skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jeff is spot on in his blog post.

To make an analogy, Dong Nguyen essentially tapped into the modern-day equivalent of Pac-Man Fever. In the 80s, it swept the world, to the tune of billions of dollars. It was the highest-grossing arcade game ever produced. People simply loved the game, and they couldn't get enough of clearing boards of dots, power-pellets and ghosts.

Most people probably knew nothing about who made the game, with the small exception of the corporate names on the game (e.g., Namco/Midway). Certainly, I suspect only the hardcore few would be able to name the programmer of Pac-Man, Shigeo Funaki. And I suspect that no one blinked their eyes in disdain when they saw the news reports of Pac-Man's financial success.

In a similar way, Flappy Bird took very simple game-play, and combined it with a simple challenge. This is, of course, not the first game to do this, but it took off so successfully that I suspect that a very high percentage of gamers have it installed, and even some non-gamers could likely brand-identify the game, or have at least heard of it. The power of the Internet has made Nguyen's name known, and quite sadly in some circles, despised for his financial success.

No one bemoaned Pac-Man's programmer, or Namco/Midway's success, but fast-forward from the 80s to today, and you get gems like this article [1] and its intellectual lamenting with, "[...] I begrudge a society that would turn it into a phenomenon."

I suspect that the author would have said the same about Pac-Man.

Casual games like Flappy Bird do not prevent someone from playing, say, EVE Online, to their heart's content. And, what if you just happen to like both types of games? I guess you are a real outcast at that point; a non-intellectual. To put it another way, just because you intellectually eschew casual games and choose instead to rock, say, Steel Battalion with a full-on controller [2] doesn't mean that you are necessarily leading the upliftment of society.

Fortunately, there is a game in the world for every gamer.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/02/03/flappy-bir...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Steel_Ba...
It's clear you shouldn't throw.

But correct code must assume that any function you call might throw; which is why you should use defer blocks e.g. to release resources, instead of C-style "cleanup at the bottom of the function". (Defer is also prettier IMHO)
From my vague memories of running Windows ME, that's expected behavior.
Meanwhile in the NSA canteen: "and then they said 'today we fight back' and this time they REALLY meant it, they even had banners you could copy on your website!" massive laughter

Gotta love slacktivism.
The lobbyists were lobbying to get the new system setup in a way that was favourable to them.

That doesn't mean the new system is inherently wrong.
We've actually considered doing this. Why would you like to see it, out of curiosity? Just because it'd be interesting, or in order to better understand why we're taking so long? :-)
>Can't someone write a browser extension that tracks what you like/have liked"

The issue is that most of don't want to click like, like, like on everything we "like", just to see that content.

I don't need to like HN; it's implicit in every visit I make to the site.
Everyone in US congress has the seat for life. The reelection rate is never below 80% for congress and hardly ever below that for the senate.
Telecoms: Confusing Customer Rentention with Detention
Boxer is an odd target to single out. She's not been prominent or powerful in the NSA discussion, so far as I'm aware, and the most relevant thing I see on her Wikipedia page is:

"In June 2008 Boxer spoke in the Senate in opposition to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008,[51] a pending bill in the United States Congress to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,[52] and later broke with her counterpart Sen. Dianne Feinstein and voted against it.[53]"
I agree. Though writing my assignments for a C course was made so much easier thanks to Xcode and the ability to quickly view what's in memory at a breakpoint. Sadly, the course never mentioned debuggers -- likely as a way to weed out students. I suspect this has changed since, but it's up to the prof, so who knows. Part of it is that few profs understand the practical reasons to favour some tools over others -- if you don't write the code day in and day out, you won't know which tools to recommend when. I think maybe there's room for a "practice of programming" course on methodology, tools and open source licensing.
thanks for answering the questions. i depend on node at my day job, so i am particularly interested in npm's future.

i understand someone has to pay for the servers and development time, but would it be possible to give a hint for the types of things you plan to charge for? Even just a rough sketch of "we will offer private repositories" or "we will offer support." I appreciate the "reassurances" that nothing will change today for me, but the ambiguity prevents my latent paranoia from going away.
Can you give us a list of "representatives who will invoke the change you want?" Are there any?

You are correct, though, that following the DC pattern of "follow this script while calling your congresscritters" is insufficient. This turns privacy advocates/Internet users into just another special interest group -- which is dwarfed by AARP (40+ million members) or the NRA (which managed to defeat congressional efforts at more firearm restrictions last year despite the most favorable climate for gun banning in two decades).

The HN community can do better than mere phone calls. Here are some of my suggestions from 12 years ago:
http://news.cnet.com/2010-1023-971115.html
I think Camden and other cities in similar situations can provide us with learning --

1) Can cities outlive their usefulness? My answer = yes.
2) If yes, what should happen when they do? My answer = most try to hang on or re-invent themselves, but restructuring sooner rather than later might be best.
Is it time for a GeekPAC? (2002)
Here is an example from http.Transport:

http://golang.org/src/pkg/net/http/transport.go#L408

A connection pool is kept in the transport for use with HTTP keep-alive. When an http.Client makes a request using the transport, it tries to get an idle connection, failing that it starts creating a new connection. It then selects the first available connection, either the newly-dialed one, or one that becomes available in the pool. (If the latter case, it continues opening the new connection and then sticks it into the pool.)
https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive
It has 7 to 8 hours of battery life, not 1 hour.

edit: According to the tech specs it will get a 1 hour charge after the first 3 minutes of charging.

I have the previous water-resistant model and this seems about right.
Lithium Technologies to Acquire Klout
Linkbait title aside, it's interesting that part of the Motorola play was to preserve Android... at Samsung.
Homicide rate might not correlate to robbery, harrassment, or extortion. Not to mention the political issue of richness in a nominally Communist nation.
Body Composition and Hormonal Changes under Low-Carb-High-Fat Nutrition
Ask HN: Should Microsoft rename Internet Explorer?
The truth is the modern versions of IE are actually great browsers. However, call them ghosts of atrocities past, there is still a stigma attached to the name "Internet Explorer" and cleansing it is going to be impossible. Do you not think it would be in Microsoft's best interest to change the name. IE is the butt of many jokes today.
They'd take advantage of go idioms after they've got a working compiler, a transliterated from C working compiler. Not only is translating manually boring, it's also less effective. The bugs from an automatic translator would all be from a similar class.
Well I disagree. If someone wants to give you money, just take it. You can be charitable to them if you want with your effort.
You say panic, I say exception :-)

My concern is not nomenclature, but that correct code must handle paniceptions. And that it must also handle return value errors. Go code IMHO ends up spending a lot of code on error handling, I think because of this double taxation.
Try HackerNew Chrome plugin to collapse and related features.
But panics are not exceptions. They should not be used like exceptions, and there is no "hierarchy of panic types".

They are used for things like out of bounds indexes, where in C it would simply be a segfault. A panic is a way of gracefully exiting a program that would have segfaulted otherwise. Correct code should check for out of bound indexes either way.
Want an ‘A?’ Then you better start tweeting in this professor’s class
I'm a huge fan of Node.js, but I'm getting an uneasy feeling about all the different changes and things happening. I still haven't made up my mind if it's a justified feeling or not.
I'm kept wondering how the whole npm structure will look like. At the bottom of npmjs.org it states: 'Powered by Joyent', but Nodejitsu ran the 'Scale npm' donation campaign to get funds to scale the public npm registry. But Nodejitsu acquired IrisCouch and now offers private npm services.

And now izs starts a new company npm inc. that will, well, who knows. But he's former Joyent who power npm, so will running npm transfer to npm inc.? But how does Nodejitsu or the 300K that they raised with their campaign fit into this picture?
These just keep getting better and better with every release. Vim keybinds might finally be my Firebug switch.
I feel like Firefox is getting better and better with each release. Is anyone using it as the default over Chrome.
As an update Gradle's easier to use Maven is gradually replacing Ant and has its sights on Make next. See Android for example.
People are getting more clever about it: http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/01/22/a_democrat_and_...

> A Democrat and a Republican Joined a Commission to Reform Elections. What They Did Next Will Amaze You.

>> Not really, but I figured an Upworthy headline was the best way of drawing attention to the report of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a blue/red-ribbon project that's wrapped up work one year and one day after the second Obama inaugural.
Google teams with Foxconn to build robots that replace human workers
Find your Facebook Friends Ranking Score
IF you get good teachers, etc. to live in your technocratic war zone, their high salaries jack up the cost of living

I've never heard of the cost of living anywhere going up because of an influx of highly-paid K-12 teachers.
Art thou of good contenance this day?
What do you suggest Square do? This is standard operating procedure for merchant account providers.
Bitcoin withdrawal processing suspended
My tests from dedicated servers hosted with the big three in Singapore showed this:

StarHub > DO ~70ms (via Tokyo, with NTT)
SingTel > DO ~70ms (via Tokyo, also with NTT)
M1 > DO ~210ms (via Los Angeles)

I don't have a droplet with DO to perform the reverse path.

So this looks quite unoptimised for actual Singaporean users right now.
Right, I understand that ZeroMQ is used to send and receive messages, what I mean is that there's no persistency involved so the tasks will not survive a system restart.
I won't link it here (my site is visually SFW, but deals with NSFW content regularly), but I recently wrote an article containing the story of my first computer (you can find it with a search for Women in Technology BlueWinds if you're interested).

I was too young, I don't remember much about the computer itself - but it had a big TURBO button on the front which could switch it from 20 to 40mhz. Turbo indeed.
Re: 1., we've just raised the time limit for calls to 20 minutes. Thanks for using the tool!
Is funding better or worse than corporate sponsorship? The most successful (depending on your metric of course) projects have been backed by corporate dollars. Also, not every project can be a Go or Angular with a multi-billion dollar company behind it.

All of the CPAN mirrors are paid for by somebody. Nothing's free; money is in the equation at some point.

Of course, that's a different model than VC funding. However, you're intimating that NPM isn't "real" with your last statement. The project has run for several years now. This isn't some project that came out of the chute with funding (such as Meteor).

Similar model is GitHub: long-running project/organization, took VC after a few years. In the time since they took the VC, have they become corrupted? Are they not a real community?
For sure. On the other hand, one need not forgo an appreciation of fine Bordeaux simply because they enjoy shotgunning Coors Light.
time to find another distro.
My assumption would have been that some people would use this for more persona or serious things. But after reading a few of the examples, it seems like it could turn into a sort of http://dearblankpleaseblank.com.

That site gets a good amount of traffic, but if that type of site is not your intent, I would try to leverage the look of your site and it's content to guide people in that direction.
> Don't repeating patterns increase the likelihood that the pattern is non-random with each repetition?

1. No, not for finite-length patterns anyway.

2. Your question is deeper than it appears, and it alludes to some complex theories about randomness.

Let's say I present a series of decimal digits that is a million digits long, and I claim that they're random, in this context meaning they have no exploitable internal order (i.e. have high entropy). If you understand the risks in making assumptions about randomness, and in spite of all sorts of apparent non-random sequences within the list, you might say, "the list isn't long enough to draw any conclusion about randomness." And you would be right.

My million-digit list might actually be a sequence of digits of Pi starting at some arbitrary point within Pi and extending for a million digits from that point. The list appears random, but it isn't -- it actually has very low entropy.

On that basis, guess how many digits you would need to be assured that they represent a random sequence? Spoiler: an infinite number.

All the principles that apply to a claim of randomness, apply to a claim of non-randomness, and for the same reasons.

> I am not a statistician but I do have a fair amount of background in things like information theory, and I find it very hard to believe that regularity has zero significance.

Okay. If I flip a fair, unbiased coin and record all the flips, counting heads as 1 and tails as zero, over time I will see any number of apparently significant patterns, and the longer the sequence, the more likely that I will see "significance".

In a long sequence of flips of a fair coin, for any particular sequence of length n to have >= 50% probability requires 2^n flips. For example, this means after 256 flips, the chance for an uninterrupted sequence of 8 heads has risen above 50%. Therein lies the problem -- with a large enough data set, you will see all sorts of meaningless patterns.

The only way to sort this kind of thing out is to:

1. Adopt the "null hypothesis" -- meaning start out assuming that a correlation means nothing, then gather evidence to contradict that assumption. In other words, don't start out by assuming what you must prove.

2. Consider alternative explanations for the tested outcome -- avoid confirmation bias.

3. Remember lex parsimoniae, otherwise known as "Occam's razor", the precept that the simplest explanation tends to be correct. And the simplest explanation is that a pattern that lacks an explanation, also lacks significance.

In the final analysis, one cannot make any reliable statement about a data pattern without knowing how the sequence was generated, in other words the result data ultimately has no meaning, only knowledge of the generating function can offer that kind of significance.

> If you output digits of pi long enough, they will contain this text.

Yes, but that's an argument against the meaning of perceived patterns, not in favor of it.
Show HN: Abacus – Killing The Expense Report
I think shooting it over the network is considered untrusted. Man in the middle becomes a problem.
I just did a build and sourced all the parts myself. It actually doesn't end up being much more than the Massdrop kit.
Analysis of Onboarding and Design in the Olympic Apps
I can't say from direct personal experience, but I had a friend reject a Monsanto job offer, explaining that such a first job could become a negative influence on the rest of her career. I'm not in her field, so I don't know what different kinds of employers think.
That implies there's a non-trivial number of candidates who are legitimately against the NSA.
Needs some work, but that makes quite a difference. Thanks.
There is no Such Thing as Biomedical "Big Data"
I see. This indeed adds a lot more complexity to the GC as it will have to check every integer or type that "looks" like a reference.

Does this also mean that GC times will likely be longer in Go 1.3? There is not much detailed info about the Go runtime (like we do have for Java for instance) so it would great for the Go maintainers to publish a more in-depth reference of the internals of the language in version 1.3 /
Don’t Use Mozilla Persona to Secure High-Value Data
Punch-22: A Difficult Puzzle
I wonder if Shopify actually has any input into the chargeback process and risk evaluation of accounts. Shopify Payments are "powered by Stripe" rather than something they run themselves. They do have a nice integration and you get a discount compared to using Stripe directly without any minimum volume.
The hormone levels are unlikely to be affected by cultural biases but that's not the potential weakness I'm talking about in these studies. It's during the observation, through the eyes of the parents and scientists, of what toys the children are playing with where expectations can affect the results. On top of that, you've got biases affecting what studies get published and which of those then make headlines and get repeated in blog posts like this one.
> If I were the king, I would fix

I've always thought the troops should be brought home and all those trillions spent on infrastructure and community projects within America.

Unfortunately, it's more important to spend trillions on other countries than on America and Americans.

"If Americans knew what Swedes receive for their taxes, we would probably riot."

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?artic...
It used to be that it was possible to take a snapshot of a DO droplet without shutting down the droplet, provided the droplet had 1GB of ram or higher.

Does anyone know if this is still the case?
CSS source maps! Been waiting for this one
This is very well said - this kind of change happens slowly, little by little, without a bang.

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” (Ghandi)
>You could raise lots of CA tech money, I'm sure.

To throw out Feinstein?

lol
Google, Facebook, and Twitter aren't global because they're not in the biggest country in the world...
Totally agree. Go is a superb systems language. But I wouldn't use it for a CRUD web app, nor for quasi-exploratory data pipelines, which is where IMO such generic functional combinators are clutch. It is however awesome when you've nailed down the data pipeline and you want to get a big speed improvement in a fraction of the time required to build out in C/C++.
Hey, this is awesome. Would you mind if we sent a tweet about what you did and link to that code? Any chance you might be interested in writing a guest blog on how you connected?
This sounds like more of an issue with our card payment systems rather than individual merchants. All it takes is 16 digits to fraudulently use somebody else's money and the merchant is typically liable in case of that. And to add insult to the injury, they add a $20 chargeback fee on top. The banks and processors aren't taking responsibility and instead forcing merchants whose core focus is on selling and shipping rather than the intricacies of payment handling.

Due to this lopsided arrangement, banks and processors have no reason to change the system. We should force them to take the risk of fraud; it's the only way to make the system better for everyone.
AVS does at least allow you to manually hold orders billed to a totally different zip than the shipping address. I haven't used Square's web store solution so I'm not sure if they provide this data.
On the matter of bitcoin
I had the opposite experience: Netflix was fine on Comcast, Amazon Prime was surprisingly poor.
Plus, an automatic translator? Unless it is extremely disciplined C code, that sounds harder than just translating it by hand.

It's the only way you can port without halting ongoing development. Done it. Been paid for it. It works.

EDIT: Also, if your original is highly idiomatic, and you exploit this, you can produce idiomatic code in the target language.
I think they should fork it and call it something new - something one syllable - something dangerous.
how about Singapore?
Actually Py3-support landed 6 months ago https://github.com/nvie/rq/pull/239
Is go really trying to stick to a "system level" language? The performance benchmarks I've seen seem to suggest it's no more suitable for that than Java, Haskell, and a variety of other "2 to 3 times slower than c" languages. Except I think Go might be the only one pushing itself as a system level language.
Of course they don't work. You expected something else?
South Africa. Almost an EU member. Probably.
Who is making more money than Google off Android?
Your "Features" and "Pricing" links don't work for me. (FF 27)
There should be another blog post on hacks detailing the whole workflow in the next day or two :)
Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
Yes, in general you will need to have some other mechanism other than emitting raw machine code to handle generics (unless you have a uniform value representation like MLs or Java do, but Go doesn't).
I can't find a comprehensive overview of C++ compiler performance, but this article [1] seems to point towards #includes and duplicate template instantiation. Header file hell is specific to C/C++, but it'll be interesting to see how Go handles generics to tackle the latter issue (or y'know, if they decide not to because of this issue).

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/c-compilation-speed/228701711
Paypal's Seller Protection only works if the use has a Paypal account, and has a confirmed address. It doesn't work if you use Paypal Pro or the Paypal REST API to accept straight credit cards without an account.
How to get first 20 paying customers for your startup (by Dr.Pete of MOZ)
How about simply "Talking to the customer" for a start? These types of posts would be very different if someone had talked to them in person from day one, and actually kept them up-to-date.
Yes, very much. It requires a deep understanding of the material, empathy, and abstract thinking.

You need a deep understanding of the material, obviously. You need to have a model of the correct thing in your head. The empathy bit comes in from first caring, but also being able to quiz the student's understanding so you can start to understand what the (incorrect) model is in their head.

Then you need to figure out how to build a bridge between their model, and the correct one. And you may need to build multiple bridges if the first one doesn't take.
Go's returned error allows very varied error handling if wanted/needed: http://play.golang.org/p/-2q6N08x_P

More than just the normally used: if err := foo(); err != nil; { return err }

Large code Go code basis are so much better (more maintainable) for "hyperliteral case-by-case error checking". My impression that only people who havn't written large Go projects have this complaint.

Also, there is no reason you could not define a function like:

func foobar() (fatalErr, err error)