skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a big part of this is "don't go to Penn". It has a bad reputation in Philadelphia in general. I'm not going to get too into detail about what that reputation is[1], but suffice to say, I think OP probably would have a much better time at a different school completely. Even Drexel, which is literally next door to Penn, is nicer in terms of how students are treated and treat each other.

Going to Penn is basically accepting all of the expense and pressure of attending Harvard or Yale, without the prestige. And in my mind, the only reason to put up with the expense of those schools is the prestige. It's not like you can't get a great education at far cheaper schools.

[1] other than to say that the story of the relationship with an emotionally abusive pre-med boyfriend isn't terribly surprising.
Thanks for this cheatsheet. Java becomes sexier and sexier.
Seriously, why isn't this guy able to win this and gain monetary damages?
Note that in any sane universe you'd feel able to talk to your parents about this. But we're in backwards-land, where parents exist to be impressed.
You have no idea what you'll do but among the social pressure the right decsions should have been pretty obvious by now. F-- candy krus h
> Mt. Gox and other crypto markets need to switch to using a common, Open Sourced solution

So that when an exploitable bug is found in that common solution, it can be used to hit every exchange at once?

It is much safer to have multiple, independent solutions.
Wait, what's Wit's (hard to Google...) connection with Siri and SRI?
Somebody ought to make a law that would protect people against things like that. /s
Jade Rabbit rover 'declared dead'
> The ability to lambast public figures from behind a screen of anonymity seems to bring out the abusive worst in people,

You could have left out the "of anonymity" and still have been true.
Why AOL ended up spending millions on 'distressed babies'
PayPal's mobile payment strategy is incredibly important to PayPal's future.

Here's the quote specific to the "use our own app":

"It’s been brought to my attention that when testing paying with mobile at Cafe 17 last week, some of you refused to install the PayPal app. . . everyone at PayPal should use our products. . . That’s the only way we can make them better, and better."

He's asking employees to use the new app to help beta test on the PayPal campus. (1)

So that he, and the team responsible, can improve the product to win.

He gives a few illustrations of high-morale employees "hacking coke machines" etc.

And then closes by saying "If you are one of the folks that refused . . . go find something that will connect with your heart and mind elsewhere"

I get that the tone is passionate and angry.

But I feel like there's a balance that needs to be struck vs. your comment.

Sometimes "morale" issues can be improved by letting people who are too far checked out go their own way.

(1) Cafe 17 is in the PayPal HQ (1) https://www.facebook.com/events/181056035410307/?ref=22
This is a shame, but most people -- even in space programs -- don't appreciate how cold the Moon's shaded areas become. It's now estimated that these areas get to 26 Kelvins -- that's 26 degrees above absolute zero. To get a sense of how cold this is, Pluto's average surface temperature is seven degrees warmer.

Also consider that, because of the specifics of the Moon's orbit, a given area stays shaded for just over 14 days each month. That's a long time at a very low temperature. Unless a spacecraft has a way to heat itself during the long lunar night, its electronics will self-destruct.
Baasbox DB is orientdb, which is open source: https://github.com/orientechnologies/orientdb
Good point, but I'd be surprised if this happened for no good reason. I dislike the probability of it happening, of course, but don't really sweat it.
King is no different than Zynga.

The best formula for making it in the appstore is to copy other peoples work. This has been apparent for quite some time now.
That's sad to hear of a suicide attempt and I hope the author finds peace and stability.

With that said, I am firmly of the opinion that it is not the responsibility of an educational institution to change to accommodate people who find an environment too stressful. If one finds it too difficult or stressful and the institution is providing adequate mental health services (which the author acknowledged), you are simply in an environment you should not be in. Go to a college that is more relaxing. You have hundreds of other options that will be much less stressful. Changing Penn to a less stressful environment would not make it Penn anymore. Lots of people thrive at and enjoy Penn.

I do not mean to sound harsh - it's simply a reality. It just concerns me that the author acknowledges the school makes him/her suicidal yet is unwilling to leave and lays the blame on the school for his/her suicidal attempts.
Why would you doubt that loneliness was the problem? Man is a social mammal and isolation in such animals produces easily measured extreme stress. If unchecked it results in breakdown.
Don't forget a little bit of salted butter in there, too!
> _believe_ that an asterisk indicates that something is true

Attitudes like this bug me so much. From my experience it is a big part of what makes people that are not familiar with science not trust scientists.
Saying goodbye to Python
I've looked through the docs and a video on YouTube and I still can't figure it out – what features does this offer that can't already be done with tmux?
organic whole milk is pretty much the only I can enjoy. The rest tastes awful.
I'm aware of that patent long before and not following the same structure. Besides, it also targets other languages by saying 'Javascript or similar'. No worries here. Thanks for reminding.
I think its a disservice that millions of people act like this guy stumbled on a new genre when he didn't.

The way the game is played is nearly identical. You either increase your altitude or decrease it.

I agree that the consistency of the obstacles is different though.
It's simple. Java was free, Smalltalk was $50,000/seat.
A subatomic particle: the adipon. These are sometimes produced in bogon-bogon collisions, and are the primary reason why people overeat when stressed.
That's a really great use of jbuilder. I thought their only benefit was separating view logic but this really makes them useful. Now if they only had a name that was different from a Java thing.
I'm tempted to reply to long, low signal/noise ratio emails with this.
> In 2005, epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in California suggested that most published findings are false; since then, a string of high-profile replication problems has forced scientists to rethink how they evaluate results.

That's what is supposed to happen, though, right? You publish your findings. Others try to reproduce. They publish THEIR findings, etc. etc. If most published findings are false, it sounds like the process is working as designed.
You don't actually need echo, you can use return from the rewrite module (which is compiled in by default).

return 503 "<h1>Maintenance</h1><p>will be back soon!</p>";
I'd like to point out that two competing founders of hosted Elasticsearch as a service agree: ES is great, but not a general-purpose data store :-)
People buying shares on a secondary market aren't really helping fund product development, at least not in any direct way.

But you'll still see folks putting large sums of money into something like a small biotech company that doesn't have a working product yet.

It's speculation, of course, but that's the point. People speculate all the time, some of them with large sums of money. Shouldn't be surprising news.
Assuming you have Centos, deploying is as easy as:

yum install java-1.7.0-openjdk
scp baasbox-xx.tar.gz user@host:remotepath
cd remotepath
./start
I'm guessing the cost of actually doing this is more than he has. And even if he wins, I'm sure King.com will spend months or years trying to appeal the ruling which will cost him more money.
>everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway

I think many people would pay to post on an anonymous equivalent of Hacker News. Of course, the question is how you bootstrap such a community.

A more straightforward alternative (which would benefit the poor posters the most) is to offer compensation to the posters through, say, the encouragement of tipping for good posts or some sort of a redistribution mechanism [1]. I wonder how this would affect the natural self-regulation of an anonymous community in what people choose to post. One could say that it would encourage the posting of popular opinions but I think that in most anonymous communities that already happens through other means.

Another, more out-there, idea would be to algorithmically grade the posts and assign a price to each. A long, thought-post post would cost you nothing while a post consisting of just "lol" would cost a lot.

[1] E.g., a voting-based system where everyone pays to post and then whoever paid can upvote other posts in the thread. The money is redistributed among the posters in proportion to the number of votes they got once the thread no longer accepts new posts. Try to come up with exploits for this system and ways of mitigating them.
Somewhat related and something I've thought about over the years:

"Here's a model that we've had trouble with. Maybe you'll be able to figure it out better. Many markets get down to two or three big competitors—or five or six. And in some of those markets, nobody makes any money to speak of. But in others, everybody does very well.

Over the years, we've tried to figure out why the competition in some markets gets sort of rational from the investor's point of view so that the shareholders do well, and in other markets, there's destructive competition that destroys shareholder wealth.

If it's a pure commodity like airline seats, you can understand why no one makes any money. As we sit here, just think of what airlines have given to the world—safe travel, greater experience, time with your loved ones, you name it. Yet, the net amount of money that's been made by the shareholders of airlines since Kitty Hawk, is now a negative figure—a substantial negative figure. Competition was so intense that, once it was unleashed by deregulation, it ravaged shareholder wealth in the airline business.

Yet, in other fields—like cereals, for example—almost all the big boys make out. If you're some kind of a medium grade cereal maker, you might make 15% on your capital. And if you're really good, you might make 40%. But why are cereals so profitable—despite the fact that it looks to me like they're competing like crazy with promotions, coupons and everything else? I don't fully understand it.

Obviously, there's a brand identity factor in cereals that doesn't exist in airlines. That must be the main factor that accounts for it.

And maybe the cereal makers by and large have learned to be less crazy about fighting for market share—because if you get even one person who's hell-bent on gaining market share.... For example, if I were Kellogg and I decided that I had to have 60% of the market, I think I could take most of the profit out of cereals. I'd ruin Kellogg in the process. But I think I could do it.

In some businesses, the participants behave like a demented Kellogg. In other businesses, they don't. Unfortunately, I do not have a perfect model for predicting how that's going to happen.

For example, if you look around at bottler markets, you'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises. That must get down to the peculiarities of individual adjustment to market capitalism. I think you'd have to know the people involved to fully understand what was happening."

-Charlie Munger http://ycombinator.com/munger.html
As someone who just graduated from Penn last May, I feel inclined to comment.

Penn can be a stressful environment, no doubt. Most of the students who attend Penn were at the top of their class in high school. Many dominated in athletics as well. For these reasons, some students are shocked by the level of excellence, and the rigor of some classes.

That said, I would be cautious to generalize this story. I know people who have received help from CAPS, and they are healthy-minded friendly students today. As with any school, the most important thing you can do is join communities or clubs where there is a collective enthusiasm for something outside of class.

As a graduate, I can confidently say I loved Penn, and my peers would say the same. I'm also glad these stories of students are being shared because there is always room for improvement.
Thanks for the feedback!
Lists are definitely on the way!
It's a shame that Toyota didn't set up a way to securely update their software remotely, which is how Tesla does it.
Thanks. I'll have to check this one out. I guess helicopter game wasn't the first, which makes it even more ridiculous that people are acting like this is something new.
Does not work with Chromium on Ubuntu :-(
IANAL or anything but the TOS states:

"Methods of Access
The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time. Because Wolfram|Alpha is doing computation, not just lookup, each query may require significant CPU time on multiple parallel servers. Any attempt to use a robot, script, or organized group of humans to repeatedly access Wolfram|Alpha could place an unacceptable load on the system, and is strictly forbidden."

So isn't it clear that they only want you to access their content by manually typing in a query ? Your app sends a query request to their server which is probably a violation because it could be counted as a "script", may be ?
One Weird Trick for a 15,000x Improvement in PostgreSQL Performance
Redwood City tech firm sues founder for creating competitor while on payroll
Good catch. I feel like the author failed to mention this- There might've been a much different conclusion if she had found her niche.
Let's see how limited will we be with it. Like, will it allow us to change variable types dynamically? And what JS libraries will run on it "out-of-the-box".
While the OP was focused on Penn (I'm a Penn grad '04, fwiw), I'm sure this is pretty common at a lot of other selective colleges. I wrestled with a lot of the same exact feelings the OP did, although it never quite got so bad for me.

Ultimately I just remember struggling so much with... "identity," if that's the right word for it. Penn basically ended up disproving everything I thought I knew about myself when I was 18. I thought I was a "high achieving" individual, then I was suddenly very average. I thought I was someone that made friends easily, then I found myself on a campus with 11,000 undergrads yet basically felt like I had no friends. I thought my ethnicity was irrelevant because I we now lived in a post-racial America (hah!), but it seemed like so many organizations there defined themselves by socioeconomic or racial lines. I thought I was good at programming, yet I felt so completely lost in my comp sci classes.

It was pretty harrowing feeling like everything I thought I knew about myself was false, and I couldn't figure out what was true, and I was still expected to achieve at a very high level while I was figuring it out. The OP's anecdote about going to Wawa really hit home, because I remember almost literally the same thing happening to me, and that's all it would take to feel like nothing made sense anymore. Am I really the kind of person who doesn't have a single fucking friend out of 11,000 undergrads that would take a 10 minute break to grab a sandwich?

The OP seemed to blame Penn as an institution, and I do think these selective universities could do more to recognize that some of their students will basically feel like they've been abruptly thrown into a crucible, and it's not always painless to adjust. The OP advocates things like publishing suicide rates, but I think that's just another way of advocating, "please tell everyone they don't need to pretend everything is great, because I've felt fucking miserable sometimes and I don't think I'm the only one."

There was a guy in my freshman dorm that basically did "crack" and abruptly withdrew for the semester, and I just remember everyone just kind of smirking about it. "Yeah, Sean went nuts or something. Was spazzing out over a midterm and then next thing I know, all his stuff's packed and he's gone. Guess he couldn't hack it."

I didn't smirk. I just remember feeling sad and wishing Sean had said something to me. Feeling overwhelmed apparently meant "going nuts." Was that fair? That didn't seem fair. I don't think Sean would have thought it was fair either. Maybe we could have gotten a sandwich at Wawa and talked about that.
Why Startups Face Increasing Competition in Raising Series As and Bs
If this is the case, then my employer is also responsible for actions I take while I'm on-call (with the important distinction that my on-call is not opt-in and is per the terms of my employment contract).

If I break the law and hack someone's wifi for internet access in case I need to log in and fix something, that's on me. Likewise, Uber didn't make this guy drive without regard for others safety (or even suggest it for increased availability), so he alone should see the consequences of his actions. I sincerely hope that the Uber X driver has criminal charges brought against him.
Perhaps they spend slightly less than others, but what interests me is that there is an exponential growth of R&D spending over the last five years with no real innovation (in my opinion, since the iPhone). And Microsoft has been spending consistently around 15% of their revenue on R&D. For what? Higher pixel density and an OS with tiles that can be swiped on touch screens? Is R&D really that low ROI? We're talking about tens of billions of dollars here.
...as opposed to Spark[1], the tool by @holman.

[1]http://zachholman.com/spark/
If you're interested in the subject, some additional reading (warning, PDF):

http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf
I guess more important than knowing how to cure burnout is knowing how identify it. When I got it a while ago my reaction was to put even more effort at the project, to compensate for my reduced productivity and get it done for once. All I can tell is that it was a very bad reaction.
I went to Butler University and I struggled much like the Penn student above. Two hospitalizations while there, I believe. Everyone involved there--all the professors I knew, and all the administrators who took on my case--were just exceptionally supportive and kind. They really cared, and they were damned good at what they did. In the end I wouldn't have gotten onto the path of getting better without them--especially my advisor, who intervened in a very personal way that probably took some guts.

Another person suggested small teaching colleges. Seeing as Butler is a 4000-ish person college, maybe there's something to this. But I'd like to think that even in big colleges, the student-health-oriented administrative staff would be on their game. I dunno.
I knew multiple people at MIT who used the mental health services/therapists there. My impression was that their experience was positive, and that at least someone was there to listen and have a conversation with them.
When Programmers Scrape By
Coming from a EE background, sounds like total bogosity relying on the customers not knowing anything about electronics. Magically dripping oil on a piece of electronics makes it use half the power, yeah get back to me on that.

I never knew that adding massive capacitance to high speed signalling lines made their drivers draw less current (super sarcastic here, its the other way around)

I've dunked my share of power resistors, precision resistors, and the occasional semiconductor in oils of various sorts and nothing too exciting happens. Some electrolytic caps are not very well sealed and leak oil in and (conductive) electrolyte out. Some component marking inks are oil soluble and some inks are semi-conductive, which can be a problem.
Great resource. I've even found my all time favorite "Spawn " (always wondered how such shitty movie could have such wonderful soundtrack).
Suicide doesn't usually happen when people are depressed. It happens when they're going into or out of a depression. Think of depression as night; suicide usually happens at evening or morning twilight. More often, the morning twilight. They're getting out of depression, can see the big picture again (when you're depressed, you can't) and realize what a mess their lives are in. They freak out, for lack of a better word. They're not in the throes of depression, but still emotionally unstable. That is when suicide tends to happen.

Society makes it worse by kicking such people when they're down and making it a lot harder for people to pull themselves out of depression and get the recovery they need.

For example, when I missed a midterm exam because I was in the hospital after my suicide attempt, my professor did not allow me to make it up.

See, it's shit like that. One period of illness and now you're playing for a D+. One slip and your life just might be fucked.

Ok, and here's why this will never improve in American society. We run this contest of superficial reliability at relatively easy (intellectually speaking) work, and our corporate overlords are selected based on who drops last. Usually, the culling agent is a short-term episode of anxiety or depression (or "burn out") in a normal person. They're considered "the weak" and pushed aside. That is why our society cannot, on the terms it lives by now, ever accommodate these genuine (and serious) medical problems.

As it's structured now, society is more about competing for position than excellence, and the result of that is that people have to be kicked when they're down.

I would argue for scrapping the whole thing (society, that is), rethinking all assumptions, and gearing our society toward genuine excellence (and toward helping the sick, unconditionally) rather than mindless, senseless competition... but that's just me.
A corporate legal team stealing intellectual property and trademarks from smaller entities is more american than apple pie and baseball.
The Old Reader Premium
Google partners with VMware to let Chrome OS users access their Windows desktops
The big question to my mind is how many other points there have been between then and now where this chart would have fit at least as well.
Is npm worth $2.6MM?
lol, I love hackers :)
Alas, I am too late: "Server doing weird things, come back tomorrow. "
A time-series series (cumulative sum) would also answer the question, and could actually be plotted on the same chart as the original series.

On a side note, time series is not a great phrase for the original data set ("time sequence" would have made more sense, since the numbers shown are not cumulative)
Ask HN: trying to find a project that was shared here recently
I'm looking for a project shared in the last couple of months that replicates the iOS 7 mobile Safari loading bar that moves across the top of the window between page transitions.

There were a few variations of this, but I'm at a loss for how to find them now. If someone remembers, can you share the link(s) in the comments?
Definitely less than 5k. I tried pasting in Politics of the English Language and it is impossible to use. After a little while the text is double printed (err, lines on top of lines of text).