skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author points out that "worse" opposed to "the right thing" is better in terms of life expectancy. As being simpler, "worse" has better survival characteristics to evolve toward something satisfying (opposed to the extreme difficulty to figure out the right thing from the first attempt).

This is totally similar to the lean startup methodology in use today. Making something "worse" reduce the length of the feedback loop, allowing more flexibility, thus being better positioned to survive.

Javascript is a good example as the REPL (read eval print loop) allow beginners to start and see results right away which is very encouraging and easier to assimilate.
Report: NSA bulk metadata program doesn’t cover cellphones
Isn't it how the insurance works(and the very point of it)?
Spreading the risk(and cost) over multitude of individuals?
I his words utterly silly
How would that work? Just detect signals with an abnormally high RMS and block them?
Dong Nguyen as a developer might be a smaller name but I guarantee you the ability to put "from the developer of Flappy Bird" is going to have similar effects to being TV famous.
CEO of Baidu, Third Richest man in China -says Bloomberg
Sleep Researchers Say Brining a Smartphone into the Bedroom Causes Insomnia
Many Americans now bring their smartphones into the bedroom, especially to use them as alarm clocks. But that may be a recipe for insomnia, studies show.
Why can't people just accept his decision? Let him do whatever he wants.
Loop Recording and Comping in Ableton Live
Does anyone really grasp what it must be like to become somewhat famous or rich overnight in a poor country? The amount of attention (normally bad) must be horrible. What if the platforms that made this game possible to help a developer make their success more manageable?
No, that's not even remotely an accurate analogy. Computer science is a branch of applied mathematics; not a physical science. Engineers need to have a basic understanding of core physics principles in order to do good work. That analogy doesn't hold with respect to programming and CS. A better analogy is that CS is to programming as number theory is to arithmetic: a person doesn't have to know what a "field" is in order to compute 2+2, or to be able to solve incredibly complex computing problems in general.
> Population growth is a fundamentally exponential process

No it isn't. If everyone has one or less children, the population does not grow exponentially.
It is a bizarre conglomeration between CS, Mathematics, and Industrial Engineering. It is distinct from math in much the same way that CS is distinct from math.
Nobody prevents the manufacturing to put some electronic bits before the speakers to cap the maximum power. Even better, teach the sound card to do that.
I Took Off My Hijab
I've used Arch linux on my main computer for the past ~4 years, but I'm considering using Debian on my next computer, just to give it a shot as my daily driver.

Debian packages aren't necessarily much (any?) more stale than they are in Arch. It depends on whether you're using stable, unstable, or testing. (If I remember correctly, "unstable" is actually fairly stable, whereas "stable" is more like an LTS. "testing" is closer to Arch, though less "bleeding edge" than Arch is.)
Improved PostgreSQL support for Django
Mailcap, HTML and AppArmor
Secret court approves Obama’s small tweaks to phone metadata collection
How do rubygems work anyway?
A brief history of the evolution vs. creationism debate
This situation reminds me a little of Notch.

Maybe we should have a meetup for introverted nerds who have become wildly successful but have not found happiness with their success? When the event happens we can turn off all the lights and talk in the dark.
It made me feel so much better, reading this. I thought it was some kind of personal failing that I can't keep up with all the changes. I definitely feel the hot breath of the steamroller, but in a way I'm enjoying the ride.
I do not know if Poettering creates good code. He surely creates successful code, though: Gnome, PulseAudio, Avahi, systemd.
I agree, 'There's more then one way to skin a cat' no harm by what method one enters the field ,so long as the catfish hits the fry pan!
Tim Armstrong blaming Obamacare (its mandate for medical coverage for situations like this) for the benefit cuts also has an interesting implication:

If not for Obamacare, AOL would have provided a insurance plan that wouldn't have covered this child, and instead left her to die and her family in a permanent state of medical bankruptcy.

ETA: For the record, I think most insurance policies have covered this for awhile. But Armstrong's either very confused, or, more likely, just struggling to find a way to point fingers at anything who's not him.
IPv6 domain readiness tester
An almost grad. Never got around to finishing a paper for a seminar, which was needed to satisfy a writing requirement.
Peter Bright gives a very good comeback to the statements that the google employee made.

With Android 4.4 I felt disappointed that it was just an excuse to integrate more the platform to google services, so, google become the real an unquestionable controller of Android.

The "Android is an open platform" is just a fallacy.
The Persistence of Memory?
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales: 'It's true, I'm not a billionaire. So?'
Show HN: Flappy Bird clone using the Chromecast SDK
Uses a custom cast receiver
>The problem was that they really believed he was guilty,

Right, so the process failed (after the agents failed). Nothing stopped the FBI from harming the guy despite their total lack of actual evidence.

> The problem was that they really believed he was guilty,

People will make mistakes. The system has to allow for that. But it didn't.
Stripe bar none.
Story of recovery
Testing performance of C99 types within a game data structure
If I wanted to download my mbox file from Gmail and reupload it at a later date to Gmail (possibly another of my accounts), I could do that without a problem, right? Or will they just be a jumble of emails, out of order or something? I suppose at the least, they won't retain their labels.
Even so, there's a point of fame/money/success beyond which most people are uncomfortable.

Look at lottery winners. I would certainly not want to win the lottery, because most winners end up having a terrible life.

Also, lots of people enjoy shooting things, but being the inventor of the gun must have been a pretty heavy burden. Just because something is enjoyable, doesn't necessarily mean it's "good" overall...
Armstrong's quotes are quite deplorable and the backpedaling is cringe-worthy but all i could think of while reading the article is Mrs. Lovejoy from the simpsons, "Won't somebody think of the children?!"
If that were the case, I can't help thinking he could have released the app without the ads, or at least pushed out an update removing the ads at this point, instead of removing it. I don't think this is about money.
Class action, and also direct action on the part of VLC for slander (if the VLC project is in a position to have lawyers available).
How is what we have today so different from McCarthyism of the 1950's?
The Best Advice I’ve Gotten (and Why the Best Advice Isn’t Advice)
The way I heard it: Ambiguous rules, ruthlessly enforced.
Should we eat bugs?
Also many mastering engineers do the exact same thing to make the music "louder" because the record label/artists demand it. Maybe Dell should start making popular rock/pop music void the warranty as well.
I'm glad this article was written. Armstrong's statements were so despicable that in this case "airing the dirty laundry" is a perfectly appropriate answer.

I'm also surprised that his statements aren't "suable" in some form in the lawsuit happy country that is the United States of America.
A friend of mine immediately pointed out to the numerous healthcare privacy laws in place; and another HN commenter pointed out on the original thread the possibility that the employees with the distressed babies would get discriminated against by their coworkers, after Armstrong's statements, due to the fact that they're probably identifiable internally by their team members.

This is the same guy who fired an employee publicly during a company talk for (apparently) taking pictures. (http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/AOL...)

What a sad, sad man. I hope that he gets scared and lonely as he gets older and older, when his billions won't change anything and when he realizes that all of his misery stems from his own choices.
Impractical and impossible are of course two different things. It's sort of funny to consider a scenario in which a manufacturer adds a thermistor to the speaker coil assembly to measure the temperature & lower the amplifier output via the BIOS as the temperature in the voice coil rises to a dangerous level. I suspect that might cost more than using good speakers in the first place but then again if there's limited room for speakers which would lead to heat buildup in the voice coil such a solution might be practical.
Very creative github page. The apps named like movie titles and the UI looks like their Netflix movie browser.
Thank you for the advice. I tend to end up with apps that have the opposite problem (though I also tend to only work on complicated apps) in that I have more customer than I have app to support them. This is really meant to help me get to a place where I can really figure out what it takes to find that magical minimal viable product, and apply that to new features for my primary app. And who knows, maybe I can make a business out of one of those ideas.
But they're profiting off making the 2 second early access to data more liquid, at best.
Interesting way too take the conversation but valid.
Just waiting on the next person to send me some skrilla then you can reap your reward.
I Stole From The Science Museum and Paid For It
I should claim that that was my point, and that I was trying to be satirical.

However, the truth is that for discussing motivations and explaining things, such as Flappy Bird's demise, it really is not the ideal way to convey a message. Nuance and detail are gone on Twitter... and to your point, I was initially downvoted for my comment, presumably because I didn't give sufficient contribution to the converstaion.
left her to die and her family in a permanent state of medical bankruptcy.

I can't get my head round this, as someone born and raised in the UK, America's health care system (or lack there of) is the single thing that will stop me ever wanting to live in the US.
Thanks.

For anyone reading along, reboot does now work, and I was just able to install systemd (apt-get update, apt-get install systemd, edit /etc/default/grub, edit /etc/fstab to remove the systemd-unsupported nobootwait line, update-grub, init 6). Thank you Debian cloud team :-)
I think it seems like Notch enjoys his fame because it has allowed him to focus on his own projects, and work with great people.
> Systemd is an ecosystem.

"Ecosystem" == vendor-managed closed system.

True interoperability does not produce "an ecosystem", it produces standards with (at least potentially) multiple implementations.

> It contains a number of different binaries. They may be part of the same codebase, but so what?

So it's contrary to the idea that modularity is achieved through clearly defined interfaces, so "the same codebase" is an unnecessary luxury for lazy designers.
Spreading the risk is only half of insurance, the other half is deciding exactly what hazards are covered.

In normal first-world countries you have some form of socialized healthcare with bioethics committees that decide what should society should pay for. You can have reasoned arguments about end-of-life care and very premature babies.

But in America with the crazy system of employee-provided coverage it's the CEO that sets coverage limits, and generally speaking a company's interests are not aligned with society in general.
According to the article, the family had family insurance plan which would have existed before Obamacare, so I think this is a bit of a red herring. I think he was pointing to increased costs of Obamacare AND the distressed babies as examples.

But I agree, if you can't use your insurance when you need it, whats the point of insurance?
Because somebody should think of the children. And the geriatric. And the disabled. Part of the point of having a developed society with a developed healthcare system is using it to sustain people who can't sustain themselves.

I think this article isn't important because one person happened to say something rude about somebody's daughter. It's important because it's a peek into how a lot of people are actually thinking about the world, and that's pretty scary.
"The only thing we are really missing is a large OSS project to serve as a base."

What about Firefox OS?
We recognize less attractive faces best
Sorry but you are clueless. Taxing the trading itself will raise the cost of trading, this making it less profitable
if it is less profitable people will do less of it.
Analog limiter ICs (that I know of) limit the signal according to input voltage, something that does not catch this issue. Furthermore, limiting power at the audio codec level would require for the codec to have that feature and I don't know of audio codecs with that capability.
You choose the pain and suffering (mixed in with the good stuff too) because otherwise you'd be as bored as it gets and can't even kill yourself. If you choose to believe that.
I'd have thought the best strategy is to teach coding/basic scripting as a requisite course earlier on and then allow more official CS education to be something a student can choose to do in a later course if they so choose.

The basic understanding of how to use a programming language will be of practical use to them, the CS course will let them understand what the programming language is actually doing under the hood.
You can't know everything.
Andy Keep – Writing a Nanopass Compiler – Clojure TV
I never realized they fixed that! What great news!
The point of insurance is to make money for people selling insurance. That's why those companies employ teams of people who look for ways to avoid paying insurance.
Another interesting quote from the article:

> Let’s set aside the fact that Armstrong—who took home $12 million in pay in 2012

Assuming the above is factual (and I have no reason to doubt it), he wanted to cut the 401(k) plan for everyone because of an expense that was one twelfth the size of his own pay that same year.

Just a wee bit hippocritical there on his part.
Thanks, learned something new :)
> No other kind of god would set up a system where you're forced to repeat the same mistakes for billions of years.

If the alternative were ultimate boredom, you might. Consider the possibility that you're not repeating mistakes so much as continuously immersing yourself in an environment that relieves boredom, an environment that also allows for personal/god growth.
Academics being snooty.
> The issue here is that Dell sound cards output power (that can be approached by a factor of the quadratic of the amplitude)

This is correct, and for those who want to know the technical reason, we can look at the Dell speakers (any speakers) as a resistive load (only approximately true). For a resistive load, the power increases as the square of the applied voltage, because the power in a resistor is equal to the voltage times the current, and both the voltage and current are increasing as the audio output level is increased.

In terms of Ohm's Law: P = E^2/R.
You need to write some documentation if you want to get anyone interested.
Create iOS/Android apps in minutes from this Cordova+Backbone sample project
I made this to help people get past the complexity involved in setting up a Cordova project. If you're familiar with Coffeescript/Javascript, you should be able to get going with it fairly easily.

Any feedback would be much appreciated. I'm trying to make something that's genuinely useful for people looking to get started with mobile app development. This is very much the first release so if you have trouble with it please let me know, here or via a github issue and I'll see what I can do to improve it.
Someone should upload video to YouTube with high gain and call it: "This video will void your Dell laptop speaker warranty" :)
I can't imagine that Tim Armstrong sits at home stewing about the high costs of distressed babies, but singling them out in this situation is deplorable.
I absolutely agree with this. All kids should be learning how to compile a basic program as they are learning their multiplication tables. They may not end up being computer scientists or mathematicians but everyone should at least get that. I certainly didn't. They didn't even have programming at my highschool.
Focusing on the two characters may sound like survivor bias; both being the extreme outliers. Nevertheless it is the message I hear it often here and outside. Start doing something, be it an itch or anything, and then just start working on it. If it is what you'll love to do for the rest of your life you will keep going on it even if you fail. Paul Graham wrote an inspiring assay on this [1].

[1] http://paulgraham.com/love.html
Flappy Bird Removed
Not that I have any choice with regards to my ISP in my area (NYC - I'm stuck with TWC), but what ISPs in the US actually provide IPv6 support for even a majority of their residential customers?

Time Warner Cable certainly doesn't, but I was surprised to find that even Verizon doesn't provide it for many (most?) of their FiOS customers.

When pressed about IPv6 support, ISPs, typically respond that very few services require it, so it's not a priority for them. But this is a catch-22 - the only reason so few services require it is that so few people have access to it!

And the people who suffer the most aren't their customers - it's people in other countries who are forced to live behind NAT because of IP address exhaustion.

For example, the entire country of Qatar shares a single IP address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:82.148.97.69/header
That's a tooling problem. Sqitch or something similar can help.

http://sqitch.org
I found this book on compilers to be rather up-to-date, clear and useful when you start going into the topic: http://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Compiler-Second-Edition-Co...
The problem being discussed is by no means limited to Dell speakers -- it would be a problem for any small laptop speakers connected to an IC that can overdrive them under specific circumstances.
The old Netflix DVD shipping service still runs on the old code base on top of a few large Oracle databases.

Interestingly put. I didn't realize their DVD service is so neglected -- wonder how long it will be around?
> While it may be perfectly acceptable to ignore the lower-level details when first learning some new technology, or even when using it for personal use only, that sort of ignorance is not acceptable when working on systems that are meant to be used seriously.

I'm a self-taught web developer. While I have probably picked up some programming fundamentals/best practices through experience I have very little interest in computer science or learning the low-level details of every technology I use.

I probably couldn't get a job at most SV/SF startups, but I run several WordPress sites that have millions of monthly visitors and that have traffic spikes of 100,000+ visits in 2-3 hours at least a few times each month. I'm paid very well and I don't need to apply rocket science to do a good job.

Meanwhile I have friends with CS degrees at hot VC backed startups using all sorts of crazy technologies and advanced programming techniques for sites that get maybe 100,000 visits a month.

If you ask me, ignorance is premature optimization, overengineering and hiring expensive people to apply skills you're nowhere close to needing.
wait, so you currently have an infected computer on your home network?
Thank you. Yes I would write detailed documentation.
Somebody explain why this is necessary. Ghost is open source. Why not just uses Ghost? It also uses Ghost themes.
I had once faced the exact same issue once in Mar 2009, so all I did was called them again after some time from a different number and using a different name and told them that No, VLC was not installed. And I got my warranty upheld and speaker replaced.
Can you give me an example of a company/organisation that you work for so I can look for something similar.
File based cacheing in Node.js
If you're choosing the reincarnation yourself (if only to relieve boredom), then it's no longer horrifying.
It's a fun idea, but why is it $20/month? I feel like I could throw this together for free. Am I missing something?
Did you ever consider that a lot of the work being done by developers today makes them more like plumbers and electricians than architects and engineers?
Memo: Don't screw with someone who can write well.

[Yup, Armstrong is despicable]
Values matter. Ethics matter. If you're considering someone as a co-founder that believes the end justifies the means, or it is better to ask forgiveness than permission, then pass on that person and keep looking.

Personal anecdote: I wasted years of my life trying to get my multi-millionaire co-founder to be honest, but to his way of thinking there was no value in being honest all the time, so he wasn't. Consequently, because of the social isolation and loss of business contacts that comes from being untrustworthy (and just making bad decisions in general) this person went from have nearly 12 million dollars in the bank to having less than $500.

Karma is a bitch.
I'm out; this discussion is not productive to me. You have given no evidence to back your claims -- you have no data, to use your phrase, though you are so keen to see mine.

Specifically:

I gave examples of the need to control memory layout and memory allocation.

I gave examples of Rust's features leading to reliability and security -- memory safety and absence of data races.
Everything else at style.org is equally amazing. Corum was, IIRC, a student of Tufte's.

Here's an especially great pair:

http://style.org/unladenswallow/

http://style.org/strouhalflight/
I thought it was about this.
https://drone.io/
Why is this important? What makes this different from any other open source game clone?
> I hope that he gets scared and lonely as he gets older and older, when his billions won't change anything and when he realizes that all of his misery stems from his own choices.

I know the word "sociopath" gets thrown around a lot when we're talking about CEOs, but I really really think this guy fits the bill. And so, in all likelihood, he sadly will not feel or realize a thing even as he gets older.
Republicans are Wooing the Wired
Jumped the gun when posting the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/technology/republicans-are-wooing-the-wired.html
I'm glad to see more options becoming available for CI, especially ones that are easy to maintain and deploy. Basing Drone on Docker with few external dependencies is a plus. I'm also glad to see support for Cassandra and all the other databases.

However, I do see a lot of CI systems depend on Github as the repository, as Drone appears to do, and I would appreciate a more generic, flexible approach to that issue.
She quoted this line from some of the TV coverage:

“How many distressed babies does AOL pay this guy?”

Does anyone know who said that? That's really dark, but also hilarious.
To run Ghost, you need a server to host it on, and enough knowledge to set it up and manage it. You need some level of sysadmin skills just to understand the install instructions.

A PHP application can be dropped on any $2/month shared hosting account over FTP. That's the extent of the installation, and the host will support it for you. Even cheap unmanaged shared hosts will troubleshoot setting up PHP code for customers.

Ghost can only be set up by people that frequent sites like HN. A PHP app can be set up by anyone. That's why over 40 million people use WordPress where maybe 20k have used something like Jekyll.