberty is hilarious. Laissez-faire capitalism leads only to tyranny, not liberty. Even Greenspan finally figured this out. Too bad it took destroying nearly half of the global wealth for him to do so.
For those curious, this is inspired by vvvv[1].

[1] http://vvvv.org/
Sillicon Valley's Dirty secret
I just saw this several days late, but have to comment.... is that really the example you're giving of a list comprehension that's easy to read? Because... yeah no. If I saw this in a code review, the first thing I'd say is "this code is illegible, please reformat to make it easier to read"

This is classic "I'm trying too hard to make my code look clever rather than make it readable and easy to understand".
Why Did You Go Remote?
You're right, of course. My original comment did put quotes around 'leak', but I figured someone would come along and argue a leak is a leak even if it's not going to crash your program. Oh well. :)
I've heard good things about this service (haven't used it though): https://getbase.com/
This is definitely true. Finding the non-naive solution is still more of a math exercise, though.

I've spent a lot of time reading wikipedia articles for algorithms that I don't understand trying to solve some these problems.
Imagine the internal monitoring that a hosting company might need. They'd have to manage:

* All the (virtual machine) host boxes.

* All the routers, switchers, and firewalls.

* Status-checks, on hosted sites, etc.

In the end I designed and implemented a system which was capable of running all the tests in around 90 seconds, by virtue of being distributed. One host does all the parsing and such like, and N-other hosts could pull out tests to execute. (As it happened we ran everything on a single box, but it was designed to be distributed, it just transpired that having 6-10 worker process pulling jobs from the queue to execute was good enough.)

Introduction:

http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2012/12/19/custodian-a-network-mo...

Code:

https://projects.bytemark.co.uk/projects/custodian
The new defaults The functions every online service should offer, from day one.
> Some of them I have no idea how to even start working on

Do you have an example of such a problem?
I didn't click on this link, but I really hope the domestication experiment with foxes is not being called 'evolution'.
After the first hundred or so, you start to need more and more math.

If you don't know what to look for off the top of your head (which you probably wouldn't without a math degree), try to google around for math that looks relevant to your problem.

I find http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ and http://oeis.org/ to be very helpful for this.
Crypto-currencies statistics
I used it to learn the basics of F# and solving algorithms using a functional approach.
I agree... it is still horrible, but it seems to be slightly less horrible now.
Lets think this through !

The more moving parts you add to a system , the more points of failure and latency you will add to your system. Not to mention their impact on your marginal costs.

Some specialized services are not only essential but also replicating them in-house is beyond the expertise of a normal start-up. I would put Stripe, AWS/Heroku/Google, Github in this list.

Others are neither essential (mission critical ) nor rocket science to implement in-house. The start-up has to figure out if the impact of these non-essential services on the marginal costs is justified or not. And how long can you get away without spending money on nice-to-have services ?
I like that Project Euler encourages me to learn more math.
I have a Burmese and they are VERY playful and energetic, sometimes too much so. But they are an absolute blast of a pet.
>> "Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear tomorrow, and I would be OK with it."

I use these services heavily yet I completely agree. I actually had a Twitter account I used for 3/4 years, sent thousands of tweets and had several hundred followers. Deleting it was a 'scary' moment (kind of like formatting a hard drive and making sure you haven't forgot to backup anything) but I don't miss any of the content from it.

SMS likewise. I recently switched phones and didn't go through the hassle of bringing my SMS's with me. I miss nothing.

Facebook is slightly different. I do enjoy going through my timeline occasionally but the thing I would miss most is the photos. I don't take a lot of photos but my friends do so most of the photos on my Facebook are ones I'm tagged in so don't have a local copy. I would hate to lose those so every now and then I back them up (Facebook has an export tool for all your data).

You make a good point about value coming from current content. Years ago people perused old content nostalgically. We still do this BUT we have vastly more new content appearing in our lives every second. This means less time to go back and peruse old content especially if you have to filter it all for the gems.
Yes, that is already one of many options of haptic feedback being explored actually:

> A new technique that does not require actuators is called reverse-electrovibration. A weak current is sent from a device on the user through the object they are touching to the ground. The oscillating electric field around the skin on their finger tips creates a variable sensation of friction depending on the waveform, frequency, and amplitude of the signal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology
The best technical interview I ever had involved picking a random Project Euler problem in the hundreds and pair-programming our way through it. The CTO wrote his version in Python and I worked in Perl . . . he was astounded mine ran 8x faster.

The same company also had regular hack night where everyone drinks a lot of Tecate, agress on a Project Euler problem and a language no one knows, and races. Fun times.
How Big Data Can Create A Smarter Transportation Industry
Finally a wearable tech gadget that is usable in public without fear of embarrassment
Conan Goes Extreme With His GoPro Cameras
A dozen? Perhaps a dozen of the easiest ones that one can do in a few minutes, but even so it seems like a lot of work for a pre-interview screening. But many Project Euler problems require a great deal of thought and are mostly testing mathematical prowess.

How much work are you comfortable making your candidates do before they even know whether they're getting an interview?
Show HN: Hound – Elixir web driver library for integration tests
Well of course the ETA changes while you are driving, that seems obvious. It's an estimate, it depends on current conditions, it can't be correct from the start.
Startup reboot in Six-Week Hackathon. How we boosted our team efficiency by 50%
Splitting a sandwich and feeling not deceived