skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you'd like to read a deep investigation into writing styles, let me suggest Clear and Simple as the Truth[0]. Steven Pinker discusses the book in a fun talk on communicating science[1].

[0] http://classicprose.com/
[1] http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-technol...
Likewise I don't understand your POV -- in fact I think you're spouting rubbish much as most advocates seem to. I've been dealing with Windows, Linux and BSD systems for 20 years and there's really not much in it between them.

The bad rep Windows gets is from idiot users clicking Ok. If we had user friendly OpenBSD desktops with idiots pushing the buttons we'd have the same statistic with a different OS.

The brand doesn't matter - the fundamental problems are the same.
You might not be able to force people to write well, but you can help them not write badly. That's the point of apps like this one - mediocre is better than bad. Once someone has improved their writing to the point where this app is no longer useful they can easily switch to something else.

Writing is a skill that few people have really learnt to do well. For them, following some "random rules" will improve what they write.

Regarding writing 500 line functions in code: very occasionally you need that, but there's nothing wrong with an IDE that points it out and asks if it's really a good idea, and for new developers who would do that sort of thing all the damn time it'd be very useful in improving what they come up with.

Learn the rules first, then learn when they don't apply.
The crying "fire" thing a is silliness that too many people unknowingly reference (it's not really a thing):

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121102/13355920920/stop-s...

All supreme courts interpretations of the constitution in the last 30 years have been in support to and helped expand the scope and authority of the first amendment.
You could achieve something similar using the simple HTTP server shipped with python: python -m SimpleHTTPServer
For the hackers, I use write-good-mode in emacs to catch passive voice (which is based on some simple shell scripts[0]). I've heard good things about diction-mode, grammar-mode and artbollocks-mode. And of course flyspell.

I find emacs very pleasing for writing text. I also use org-mode and it's LaTeX exporter extensively for publishing.

Now if only it could integrate with text-fields in my browser...

[0] http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...
Meteor 1.0 is coming
> There is no such thing as "secret assistance" in the US

US spy agencies assisting Boeing with their bid against Airbus may not be secret anymore, but it was certainly intended as such.

The US government negotiating in Russia on behalf of Visa and MasterCard may not be secret, but it's certainly not the kind of assistance smaller companies can count on.

Face it, the US government and US corporations are in bed together. They represent each other's interests. This happens on a scale you don't see in the EU, or probably anywhere else.

I don't know what economic woes you are referring to, but I don't thing selling your government to the corporations is healthy for your economy.
If you choose to slave yourself to the machine, you will produce output that reflects that. If you use the machine to improve your output, then you produce improved output with little effort. Either way, it is not the machine at fault. A frequent user would probably learn that some streaks here and there are OK, but if your entire text is colored blue that's likely to be a problem.

Personally what I need is an extension or scriptlet that embeds this into an arbitrary text box. I've struggled with adverbs in my writing. I am less worried about Hemingway about longer sentences or the use of a larger vocabulary since I'm generally writing for an audience other than the general public, though. Perhaps some tuning parameters would be nice.
> Generally the most frustrating part of freelancing is dealing with the business side of things.

I strongly disagree. The hardest part of freelancing is finding quality clients. Not finding leads, not the legal work, not the accounting, not anything else.

What would be interesting is a service that coaches clients on how to be reasonable. How to have realistic expectations, how to set a realistic budget, how to ask for the right things and when to just let the designer or developer _do their job_ .

That's a service I would pay for.
I'm very interested in using this for robotics, especially RoboCup. That that latter case, I can't use an internet connection, the robot must be fully autonomous and independent.

Can I run an instance of a wit server myself? And perhaps update its speech models regularly?
Please make one for ee cummings now.
How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates (1998)
Forcing somebody to write short sentences wouldn't improve his writing.
Neat. Along the same lines for emacs people, there's writemode-good (https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode), and for Sublime Text there's Writing Style (https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Writing%20Style).

Also, heads up that the site layout is not responsive: viewing at ~800px width places buttons all over the left side of the screen in an ugly way.
Largest Ever 400Gbps DDoS attack hits Europe uses NTP Amplification
I think a 51% attack would be really scary in this case, and quite realistic. If the US and the rest of the EU all decided they wanted some domain off the internet, combined they'd probably have enough power to fork the blockchain.
The author seems to answered his own question if you pull out some key points and examine them in a logical way:

1. Software development was tightly controlled in the 70's through a hierarchy of management (project managers, business analysts, senior programmers).

2. Today the hierarchy is gone, reduced to “team leads” and “scrum masters” with no real authority or control.

3. Today programmers left to themselves often adopt or create methodologies stricter and more filled with ritual than software development in the 70s.

4. Today he often gets involved in 1 or 2 people projects that have so much process and “best practice” that nothing of real value gets produced.

5. What makes software development work is “conceptual integrity” or common vision or that feeling working on a team where everyone clicks and things just get done.

6. He doesn't understand why he had that feeling more in the 70’s than now.

Well if you follow the logic, what is missing? The hierarchy of management. Which he seemed to blame for the original reason why software development methodology doesn't work.

I hate to admit it, but maybe the hierarchy of management added more value than we gave them credit for?

He sort of suggested finding that “feeling” in a project/team was unpredictable, random. But perhaps the hierarchy of managers actually had valuable skills that led to higher success rates of projects achieving that “feeling”? Perhaps they had a knack for picking the right people and for managing people in a way so they worked together more efficiently? Of course they weren't perfect and there were some bad apples, just like any profession.

I wonder what the demise of the hierarchy of managers was caused by? Did the hierarchy of managers lose these skills overtime and become useless? Did programmers just not recognize their value added and throw them under the bus for 30 years until they didn't have a leg to stand on? Was it pure budgetary, cut costs and get rid of the resources with the least perceived value?

DISCLAIMER: I am not a manager. I use to be very hard on managers, then I became one for a while, realized how difficult their jobs can be, and now I am one of the easiest people to manage.
The gadgets and apps that guru Nicholas Felton uses to monitor his every move
I was going to suggest this.. that people replace high fat foods with high carb foods which translate into gaining more weight. I've long said that fat doesn't make you fat, it clogs your arteries. Though the latter part of that is now up for debate based on more recent studies. You out-scienced me though.
All things considered, things that are low-fat/no-fat and low-sugar/no-sugar taste like cardboard and they're not very filling at all. I'm quite sure that our food overlords discovered that fairly quickly, and just as quickly they realized that consuming sugary bullshit had similar physiological effects compared to opiate addiction.
Yes you'll be able to run a lightweight Wit runtime locally very soon. Learning will still happen on the server. The embedded client will upload its usage data to feed training, and download updated models (for both speech and natural language understanding).
U.S. judge blocks warrantless searches of Oregon drug database
Yes, the idea is to have something that you can do with some low effort. We can call it aerobic brain activity.
I'm not sure I agree on the severity, but of course Apple is being dumb by simply not communicating with the guy about it. Jeez.
Does anyone have any recommendations for the other side of this - translating text into speech?

I know there are a million APIs for this, but most sound awful. I'd love a service that sounds as good as Siri.
For small messages it will be slightly slower in terms of CPU time because of JS vs native DOM parser. But for small messages the time taken with modern JS engines should be less than a monitor refresh.

For small messages on fast networks there really isn't very much time to save, so for this worst case in terms of looking for somewhere to optimise I think it is best to aim for no significant performance impact. The best improvements are where the messages are very large, on slow networks, or where the server can write out a stream.

The XHR2 spec specifies "While the download is progressing, queue a task to fire a progress event named progress about every 50ms or for every byte received, whichever is least frequent"

Because of "whichever is the least frequent", for messages that take less than 50ms from first byte to last, Oboe.js will get only one callback from the browser and notify all callbacks from inside the same frame of Javascript execution. This is exactly what we want it to do since it avoids rendering happening between the callbacks which would be very bad for overall download time.

I'm in two minds if Oboe should be dropped in to replace JSON AJAX calls, because everything will be accessed from a slow network one day, or if it should be used only for the very large, streamed REST responses.
Google announces a major Cloud Platform event. Urs is keynoting
Sprint CEO: Just give us time, and we’ll build the 4G network of your dreams
Your doctor is awesome. "The AAP recommends this, but only because it's trying to fight childhood obesity. Your kid is nowhere near obese so let's give her the best diet for her as an individual."
It may very well have worked for you. The data seems to a show that about 1/3 stay the same, 1/3 get better and 1/3 get worse. When I say psychoanalysis I mean it in the classical Freudian sense, and yes there are some things that seem to work better than others. I read that the average American has .8 intimate friendships - I think having a relationship where you feel comfortable expressing some of your emotion and inner life is valueable for sure and can be healing.
The Mask, a malware campaign that remained undetected for 7 Years
zipfile.zip: $(wildcard dir/*.c)
zip -ur $@ $?

Note, $? will only include the prerequisites that are newer than the zipfile, and therefore, will only update the files that have changed. You will not be re-zipping things repeatedly.
You do realize that your "Anarcho-capitalist" solution describes the EPA's history. Precisely the moment when the US Government declared ownership of the Mississippi River, and all federal lands under its protection.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/33/652

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_National_River_and_...

Your solution is really called "internalizing the externality", and a near hundred-year-old analysis can be found in Coase's Theorem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

Your solution requires "some entity" to create the concept of ownership, and then sell pieces of the shared resource to other people. You ensure that an owner exists for every part of the river, and then you get an economically optimal solution.

But WHO declares ownership? WHO enforces this ownership? If you believe in "private protection agencies" and "private courts", it is obvious that ownership of "The River" should be settled in the "private courts".

Eventually, you start building an entity functions exactly like the current US Government (except you use Libertarian friendly words to describe it). So please, describe to me a technique that isn't currently being used by the US Government to solve the problem of Externalities. Otherwise, you end up just describing our current Governing philosophy.
Pasting "best" HN comments in I get:

Grade 10,
Grade 6,
Grade 11,
Grade 14,
Grade 14,

And copy and pasting the whole page gets me Grade 9 (and some serious bugs (http://i.imgur.com/U6sK1mM.png?1) which I think may have crashed my browser.)

"New" HN comments:

Grade 12,
Grade 7,
Grade 7,
Grade 5,
Grade 7,

And the whole page is Grade 8

My own comments apparently have a lot of unreadable sentences but they aren't that bad. (this comment is Grade 3! Yay.)
Isn't this just SMS "Flash" messages? That's how I was told the voicemail count worked when the iPhone came out on O2 in the UK all those years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Message_Service#Flash_SMS
No, you are wrong, sir. There are many who are recording all Bitcoin network traffic, myself included. I can see that Gox had all their outbound transactions slightly changed and rebroadcast. After that went public, being now outed and in the open, having nothing to gain from stealth the attacker moved to attacking everyone they could.
Please don't mix tab and spaces :( https://github.com/goldenice/Kamele-Framework/blob/master/sy...

Using proper namespaces would be great, the `System` namespace will probably collide with other projects. `Kamele\System` would be much better.

Using PDO would be much better than the `mysqli` functions.

Where are the unit tests?
Taking a crazy risk is what the VC is paying you to do. If it didn't take a crazy idea to make it big, everyone would see it, and many would be doing it. From the point of view of the VC: how much of your net worth would you bet on a 1% chance of a 10K payout, if you cold make dozens of such bets?
> So, when tourists enter the US, do they need permission to leave with souvenirs?

Yes, though there's almost certainly an exemption for items worth less than $x00 and/or for personal use.
You probably can use machine metrics to have a good overview of some properties of the text; one of the more useful machine metrics that comes to mind is vocabulary estimation.

I guess personally I'm a bit put off by the UI. I'm reminded of a scene in the recent movie Her, where the AI offered some suggestions but only after being explicitly asked to do so. In HemingwayApp, the immediate red/yellow highlight will nudge the user into fixing the paragraph, whereas a more subtle colour and/or style might allow him more space to think "the computer is wrong this time, I like it more the way it is".
It is just a marketing gag of a Belgian advertising agency.

Nothing real, no real-time video. Just something pre-recorded in loop at http://spyonthensa.com/video/dag.mp4
Er, are you saying they were incompetent because they were Indians?
As opposed to Spark, the microcontroller platform. As opposed to Spark, the resilient distributed data system. As opposed to Spark, the open source IM client.
I know about the studies, and the explanations are nice, I didn't have those before. I get that we have no current significant reason to fear anything, which is why I'm not exactly panicking and vowing to stop using cell phones. But this doesn't enable me to completely discard my fear either. You're only corroborating my point.

The only slight recommendations that are issued are for longer term studies - simply because cell phones haven't really been in heavy usage for more than 20 years. Pure fear of the unknown, despite study after study showing no effect.

I would call 420,000 people over 20 years insignificant because there are other cancers where even longer timelines are required for symptoms to show. For example, abestos and mesothelioma.

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/i...

Mesothelioma

Mesothelioma is a rare form of cancer that most often affects the thin membranes lining organs in the chest (pleura) and abdomen (peritoneum). Mesothelioma is closely linked with asbestos; most cases of mesothelioma result from direct exposure to asbestos at work. This cancer is also linked to all forms of asbestos, although amphibole asbestos appears to be more potent (causes cancer at lower levels of exposure) than chrysotile..

Studies have found an increased risk of mesothelioma among workers who are exposed to asbestos. There is also an increased risk of mesothelioma among family members of workers and people living in the neighborhoods surrounding asbestos factories and mines. Although the risk of developing mesothelioma increases with the amount of asbestos exposure, there is no clear safe level of asbestos exposure in terms of mesothelioma risk.

Mesotheliomas typically take a long time to develop. The time between first exposure to asbestos and diagnosis of mesothelioma is usually 30 years or more. Unfortunately, the risk of mesothelioma does not drop with time after exposure to asbestos. The risk appears to be lifelong.

Unlike lung cancer, mesothelioma risk is not increased among smokers.
I'd definitely pay for a Chrome addon or desktop version of this.
When you hit an SSL site, the remote server (the one you're browsing) presents a number of certificates. One for the actual secure domain, and one or more for the CA that signed that certificate (sometimes more than one because the CA's have intermediate keys. A key which signed a key which signed... etc)

The CA itself is not a party to this exchange, they only provide the end product - a signed certificate.

If you trust the CA (in your browser config), you also trust by extension every certificate that CA has ever signed (barring revocation lists).
If you paste that URL into a feed reader it should find the feed link from the page source.

It's http://blog.vjeux.com/feed, in case your feed reader doesn't do that for some reason.
Several years ago at conversion voodoo we studied the impact on conversion of writing at an 8th grade reading level which is about the average American.

It, of course, improved conversion and it turns out there is already quite a bit of algorithmic work on the topic to help tune your ad copy.

So I am a believer in the hypothesis that simplicity and clarity, in marketing anyways, is a worthwhile pursuit.

I am going to test this Hemingway along the same lines - take some longer form copy, run it through and test output.

(1) http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increasing-site...
:-) a lot of people hoped that this was an opensource implementation of the protocol that could easily be ported to Android I bet...
From Java to Scala: A Higher Order
Google Translate seems to think Roman Digerberg translates to: "Digestion novel Berg"
They take 10% of the project.
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

Billions of dollars of exports to China, month after month after month after month.
There's a complete /doc folder that could be a gh-pages branch instead of that useless readme.md
Melikes
er, "put some headphones on to reduce the odds of someone interrupting [you/him/her/null]."
Veusz: a free GUI scientific plotting package
Lechal – Interactive Haptic Footwear
As a former teacher at one of those camps, I can attest to having kids there who loved being there and learning. What kids end up doing in their summers should be a ongoing dialogue between the parent and their child, without any voice overpowering the other.
You can give it a string or a single file, not only a dir.
Another question - do we know who made this app? I'm curious as to the security of their servers.
Hmmm... thanks for commenting, acqq, but four out of nine sentences in your comment are hard to read. You also used four adverbs, try and aim for two or less.
Exactly. Strunk and White actually devised their "rules" without the exact analysis of the real texts. Likewise, I can imagine HemingwayApp giving the real Hemingway bad notes.
Final Fantasy XIV: new trailer, final date for PS4 release
Do you feel a sense of justice now?
Neat!

From their JS:

readinglvl = getReadingLevel(paragraphs, sentences, words, chars);
[..]
function getReadingLevel (p, s, w, c) {
var r = Math.round((4.75 * (c / w)) + (0.5 * (w / s)) - 21.43);
return r;
}

So it's a slightly modified http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index (uses 4.75 instead of 4.71 .
I wrote a Java applet that will show you how to avoid some of these vulnerabilities. pm me for the link... ;-)
Certainly looks like it, when you compare against the screenshots that appear on a google image search for ios sms flash.

I guess this is a "feature", then.
hdmoore re-disclosed this back on mar 2 2010. nothing new here. more about this:

https://labs.ripe.net/Members/mirjam/ntp-reflections

templates from the team cymru guys to secure your ntp installations, which have also been around a while.

http://www.team-cymru.org/ReadingRoom/Templates/secure-ntp-t...
>but the rest did taste different/worse than the milk which you can buy in Germany

I think this might be the difference in how the cows are raised and how often they are milked, perhaps. And their diet. In the US we go for quantity over quality.

I don't know about milk but I know that for eggs it makes a HUGE difference. When I lived in Europe they only sold eggs that were higher quality. The yolks were bright orange and the taste was amazing. In the US most of the eggs have pale yellow yolks because of the chickens' diet being mostly corn soy instead of natural grass or whatever chickens eat and they are raised in stressful conditions. The taste is diluted.

I mostly buy my eggs straight from the farm here in the US. I can see the chickens when I go, they are wandering around on open pasture. The eggs are like the ones from Europe. In the grocery store buying the ones labelled "free range" gives you similar eggs.
You lose mass by exhalation of CO2, not defecation. Since you inhale O2 and exhale CO2, you don't need to inhale more than you exhale (a mathematical impossibility anyway, of course) to lose weight.
† Prices are lower, not cheaper.
>> a single competent westerner (of any descent whatsoever)

> are you saying they were incompetent because they were Indians?

Quite obviously not.
* Not a composer package

* Uses arcane define() statements to set configuration

* No ORM -- provides a slim wrapper around mysqli

* Uses singleton classes -- makes any potential unit testing very cumbersome

* Rudimentary routing system -- doesn't support anything beyond /$CONTROLLER/$ACTION/$ARGS...

* Rudimentary templating system that does simple string-replacement -- doesn't support looping or conditional control structures

* Database::safeQuery() is anything but safe, in fact it's quite dangerous -- prepared statements should be used at a minimum rather than blind string replacement (see mysqli::prepare())

This seems like it was an interesting learning exercise for the author, but it's not much beyond that.

The next step would probably be to make it PSR-1 and PSR-2 compliant (note how public/private accessors are absent in many places, and indentation swaps between spaces and tabs), and make it fit within the composer packaging system.
FBI offers $10,000 for 'laser strike' info