skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An odd thing about Alexander's work on pattern languages is that, despite people's enthusiasm, Alexander himself considered it to be a failure. There's a chapter in Richard Gabriel's "Patterns of Software" (http://dreamsongs.org/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf) that has an interesting discussion on this.
No. Wrong. It is current and it is a crisis when campaign finance is essentially unlimited and politicians are more accountable to their financiers than their constituents. American politics were bad and they're getting worse post-Citizens United.
I've never really met a "normal" engineer. Either they are incredibly naive, or really odd, or behave strange when in a group.

There are certain things you pick when you study liberal arts, just by being among other English majors.
From their donation page, donations are not tax-deductible (for individuals at least; businesses may be able to expense them).

Nevertheless, I donated $50 just for the excellent work they do on OpenSSH.
I don't think fuzzix was trying to divert the discussion onto Perl, but citing it as an example of a language generally agreed to do an excellent job of handling character encodings in which it still isn't true (as the article alleges for Tcl) that "encodings are not a problem - they just work".

The purpose of the comment seems clear enough to me: to point out two claims made by the article that seem implausibly optimistic:

1. That i18n "just happens", which as fuzzix says is surely impossible unless Tcl includes magical machine translation facilities.

2. That "encodings are not a problem - they just work", which would require Tcl to tell by some ingenious means what encoding is used by any given file -- something that Perl, despite being exactly the sort of language that doesn't mind the kind of heuristic complexity it would take to do this well, and being generally acknowledged to do a good job of handling Unicode, punts on).
Here's the link to the Netflix documentary -

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Square/70268449

It's not yet available to public but you can watch the trailer and save it to your list.
What makes it more risky to do a start-up in Japan?
As someone who is new to frontend/js development; Bower is a life savior.
When you spot someone blaming, try not to assign blame when you reply. It interferes with forward movement in the conversation. Also, everyone makes mistakes every now and again. Shit happens.
To state the problem explicitly, internal storage format of strings doesn't mean you can handle all data streams seamlessly. Internal consistency is fine, but ultimately your program will have I/O.

If I open an ISO-8859-15 or UCS-2 file in a Tcl program, how is this handled? Does it seamlessly detect encoding and translate to UTF-8 or is there more to this issue than what's stated in the article? Also, are the strings stored in a canonicalised form? If not, how simple is it to perform normalisation?

I brought up Perl because it's my experience of a language with excellent encoding support and helps make the point that the issue is probably more complex than just how strings are stored and manipulated internally.
Have you already seen it? If so, how?
I think the fact that two people suggesting this idea chose two completely different names to replace "Monad" demonstrate pretty well why trying to use an "intuitive" name is a bad idea.

I can just about get behind "Mappable" for Functor, but there simply isn't a unifying notion that explains what a Monad is in one word. Some Monads are better described by their join, and others are better described by their bind. You call IO a "freakish outlier", but Reader, Writer and State all follow a similar notion of sequence.
I find it funny that mother of all package managers, Perl's CPAN is only mentioned in a footnote.
Indonesian Geologist says region is perfect match for Plato's Atlantis
Great overview, but do you think it's possible to compare package managers between different programming languages? I mean they all work quite differently when it comes to dependencies, build process etc. I'm a Python coder & pretty happy with PIP and PYPI...
Growing up we went to the local public school and took art and physical education.

In high school, I played varsity soccer, and ran track at nearby public school, so I knew most of the kids there.

I also worked often, and met quite a few people that way.

If I could change anything about my social activities, it would be to live closer to where things actually happened. Growing up in the middle of nowhere in Maine gets boring :)
Yeah, but I don't think freehunter was invoking white line unConstitutional things, which cover your first two items.

The latter two are just reflections on shifting cultural trends. E.g. replace sharks with wolves for the first ... but the latter is cute. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wetlands....
>But there is no requirement that everyone on Earth only accept things based on empirical evidence.

You'd get laughed out of the left wing political sphere if you went around saying that.
I'm getting my fizz buzz on.
Photoshop Adds In 3D Printing Tools
If this thinking, that "we will do anything to prevent another terrorist attack, including give up our liberties", is acceptable, then why isn't giving up guns acceptable to prevent the next school massacre?
"Ah, so I'm calling for the ban of something I have no idea about."

Yep, not much better than the stereotypical conservative politician in that regard.
They really should have added CPAN (for perl) to their list. Perl might not be the most popular language nowadays, but in my opinion, their package manager gets a lot of things right...

* centrally hosted

* mirrored all over the world

* packages are automatically checksummed & the checksum is compared on install

* is is quite easy to publish packages

and very important in my opinion

* it encourages you to write tests. Unit tests included in packages are automatically executed when it is installed. Many systems (semi)-automatically report back when the installation of a package fails. Hence you get tests on tons of platforms for your package

* pod documentation is automatically available on cpan.
Go read http://www.futurealoof.com/posts/the-san-francisco-safety-ne...
Startups 2.0: A Cambrian Moment
He'll look bad when his failure to react to some threat on time leads to some unfortunate incident.
A fellow Christian and scientist named Dr. James Tour explained that many creationists do not understand the limits of the scientific method. Dr. Tour concludes, "I am sympathetic to the arguments on the matter and I find some of them intriguing, but the scientific proof is not there, in my opinion."

http://www.jmtour.com/personal-topics/the-scientist-and-his-...

So in response to people clamoring for creationism in the classroom, he suggests this:

"So what should be taught in schools regarding evolution? As I wrote, I am not a proponent of Intelligent Design for the reasons I state above: I can not prove it using my tools of chemistry to which I am bound in the chemistry classroom; the same tools to which I commensurately bind my evolutionist colleagues. But I think that a better approach might include more teaching about evolution, namely coverage of legitimate scientific criticisms of neo-Darwinism and disputes about the origin of the first life. That would be more balanced."
Pentagon Papers leaker Ellsburg discovers being surveilled pre-leak on Reddit
There are parents in the US that use homeschooling as a tool for religious indoctrination.

Case in point: I was given Christian-themed workbooks and presented anti-evolution texts. Today, I don't belong in either camp. However, who knows how I would have turned out if not for unfettered Internet access and a degree of laxness in the indoctrination efforts.
F#'s big brother, OCaml, has this: http://try.ocamlpro.com
The best part is that since OCaml can compile to JS, it's completely offline !
Nice! I have about half a dozen projects that could use this.

A question to no company in particular, though this seems to be a good place to ask.

Why are you not taking backorders? I have noticed, across multiple startups and other electronics companies, that the pattern seems to be:

1) Produce $QUANTITY items in the first production run
2) Sell out in $RIDICULOUSLY_SHORT_TIME
3) Order $QUANTITY * $MULTIPLE while telling potential customers, "We ordered more from the manufacturer, check back later!"

The last step turns getting an item into a sort of lottery. If you take backorders, though, you get a defined backlog to work through. Your customers will definitely get what they want (eventually). Plus, you know what $MULTIPLE should be going forward because you have a defined set of work for the future. I spent the first four years of my career as an EE with an aerospace company, and for us having a backlog was a good thing (as long as we could meet our contractual obligations, of course). Few, if any, hardware startups seem to be embracing this concept.
I, and I'm sure the rest of HN, loves F.lux...but is there a reason why this needs to be posted every month or two? There hasn't even been an update (and the promised OSX update is no where to be seen)
I'd still pay for Rdio before Spotify. Just my two cents.
Which makes it clear the author knows very little about math.
Can RCN still see your password?
shoulda been home schooled
>Allowing home schooling is even more sick than that kind of bullshit these Texans are doing.

I agree in principle, but what if Christian religious ideals were compulsorily taught in Texas public schools?

>Not to mention the fact that home-schooled kids are far, far behind "ordinary schooled" kids in terms of knowledge. How should they be other, after all?

I am an instructor at a small College in Texas, and I have had a few home-schooled students (and perhaps there were some that I did not recognize). After my experience with them I can say the following: One performed significantly better than public school students in at least one subject (math in one memorable case). Most performed worse or seemed deficient in at least one subject. All seemed to lack social skills to some degree. As an example, the student who was so good at math had no idea of the existence of the civil rights movement of the 1960's. There were other gaps in his knowledge of recent history, but that one stuck out the most to me.
This guy doesn't seem to understand the real differences between java/clojure packaging, and scripting language packaging.

Ruby's "gems" are source packages. When a gem is installed, arbitrary code is executed, C stubs (or even C libraries!) are compiled, and the resulting artifacts can be very different on different systems. Some Ruby gems even modify the Ruby code at install-time. The same is true for Perl (CPAN) and Python (setuptools, pip, etc)

Java and Clojure packages are artifacts. Each jar is a finished, built product. If it has JNI stubs, those stubs were pre-built against a specific version. The artifact is identical on every installed system. No arbitrary code is executed. Reasoning about the contents of a Clojure package does not require me to solve the halting problem.

The artifact approach is unambiguously better for any production deployment. The source-based approach found in Ruby, Perl, and Python is a problem for me more often than a solution. It is hypothetically great that I can use the same "gem" on OSX and Linux, but it is more important to me that I get consistent deployments on two different Linux systems.
Having a long list of skilled friends and colleagues is categorically not the same as having potential co-founder material. I dated a whole heck of a lot of girls before I married one. If you're not some wet-behind-the-ears kid fresh out of college and you've built a real network, your network consists of experienced grownups who likely have families, standards of living, and career paths. It's not easy to get those people to give up their current velocity and expose their lives to the risks and challenges of a startup.

Of all the friends and colleagues I've developed over two decades in the industry, I have two that I've seriously considered for co-founders, and I can't pry either of them loose. One is working with me on the company as my IP lawyer, just not as a co-founder. The other I'm hoping to get as an early hire when the company is farther along. There are lots of other friends with great skills that I won't consider for co-founder because I don't think they'd be a good fit, for reasons that are personal for each one.

This isn't a reflection on me or on the idea. It's a reflection on the reality that real grownups with real commitments can't always just drop everything and start anew. And these friends are valuable to me because they're experienced and I have worked with them before, and they're happy and honored to help out as advisors and sounding boards.

I can tell you from hard experience that there's a good reason the industry is down on solo founders. It's incredibly hard. But looking for co-founders isn't necessarily a good option. If you can't find one right away, looking is time-consuming and difficult with no guarantee of success, not if you have standards. Which is a better use of my time - developing product, or looking around for someone to help me? And by the time I'm far enough along that it becomes much easier to bring someone in, are they co-founders, or hires?
Fascinating given the attention that FreeBSD was given (and was able to raise) when posted on HN about their own funding problems.
I agree with sanxiyn's take, especially regarding disruptive ideas. There have been some incredible Japanese inventors, and groups that are willing to take huge risks. The multiple innovations in both the Prius and Wii are two high-profile examples.

Three other points I would like to share come from discussions with Japanese friends over the years:

- For men in certain industries, there is a strong social encouragement of working for large companies for decades, and the expectation at many (but not all) corporations is that once you are hired, you are in for life. The companies make it easy to do so -- I have a friend at a large electronics company who said they took care of housing, relocation, even a company hospital ("hospital" was the term he used, although I suppose it could have been a clinic).

- Entrepreneurs are seen as somehow tricky or ethically lacking. This was expressed to me by middle-aged salarymen at giant multinationals a few years ago, so I don't know if the attitude has changed.

- Large companies have extensive and deep supplier relationships that discourage taking a chance on an upstart.

I'd like to hear the observations of other HNers who are Japanese or have long experience in the country.
They did:

> Date: 2013-12-17 18:20:48

It just took a month to have this thread on HN (there were others).
Just to make the call to action a little more direct, the donation link is here:

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html
Karma whoring reposters have leaked from Reddit.
More importantly, without CPAN, we might not have things like pip and npm.
I think it's a symptom of corruption of the system's built-in checks and balances. The executive branch is much more powerful now than it used to be, and is the only branch that is composed entirely of a single party. The only politically homogenous branch is now far-and-away the most powerful.
I think if it's a client situation there are ways to use Agile approaches and still give them fixed bids. The initial setup is wasteful, but from what I've seen once you deliver regularly you build trust, and they learn that they can control risk in other ways.

As to talent, I have the reverse view: by putting people in boxes, waterfall-ish processes train people to look untalented. I think perfectly ordinary people can do Agile processes as long as there's good mentoring and institutional support while they learn to step outside their boxes and make shit happen. After that, nobody wants to go back to being a doll in somebody's Manager Barbie Dream Office playtime.
Ah, genres.

In the 90's, I was into Breakbeat Hardcore and then later Jungle, which transformed into Drum & Bass, which was subdivided over time into Ragga, Neurofunk, Tech Step, Hard Step, Jump-Up, Clown Step, Liquid Funk, Ambient Drum & Bass, Drumstep and so on.

Of course, what I understand under "Drum & Bass" is very different from a 18 year-old teenager who thinks late-period Pendulum is the greatest thing on earth.

Now, during the early 00's a lot of the old-schoolers were annoyed with the direction drum and bass took. The tracks became cheesier and cheesier, and a lot of the old vibe was gone.

They turned to Garage, Grime and Breaks and found a fertile playing ground in the fledgling Dubstep scene. Lo' and behold, there it was, the fat dubby bass of their youth.

Alas, again, an 18-year old teenager today has a very different picture of "Dubstep" compared to that of the people who originated the sound. No more dub, a lot of cheese. Somewhat similar to the entire drum and bass story. The genre has been appropriated by the masses.

And well, the circle goes on and on. The same thing applies to older genres such as "Electro", which in the 80's meant something entirely different from what it is now.

So in a sense, how useful are genres really?
Famo.us Stress Test Demo
For all the java devs who can scape maven insanity exists ivy.
Tell that to my openly lesbian mayor. Or go look at the AP computer science results from 2013--most diverse.

Way to just parrot nonsense though!
Why Your Customers Should Be Doing Your Marketing
Yes. As an anecdotal at a startup I worked at years ago the founders best friend who had become COO would bring women up to the office after hours and fire call center employees at random to show off "his power in the company." Another time the company was having a hard time paying the bills so they fired quite literally half the staff seemingly at random and then delayed their final paychecks.
F.lux (or something similar) is one of those things that should come pre-configured with each operating system. I find it indispensable for coding at night (and I use Photoshop quite a bit, too.) Shame there isn't a way to do this on iOS without jailbreaking.
Open source/linux version: http://jonls.dk/redshift/

(apt-get install redshift)
You have a long list of people who are potential technical cofounders? I'm technical myself and people approach me at least once a month asking if I'd like to join (or know someone who would) their project. I know a bunch of developers but few of them are interested in startup jobs because they make loads in BigCorp and the rest are already working on a project somewhere. I'm based in Europe but my gut tells me it's similar in many places.
Good point. I used to be more sympathetic to that line of reasoning. It's tightly coupled to the argument for the existence of state secrets... granting the state the power not to act in a fully transparent manner.

How might any institution act if it wanted to earn the credibility to behave in a way that was non-transparent to its constituents?

A firm might pay out consistent dividends or go public and comply with the additional regulatory requirements. A government might declassify information as quickly as possible to prove that information was classified judiciously (once the classified status was no longer needed).

In the US, there is still lots of classified information that is decades old. Clearly the government feels no need to earn its credibility when it comes to what information may be classified and for what purpose (or for how long). For a long time this was fine b/c the public had no good reason not to trust.

Things like WikiLeaks and Snowden's leaks have given us insight into the kinds of things that are classified. The most damning in my opinion were the WikiLeaks revelations that information was classified during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that effectively filters out bad news from the information available to reporters. This is not judicious use of secrecy, it's using secrecy to achieve a propaganda motive.

Snowden's leaks reveal more than just the existence of a secret program, they reveal that the program was deliberately extralegal and far-reaching in a way that normal legal and law enforcement processes would never have allowed to happen.

It comes down to the question of whether we value (at a basic level) the rule of law, or if we prefer to be ruled by a trusted council of elders that makes secret decisions on our behalf without any kind of transparency or accountability.
The big lie is that surveillance has to do with nation security. It doesn't. You build a surveillance system to suppress political descent not stop terrorist attacks. Business has big plans and they don't want some republic to vote and screw things up for them. They have world to conquer. Follow the money.
I didn't really follow that. Doesn't that still leave a token (the encrypted password that is sent with each request) that I can steal from your phone and use to log in to your account and impersonate you?

Sounds like a complicated way of saying "don't store anything on the phone and remember a token instead of the password"
There wouldn't be a service without free users. Also, tell me you signed up for premium without trying it first.
D3 Plugins: Truly Interactive Matplotlib In Your Browser
Pros and Cons of Ruby/Rails and Nodejs/Angular/Express for a beginner in 2014?
A fairly simple question to ask but probably pretty complex to answer. I have limited web development experience (HTML, CSS, a bit of JS) and I'm looking to broaden my horizons by learning both Ruby/Rails and Node/etc...

My question is, which one should I concentrate on first and why? I realize that Rails is a framework while NodeJS is a platform (with Express being the framework) but I see a lot of people saying that Rails can do anything Node can do and vice versa. So, why should I learn one first over the other? Is it a waste of time to learn both?
Related, in learning either Rails or Node what other tech should I concentrate on? Coffeescript? SASS? Bootstrap? Other suggestions?
great write up. one thing to remember when traversing the DOM using native APIs whitespace matters.

e.g.
<div>#textnode

<span>#textnode</span>#textnode

</div>
Splitting a file into parts using PHP
Producer: NSA revelations vindicate CBS drama
I was fortunate enough to catch a viewing in New York. It was shown at a handful of theaters nationwide, for only a week in each city.
Clicked the link, clicked the browser back button to come back to HN, did not work :(
I hope that the lite plan will feature auth handling, I can't imagine the service being useful in most cases without it.
Thanks this was actually a really fascinating anecdote which gives a pretty unique perspective on digital crypto-currencies.
Done. Reading this is sad.
Religious or atheist, uninformed/ill-informed voters and naive policy pushers are existential threats to a free and open society.

Please slow down and use some "common sense" and reasoning before allowing your emotional ranting about how other people (religious folks in this case) lack reasoning and logic.
relevant: http://xkcd.com/1053/

I'm happy to assume that the reason why flux getting reposted and more importantly why it keeps getting upvoted to the front page is because new people are hearing about this great tool everyday.
While I technically agree with the article, OP really takes some liberties with definitions. Yes, technically logic > math, but I have yet to meet someone who was "afraid of math" but awesome at logic.

The bottom line is you don't need to be a mathematician or even a B-average math student to program, but if you are afraid of the math content in most standard CS curricula (calc, linear algebra, discrete mathematics) you should probably not be a software programmer
> 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses [annually?]
We are constantly adding new package managers to our system. CPAN and Nuget are already on our radar. We will update the blog post in a couple months with them.