skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The value is this:

Presuppose that you believe there is value in doing more, or less, of certain things. And that you have a way to measure the amount of those things that you do, either manually or via some passive monitor. Quantification can help you in your efforts to change your behaviours by making them measurable and less subject to the vagaries of bias and memory failure.

For example, if you felt that it was a total waste of your time and energy to write snarky comments on the interweb which appear to be written from a place of intentional ignorance, you could wire a monitor up to your downvotes and over time aim to minimize your negativity by making an effort to think about ideas from multiple perspectives, or by doing some background reading to cure yourself of the "confusing to me" == "stupid" virus.

A more common use might be "how many miles have I run this week?" "Do I have more productive days after running, or after a good sleep, or both?". Unlike the "don't be a jerk unnecessarily" monitor, these are more informative when you can look at lots of data, because the causes and effects are more complicated and often intertwined.
Hello
Hello!
I was not aware of this. It is not open-source though, and it is really just for research purposes.

Its actually quite impressive how much they've implemented, though it is still a small fraction of the software you'd need to run an actual cell network.
I'd rather I it didn't auto-play and let me choose whether I want a page to swamp my bandwidth and CPU. Even over an 8Mb/s ADSL connection on a quad core Xeon workstation with 12GB or RAM and fairly decent video card this page is one of the worst behaved I've encountered in a while.

Sadly I won't be reading any of the content because even after five minutes it's killing my browser. To the spark.io blogging team, please don't assume unlimited wads of broadband. Let the reader decide whether they want to play your videos, and you know, I can only watch one video at a time on that page, so why start them all playing at once? This is no better etiquette than CNN or MSNBC or an adware farm where they start playing videos at you upon arrival. It's very rude.
Yep. I actually have two alarms on my phone, one for wakeup, and one for 2 hours after I go to sleep. I've been doing this for years. Most nights I just solve the math problems unconsciously and go back to sleep. But some nights, I can't solve the math problems or otherwise feel low and I know it's time to check the BG.
>Did you never get cash for birthdays or Christmas?

Nope, never. I never had cash, ever. Not ever a dollar until I started worked at 16. Actually, that's not true, a couple times I went on a field trip to a big city and I got $20 to spend there. My grandparents gave me savings bonds once in a while on birthdays which I still have, but I never cashed them in. The rest of my relatives were much poorer than us. A couple had their power shut off. They certainly weren't giving me money.

Even if I did have money, I don't know how I would have the ability to ever spend it. My parents hardly even went out shopping unless they were going out for something specific they needed. When kids have cash do they just get taken to the store once in a while to browse or something? Do people just go to the store aimlessly to look for things to buy? Do kids so "I want X" and get taken to the store?
Midlands in the UK.

Projects are varied, some web portal(s), some C# add-ons to existing products, some new work. All C# 4-4.5 .net framework, Winforms Or MVC/Bootstrap
That's good to know, but it might still not be accepted. While an Ivy-league education is sure to earn recognition, many second- or third-tier American institutions might fall short.
Yes. I've got a toy language that I've been working on that uses a rope to store characters internally.

Everything works on "logical characters" - arbitrary vectors of codepoints, as you say. There's still a number of edge cases I have yet to work out as to what exactly is considered a character, though. (I just added support for a single code point encoding multiple characters, for example.)

I'm not so sure that making thing reliant on a font would be the best way to solve that, though. I'd intuitively say that there should be less coupling between rendering choices and internal encoding than that.

The twist is that each node in the rope can only store characters of the same physical length in bytes (and same number of logical characters per physical character). This means that in the typical case (most characters require the same number of bytes to encode) it doesn't add too too much overhead. Still not something I would consider as the base String type for a lower-level language, though.

There are a few simple optimizations that I have yet to do (encode smaller characters as what would be ordinarily be invalid longer encodings, if it makes sense (a single one-byte character in the middle of a bunch of two-byte characters, for example), that sort of thing.)

It seems to work fairly well, so far. Or at least it tends to give "common-sensical" results, and avoids a large chunk of worst-case behavior that standard "prettified character array" strings have.
I relate to this, too. Here's some stuff that I read recently that helped me a little:

"When you are young, beginning new projects is easy and finishing them is hard. As you grow older, beginnings get harder, but finishing gets easier. At least, that has been my experience. I think it is true of anyone of at least average intelligence, creativity and emotional resilience. The reason is simple.

When you are young, the possibilities ahead of you, and the time available to explore them, seem nearly infinite. When you try to start something, the energizing creative phase, (which comes with internal brain-chemistry rewards on a fast feedback-loop), gives way to exhausting detail-oriented work, maintenance work, and unsatisfying overhead work. You need to get through these to bank distant external rewards (money and such) that only come with completion. It is then that you are most vulnerable to the allure of exciting new beginnings. So you abandon things halfway. You bank the internal rewards of beginning, but not the external rewards of finishing.

But with age, this changes.

As you grow older, the history of a few completed projects and many abandoned ones in your past starts to loom oppressively in your memory. The early internal rewards of many beginnings are now a distant memory that offer no pleasure in the present. The external rewards of completed projects, which tend to continue to yield dividends (such as completed degrees, financial rewards) loom larger all around you: wealth, strong relationships and perhaps most importantly, an earned ability to see the world differently as the result of having been through many completions.

When a new opportunity opens up at 35, you evaluate it differently than you did at 25. You are able to estimate how long it will take, what the journey will feel like, what the early pleasure and distant pain will feel like, and what getting it done will feel like. You are able to react psychologically to the whole prospect in the form of a narrative that extends beyond the finish line, as a systematic leveling-up of your life. You see the transient pleasures of beginnings diminish to nothing in the far future and the enduring rewards of finishing as a steady source of dividends extending out beyond the horizon."

- http://www.tempobook.com/2014/01/13/when-finishing-is-easier...
Examples? If you don't get on with the OS X UI then there is little help left for you.
I've started using Go on a personal project and this looks to be a great concise resource. Hopefully this'll give me some fuel to work on it this weekend!
The biggest issue I have with GDP is that it has become more than a measure, a mean in and of itself. Policies that could have a beneficial impact on societal wellbeing have been shut down using the argument that it would negatively affect GDP growth, thereby arguing that this number alone is what matters. Sometimes it feels like politicians and economists participate in a world cup encompassing all nations where the score is determined by GDP and GDP growth, the number removed from its societal meaning.
The reality is that there's a shortage of highly qualified STEM majors. As an ECE student, if I were to ask students in my major to code a linked list, or binary node tree, a good 25-50% would fail. And this is at a Top 10 program.
Works great on a i7 Ubuntu 13.10 x64 machine under Chrome 31.
"Including the next Nixon. Which I guess is what we have today, when you think about it."

Not just "think"; my political awareness begins with Nixon's first term, and Obama "feels" a lot like him, certainly a lot more than any following president. Check around, many other of us older types have noticed this.

Just look at the analogous IRS situations, only in Nixon's days they mostly ignored his requests.
Mobile and Cross Platform .NET C# Development with Mono and Xamarin
It's the typical "write a lot, but don't really answer anything" style that so many politicians utilize, only substituting "talk" for "write".

The entire section could have been summed up as:

Because each broadcast band is identified by the frequency of the center of the band, the bands begin on an even number, and the bands are two "units" wide, making the center frequency an odd number.

Edit: for clarification.
>> Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it.

I'm trying to parse the actual meaning of this editorialized headline (the actual headline is "What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe").

Does this equate the President of the United States to being one of the least clued-in/laggard Internet users? Otherwise what does "even the President of the US" mean?
That's not the way the small businesses that use Magento think. They want one, all-singing all-dancing tool that does everything they could ever imagine wanting. And they never want to update it or maintain it or have to think about it.
Agreed. I had to open the source and see what they were using. Native video elements...I like it. I figured it was a nice GIF or something.

Not sure what the others guy are talking about. Works fine on my MacBook Pro...not issues at all?
> How can the NSA deal with the impermanence of snapchat content?

You just order them to make a backdoor they can't talk about and archive it yourself, duh. Next!
As someone who lives and breathes Backbone at the moment, I think its biggest problem is that the framework itself provides not nearly enough guidance to write maintainable and testable code, nor does its documentation. It's not nearly clear how to start your app in a sensible way, where to put stateful non-view, non-model logic, and how the pieces should all communicate. So, you start cobbling your Backbone app together, making architectural decisions as best you can, and then months later, you realize you've created an unmaintainable mess. I've had this experience coming into two large projects so far.

I'm sure everyone's second Backbone app looks a lot better than their first, but it's still an underdesigned framework, IMO. I think Marionette does a lot of good in terms of adding those missing structures and best practices, though. And I'm also intrigued by the idea of replacing views with React components.
All providers of communications services could, if they wanted to, put open secure client software in their customers' hands that would thwart spying.

Skype made a choice. Other choices were open to them, as they are now to every other provider of communication and storage. There is no excuse.
The traditional first-try sentence is "Hello, world!" in case that's what you were going for.
Actually, as a candidate, at some point they start getting read in on national security matters, so this "indoctrination" begins even before the election.
Morally yes you are correct (imo). But which product are users going to go for - the one that goes the extra mile to keep them safe and help them out, or the one that doesn't give a damn about them? We have to deal with reality, not ideals, and the reality is that most people do not practice good password management.

> 99% of users who aren't IT or security professionals would just prefer to be done with entering their password after the first time, period.

Which is just as possible with tokens as it is with passwords. There is no reason not to use tokens.
The biggest game-changer for me has been peer pressure, if that helps. I left a talkshop group of friends and started working with people who were getting things done. Changed my life dramatically.
Useful tools and resources for web developers
The ACA does mandate insurance, but the point here is that the law depends on healthy 18-34-year-olds signing up on the new public exchanges such as Healthcare.gov and state-by-state sites. Right now a higher-than-expected percentage of people using Healthcare.gov are elderly or chronically ill people who had difficulty getting private insurance. If the insurance pool is full of people using the insurance, the premiums will go up, the insurance will be considered expensive, and fewer healthy people will choose public insurance, kicking off a vicious cycle.
How much of the population is represented by HN. If you have a bell shaped curve and only people on one extreme are commenting then you can't create a curve based on those samples. Also people who aren't doing that well aren't bragging about how bad they are doing.
Indeed; autoplay=true is stupid, but on the other hand, it's quite remarkable how it manage to bring my desktop PC to its knees.

Maybe using whatever https://mediacru.sh/ returns instead will help.
Mark my words. There is a place I'm the market for an event manager and digital rollidex to replace Facebook for adults. I don't know how someone will get people to use it, but there is absolutely a place for it. I would leave Facebook immediately if I wasn't going to lose all my contacts.
and underscore. not for DOM, but for some functional compatibility (map, forEach, etc). Plus, it's convenience methods quickly become indispensable.

_(fn).bind(this), anyone?
I experienced this. I have a lot of started projects on my mac. Some i spent a few days on, other i spent a few months. In 2011 I started a game and that was the first project I finished (spiderdash.net). Although not really finished, but close enough. It took me over a year, and I really like it. What I realized, is that I do love the execution actually, but I am too unsure of the potential to focus on anything else, that is sales and marketing. So in the past 6 months I started building the ideas of my friends, I get them engaged because it's their ideas, and I get to do just the execution with the right amount of freedom. If you're like me, do things, but do it with someone else. The other good part about this is that you're going to create a unique mix of competencies. My friends are not developers, but they also are subject matter experts. So we are mixing 2 very different kind of expertise, and that's rich.
Awesome tip, thank you. I have an 8.1 license but have to install Windows 7 first, and hadn't bothered with the extra time to upgrade it yet. I know what I will be doing this weekend :)
Spain becomes first country to rely on wind as top energy source
It's amazing how fast we forget our past.
Most likely he meant generating page keywords/description using the product name and details.

A very fancy way of putting it, but something very common sense from a business perspective.
In terms of Computer Science, Georgia Tech is ranked #10 (by US News & World Report [1]). I'd say that's a first tier institution.

[1] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
Show HN: It's Thyme - for cheaper, faster, better timetracking.
You wanna know the saddest part of my day?

When I'm moving around my laptop, and pop into the "projects" folder and see what a graveyard it has become. Dozens of half baked projects that seemed brilliant at the time, that I either lost interest in, decided the concept was too difficult, or (and this is the worst one) let my self doubt convince me that it would never work. The really sad part is, every now and then I'll go back in and check out these projects and a lot of the code and design is actually pretty good. I ask myself, "Why did I think this sucked again?"

The best analogy I can make to this scenario is the self doubt that cripples many writers setting out to finish a book, screenplay, or novel. It's almost as if you tell yourself that the script sucks, to give you a reason not to finish it and move on to something cooler next week. As a writer, what's the best way to overcome this? Just FINISH the god damned first draft. Roll up your sleeves, commit an hour (or two or three) every day to working on this project, and slog through it until you type "FADE OUT" (or "The End") or (if you're coding) make that glorious commit to polish off your project.

No matter how much the project, script or book sucks, there are few feelings of satisfaction that match that.
Might want to add "the U.S. web" to title...
Real koans often have a joke-like quality to them as well – both jokes and koans tend to entail a sudden shift of perspective – but the original programmer koans have no element of enlightenment.
I think that's a naive way of thinking about the problem. Do people write rich server-side web apps in Plain Ol' Python? Of course not. Why reinvent the wheel?

For a tiny app, sure, maybe it's not so bad to just use jQuery. But if you're working on something with a very rich front-end architecture, a framework gives you a very necessary...er...framework to use to eliminate boilerplate and organize your work. Not only that, but you get to minimize your code debt to your actual business logic, not the plumbing.
browserify, +1.
I think that many of the powers that be in the UK are very wary of a manufacturing economy. I suspect they equate it with an organised labour movement and that was part of the ideology behind the push for a post-industrial economy in the 1980's.

I always found the idea of a post-industrial economy rather perplexing as it relies on the idea that we can design and manage the manufacturing of the rest of the world, but the skills required to do that are dependent on having manufacturing experience, which will die out in a generation without an industrial base in which to get the required skills.
No, clear is a requirement so that the guards can see it's not stuffed with marijuana or heroin or something.
Show HN: Pmdr is a neat Pomodoro time tracker
"Taking the plunge" is a romanticized idea. Don't quit your day job. Put together something in your spare time and see how people respond to it.
And definitely replace jQuery with Zepto (which is more-or-less a drop-in replacement), if you have control of the client (non-IE) or especially are working in mobile.
There's no reason why you need to start with a profitable business that utilizes all your resources; you could always put together something smaller that doesn't take up all your time!
> To me, the current system seems as barbaric as public executions.

I don't ordinarily downvote for content, but you've achieved a rare pitch of absurdity and I feel that should be recognized.
Nice work. I like that you included the correlations with confidence score in the MVP.

1) What about adding RescueTime?
2) Where can I sign up?
This is very recognizable. I have had this a lot, but accidentily I had an idea 2 days ago that I have put more time in already than any other of my fun plans or cool projects.

It's called PyLaTeX [1], it's a Python interface for LaTeX that supports creating documents and snippets. One of the coolest features I think is the conversion of NumPy matrices to LaTeX ones.

The HN new page [2] is just a bit rough on someone posting that doesn't know a lot of people that can upvote it, reddit [3] was a lot more forgiving.

[1] https://github.com/JelteF/PyLaTeX

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7075212

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1vcqxw/pylatex_...
h264 videos are generally significantly smaller than comparable resolution animated GIFs, not to mention being much better quality: It is a very good thing that the era of animated GIFs is drawing to a close, and the pace with which MP4 is supplanting animated GIFs is quickly accelerating.

Having said that, an h264 source can have magnitudes more complexity for playback, and generally the greater the compression the higher the playback complexity. Having five or so high profile multi-MB decorative videos autoplaying on a page is excessive.

They shouldn't use autoplay. They shouldn't even initialize until scrolled into view. They shouldn't all play at once. Their bandwidth usage is going to be enormous from this HNing, a single page impression pushing 15MB+ (EDIT: I hadn't really delved into it at the time given the display issues, however I grossly underestimated when I said 15MB).
Thanks - my wife is a solicitor in Scotland (and has been called to the Bar as an Advocate) and she did her LLB as a second degree as she already had a first degree. Although her route was unintentional it certainly used to be "traditional" to do law as second degree (and some universities here do an accelerated 2 year ordinary LLB) after a degree in classics or similar. She trained in the Civil Service as a solicitor (when you get a law degree you are still 3 years away from actually qualifying - you have to do a postgraduate course then do two years training in a a law firm) and their filtering criteria for trainees was that they have 2 first degrees....

Only a very small number of people do law as a second degree these days.

Amusingly, the process for training as an advocate is known as devilling - where you are apprenticed to a senior junior and during that time you are literally an advocate's devil :-)
Refactoring is something that has to be done before adding features. If you first start by adding features, ignoring the fact that the code needs refactoring, the code becomes impossible to maintain. Stopping development of new features during refactoring is also a good pratice. Obviously, the anti-practice is to refactor so often or to spend so much time refactoring that nothing useful is developed.
Good points, which the team I'm working on has shared with our lead and project manager, unfortunately things have never really improved.
You're saying you think ISPs would try and penalize all traffic by 50 or 100ms and let the big sites pay up to avoid the penalty? That seems like mustache twirlingly cruel and I'm not even sure you can do that with conventional network hardware (you'd have to buffer all that traffic in RAM).

On the other hand, if we're just talking about allowing certain companies to pay ISPs for prioritizing traffic for certain applications (VoIP, gaming), then I don't think that's such a horrible thing.
Why wouldn't the default behavior be to not connect with the AP if the required authentication doesn't match the stored one?

Then the attacker would at least have to try different auth modes until the device connects.
Hi HN users,

Since I'm a big fan of the Pomododoro technique, but never found a satisfying web app, I decided to build my own as a quick pet project.

Since you always have great advices and interesting opinions to share, I'd be glad if you could give it a quick look and share your opinions (criticisms are welcome).

Did I mention it's open-source?
There are pretty stiff penalties for arson, since you have no control over the fire after you start it.