skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is 120 per year really ridiculous? (I assume Monat -> month). For something as crucial to online comms as email I'd be happy to pay if it was as reliable as other offerings (and ideally extensible in some form - e.g if it could do contact/calendar sync too).

I'm considering trying out https://mykolab.com at some point as it looks like it might meet my needs. That looks like it would be around $12pcm.
I see where you're coming from. When it comes to climate models, lots of feedback loop, both positive and negative ones, are being thrown around - you can basically adjust models arbitrarily to your political liking. Adjusting these models to real data is a never-ending process as long as we don't have the computational power to both resolve much denser grids and timesteps and include more parts of the equation than we do now. However, when it comes to balancing these things out to give an accurate prediction, I tend to trust organizations like NASA, IPCC and NOAA over the typical right wing think tanks that you see throwing together these denialist reports. Yes, we do know about negative feedback loops, the scientific consensus is just that they're much weaker than what we're doing to the atmosphere. Also, the 1998 measurement that gets thrown around is very misleading - have a look at [1].

Noone is claiming these models are perfect and the temperature increase estimates may be off by some margin - all I'm saying is that as long as we're sure current CO2 levels aren't going to kill our future, we better stop increasing them, given scientific consensus. When the doomsday scenarios come from scientific studies and stop including low probabilities, it's better to take them seriously rather than bet our home planet on them being all wrong.

[1]http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/upsDownsGlobalWarm...
I was thinking about converting from a "well known format" to application specific format. File formats like yaml or xml are more popular then augeas tree. Or maybe you are trying to say that augeas supports this scenario?
DOD Electromagnetic Spectrum Strategy[pdf]
Show HN: We launched Javelin, the product I've been working on
> I wouldn't be so quick to discount this move. It could be a classic Microsoft embrace/extend/extinguish move.

Except, unless I'm mistaken, MS doesn't actually own Nokia yet.

"On 2 September 2013, Microsoft announced its intent to purchase Nokia's mobile phone business unit" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia
"Something is very bloody, terribly wrong in your code if you consistently find you need to write 150-character lines."

Not necessarily.

Most lines are below 80 characters, but there are good reasons (for readability!) to use longer lines from time to time: vertical space is more precious than horizontal on modern screens, and the more content I can fit into each vertical page, the faster I'll understand what I'm looking at.

The main reason I like the ability to occasionally have a 150 or 180 character line is akin to code folding, which some editors have as a feature. The feature allows you to hide a function or class by collapsing it into one line, because you want an overview of the code around it or calling it, and for the moment the implementation details aren't relevant. Now, I don't actually use the code folding feature in practice, mainly because I find that the times I would want to use it are times when I nearly always want to fold the code, and in a case like that, it's nice to be able to "pre-fold" it by putting it all on one line.

For example, if not using an ORM, I might want to use SQL to grab some results from a db (in a model, say), and I almost never want to think about my SQL and my surrounding code in the same context. Now, you might say, "Just put that SQL in its own method with a reasonably short name, and call it where you would otherwise have a long SQL string, and in the function that returns it, you can break each line at 70-80 characters," but that seems like a "solution" which improves nothing in my typical reading of the code, and requires me to jump around to find the SQL in the rare case I need to pay attention to it. It breaks up something which is naturally local and specific to this place in the code.

Another example which happens somewhat more frequently for me is when I want to use a literal object in JS. If I want to keep the definition local -- because, perhaps, nothing outside of this function ever needs it -- my choices are to put each key/value pair on its own line (easy to find a given key, but consumes lots of vertical space), to put multiple key/value pairs on each line to fit ~80 characters (both moderately difficult to find a given key, and still eats moderate amounts of vertical space), or to "fold" it all to one line (consumes the minimum vertical space, with the trade-off that it's difficult to find a given key). The most common case of this is where I have the choice between using 4-6 lines, or one line, and it's an easy choice for me to pick one line, though I've never encountered a coding standard that agreed with me.
That's why I added 'abstract' it's not fixed, things move underneath but the abstract properties remain.

Funny about the rock thing, I never know what to make about them, I would need to add an 'adaptability' rule to my core ones.

DNA replication did not emerge from the early organisms. Before replication, we could investigate about DNA or prototypical forms of DNA as forms of variable input transformation. This kind of meta-encoding (sorry programmer POV leaking) of input tranformation is probably not the first minimum but pressure + time pushed the versatility needs up (again programmer POV).
and still, it was totally worth it and I would do it again :-)
To use a friend's machine as an off-site secondary backup. They can store encrypted data, but cannot view or push changes to the data. I'm guessing.
SparkleShare? https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare
I think the proper way to do this is to run Windows Mobile side by side with Android. Since Android is open source it's easy to do that for companies like Microsoft. You can virtualize one OS or find another way to integrate them.

Another route is dual booting but I think it does more harm than good.
What is killing newspapers is that paper is no longer the best & fastest way of getting news now that we have newscreens.
That was Wall Street, not the Valley.
Pseudo Random Number Generation in Erlang and Elixir
so there's a bug if someone is tempted to modify it and break otherwise correct code ?

i'd be tempted to say that we can apply the same logic to about 100% of code ever written.
> Andrcusoid

How such a beautiful typo manage to go unnoticed on a website like Ars is beyond me.
Please show some love, HN: Brodlist
I'm kind of in the dark about Mt.Gox, is their recent downfall just the fault of inexperience when dealing with complex code and Bitcoin or did the team at Mt.Gox actually act with malice, attempting to steal money from people?

Is Mt.Gox just a startup made of 2 brothers and a fullstack engineer that happened to hit it big and muck up brilliantly when they scaled?

Part of me feels really sad (granted I don't participate in Bitcoin at all) because these guys may actually go to jail for fraud. I just want to know if my moral compass is pointing in the right direction.
The main argument for me, additionally to what you describe, is keeping lines readable. There is a reason the books from 1000 years ago were made vertical. They could have used much more width and characters per line but they didn't. See the newspaper format as well with multiple columns. The eye struggle to follow a text that is too wide.

For me, 80 chars is an arbitrary but acceptable limit (I could even argue it should be even shorter).

Personally, I view verbose languages that needs longer line as bugs. If you look at Scheme for example, it lets you wonderfully indent and nest, so that you rarely need long lines. Everyone benefits from it. Shorter lines are better for the brain, the problem is when coding languages make line too long by design, forgetting the 1000 years of experience in typography we've accumulated.
Really?

class Engineer(Person):
__tablename__ = 'engineers'
__mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'engineer'}
engineer_id = Column('id', Integer, ForeignKey('people.id'), primary_key=True)
primary_language = Column(String(50))

12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
^^ Line length marker

Woops. 2 characters over. Do we really need a line break there?

Guess perhaps I should rename my columns with more obscure names like engnr_id instead.

Seriously; you see this in python all the time; people not wanting to break the line because its only a character or two off, and then stupidly renaming a variable to some obscure abbreviation instead.

We won't go into the 2-character indents argument, or the push for the 100 character limit that the BDFL veto'd for the PEP8 revision; but... safe to say, I think a fair number of people hit this as an issue.

I don't think 'you can just refactor that to be shorter' is really a solution in all circumstances.
The grandparents post was probably a play on the old "But does it run linux" meme from slashdot.
> Einstein ... had 5 sets of the same suit so that he didn't have to waste time thinking about his wardrobe.

So this has been done before! A word of warning if you're thinking of trying this...

I went through a time where I'd buy 3 or 4 of the exact same T-shirt whenever I had to go shopping for clothes. Unfortunately, when I'm seen wearing the "same shirt" for a whole week, especially in summer, suits and nerds alike look at me like I never wash my clothes. I soon modified my behavior to always wear a different colored T-shirt from the previous day, and buy different colored ones whenever I need to buy more.

So whatever else is said here about non-conformity in clothing, you're taking a risk if you extend the concept to 5 sets of the same suit or T-shirt.
Telegram's iPhone Store screenshots are hilarious (Snowden, Kim Dotcom etc.)
That is the one I was referring to. I don't think it reasonable to ask €10,- per month because that is just ridiculous compared to the costs that they are making.

Of course it is an important service. But it would also be outrageous to ask €1.000 for a bottle of water when someone is dying of thirst in the desert. That would just be a dick move. Although less extreme, mykolab is similar.
Missing the occasional definite article out is something that seems to be fairly common with second language english speakers.

I decided some time ago that it was worthwhile forcing myself to adjust until it wasn't noticeably painful; there are too many people out there I want to communicate with who do it.
Absolutely agreed.

It seems that some people won't be happy until all human interaction is mediated through vapid, inoffensive office-speak.
Focused Distractions
Internet connections can be quite asymmetrical. I have a 32 MBit/s downlink, but only 1 MBit/s up. That makes updating data on my tablet with data from home painfully slow unless I am at home. For me, a fast peer that I don't need to trust is pretty helpful.

But apart from speed and redundancy, I also hope for economy of scale. If there were a small market where several hosters offer peered hosts with X GB for $Y/month, it could drive costs down for everyone. Dropbox is asking for $0.10/GB/mon, which is about twice as high as it could be if the market were efficient.
In perl I'd just write -

return $some_loaded_thing->fairly_descriptive_but_necessarily_long_name(
$not_very_long_argument
);

Surely python has something approximating an equivalent?
I loved this series too. I even remember reading this very article back in the day when I was learning about game development.
Sometimes when I go to my old room at my parent's house and I see the game boxes in the shelf, I am tempted to install at least one of them and try to get back that feeling you talk about. I never have done it because I know deep down it will never be the same
What doesn't help is silly idioms in some environments where most of the lines written START at 2 or 3 indents deep because they're inside a method inside a class inside a namespace that are all indented.

===

If anyone's interested, I wrote a simple command to scan files for configurable line length violations and the presence of a file-terminating line ending.

https://github.com/frou/pagecop

(yes, I'm aware it could probably be duplicated with some sed/awk wrangling!)
One of the very best one I've seen back when I was working in the book publishing business (many moons ago) was this: a bogus screenshot (totally unrelated to the book) with a legend saying something like this: "Insert something similar to what's in book X at page 237"... With "book X" being the name of a book by a competitor.

Somehow everybody (proofreader(s), author(s), etc.) ended missing that and the bogus screenshot and that legend made it to the final, printed, version of the book : )
Philips and Ericsson to Use Streetlights to Expand Cellphone Coverage
Can you pls point to some good examples of a scoping doc? Do you make the first pass and allow the customer to subsequently edit it? Or is the idea that you don't let customer-like fuzzy language into the document in the first place?
Hey majani, think we can have a chat about that sometime? I'm on twitter by my same handle
Messaging app Telegram added 5m new users the day after WhatsApp outage
For what it's worth, in my opinion, if you need more than an 80 character line in Python, you're doing it wrong.

I currently maintain a large Python codebase where the original authors /needed/ big long lines. Anytime I see one of these big wads of bubble gum, I know I can rewrite it to be simpler, clearer and shorter (I've done it enough now). Fortunately, there are increasingly fewer of them...

It's important to remember that you're not just writing for the computer -- while it can take almost anything syntactically correct that you throw at it -- some human, somewhere will still have to read and understand that code.

It may be you, six months later.
I just registered to reply to your post. I am a designer with a couple of decades experience. There are of course design 'rules' but there is just as much intuition and familiarity.

If I can make an analogy, it may help explain the process of choosing typefaces for a project. I really hope this doesn't come across as pretentious nonsense, as anyone can learn about type, but it really is mainly down to experience and a desire to learn:

So let's say your job is to choose the songs that appear on film soundtracks. You need to be aware of the mood, era and style of the film, and choose compositions to match. Now due to the nature of your job, you will be more aware than the average person of music around you - you are constantly conscious of it around you in your day to day life, as well as researching the history of specific songs and tunes, in your own time, purely for pleasure.

So you'll have built up a mental database of knowledge. For a specific film you could include a popular song that many people are aware of, or you could choose something more obscure, but more appropriate. You might choose a selection of songs by the same artist, or tunes from the same record label, or all songs played in the same key. Simply having more knowledge means you have these options.

There could be a set of rules written for choosing music - 'In a tense scene, use this type of tune', and that would be fine, but it really is one of those things where experience over time, and an enthusiasm, is more valuable than just going by the book.

Bringing it back to type, it's a case of knowing about the moods generated by each typeface. From day to day I am constantly aware of the typefaces used on shop signs, TV and film credits, newspapers and posters; but I also know what fonts would have been used in the same circumstances in 1979, or 1962, or 1890 (although not so much on TV then).

So I've probably not done anything at all to dispel your idea of 'priests of a mysterious religion', but I'd personally compare it more to a hobby or pastime, which, if you're lucky, you can get paid to do.
I agree with everything you said.

I've had friends lose Bitcoins both stored themselves and in exchanges/online wallets.

In any case you should think carefully about your choice.
Isn't that how it is working? For example The cost of bandwidth is 10x less in US based datacenters, compared to Indian datacenter (despite lower wages/other costs)

300 GB transfer Vs 30 GB transfer. Who would you host your services with?

If you are concerned about your security (not that I'm validating Mailbox.org), don't always go for the cheapest options; Or as uncle Sam says

"there is always a catch junior, always!"
I like Behance - http://www.behance.net/
In addition to SS there is medicare which costs a fortune and many other programs such ones that fund community centers, affordable housing, etc.
This is the opposite of the common carrier model. In the common carrier model, there are many companies that you can choose from as a consumer from the get go, because the network is unbundled from a single company.
I lost 2K this way many years ago. Didn't have a contract. I didn't get the money. It was like 2K or something. It felt bad but I got over it. Learned a lesson.

Another freelancer who was there bragged how he had a lawyer on retainer. I didn't get into freelancing much so don't know how good of an idea that is. Would love to hear best practices.
I'm looking forward to Enemy Starfigher, which make some references to TIE Fighter on the one side, and Homeworld on the other side.

http://enemystarfighter.com/
> ... which would solve the app problem for the otherwise fantastic Nokia hardware ...

The number of app on Windows Phone is no longer a problem. There are more than 240,000 Windows Phone apps as we speak.
One slide that shows why WhatsApp is worth much more than $19bn
>> Real estate is still more expensive than just about anywhere else in the country.

> That's a bad thing, and if you don't realize that, you're a dumbass with little insight into how the economy works (101 lesson: elasticity). Expensive real estate is what you get when regulatory corruption (NIMBYism) meets the extreme inelasticity of housing costs: a 2% gap between how much housing there should be and what there is can cause prices to go up 50% or even double. The price/income ratio of housing is constant absent regulatory dysfunction. Bay Area incomes are higher than the national average, but not by enough to match the housing prices.

Yes high housing costs are a bad thing but I don't think pg was saying they are/were a good thing. What he was saying was that the impression that Silicon Valley was dead was wrong. The fact that house prices remained high was an indicator that there was demand and that Silicon Valley was not dead. I think that the last decade suggests he was right on this issue.

As an outsider to the VC/SV world I generally enjoy your different perspective on it but this post felt like it was crossing the line from sceptic to slightly crazed conspiracy theorist with some good points hidden in the middle. It does name names but they are unfamiliar to me. I do remember in other posts you have mentioned not wanting to name names about the bad experiences you had in VC startups as good people still worked in the bad companies, has enough time passed that you can tell your story as I think you need to get it off your chest (apologies if you have and I missed it).
My personal favorite: "Foot Heads Arms Body"
German law states it can be used as a signal before passing. Nobody does it though, which is a good thing.
So Nokia kills one platform/smartphone in the recent past and that means that this new line of phones is doomed? How are the two events linked? I don't see a connection. Products are born and killed everyday, just because company X has killed product Y in the past, doesn't mean that every future product will be killed in the same manor.

Also, N9 was an internally developed OS that was late, and Nokia was suffering. Axing something that is eating massive resources for an external vendor isn't in any way similar to Nokia introducing a low-cost alternative to their existing high end offerings.
You can already get a brand new and unlocked Windows Phone for less than $100. Microsoft is already winning the low-end battle.
On another note,

is this related to them? http://heinlein-gmbh.de/

If so, I can't help wonder the difference in web design expertise in both of them.
There comes a point where incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

MtGox has had so many incidents that they would have faced sanctions in a regulated market. But then the people giving money to MtGox should have seen just how flaky MtGox was.

It is sad and frustrating that this happened. I kind of want bitcoin to take off. And I especially want to avoid saying "told you so" because that's just being a dick.
I actually post in fear of the hellban. I have lost two 100+ karma accounts already and even had my IP blacklisted for a while for saying "Is this really an HN worthy post?" to some general world news on an emotive topic.
Also, nowadays, there are (usually) no more slow and brittle dialup modems in place any more. A connection without packet loss is way more common these days than one with.

This makes TCP much more feasible (and sometimes necessary as getting UDP packets through various NAT routers can be difficult).

Back then, they were probably right to use UDP, but I found it funny how all the reasons they gave why TCP sucked were things their workarounds were equally bad at.
Have you not seen the high-end Nokia Lumias?
Every day is Halloween.

You have to look, talk, and act like the people you want to interact with. Dress the part. Homophily.

Last week I put on my politician costume, headed to the legislature, talked policy, asked for votes, and played the role.

The following day I put on my bike commuter costume, laptop camped with my fellow programmers, and wrote code.

Whenever we have planning meetings, I dress up, so that I'm taken more seriously.

You absolutely judge others by their appearances. Why would it be any different for you?
"Keeping money in escrow" is a big no-no. There is a huge difference between paying $X at the completion of the contract versus putting $X in escrow right now to be released later; the whole point of 'paying at date Y' is that you should be able to pay with money you don't have yet but will earn on Y-1.

Cash flow is cruicial for most businesses, freezing funds in escrow for weeks or months is expensive and often impossible for many smaller businesses who have limited lines of credit.

How would you feel if you'd be asked to put in escrow all your bill payments that would be due sometime in the next month ?
Brodlist opens up the world's data (all films, books, people, music) to list, compare, graph or map.

It's educational and even fun -- please support the campaign. Thank you!

The site is here: http://brodlist.com
Spot on. ESL. Grew up in the U.S as a kid. Took grammar as elective. But I can't perfect my writing (and am too tired to correct it now). Shoot an email to yeukhon@acm.org for a correction, if needed. Just fixed a bit, not sure if the revision is better or worse. Probably missing some "the". Can't edit it now :3
How to build a strong work ethic
I use simulations so I can avoid math and analyze the power of any distribution I can model in a consistent manner.

I wrote something about it here:
http://www.databozo.com/2013/10/12/Finding_a_sample_size_for...

EDIT: typo
Celebrate Steve Jobs’ Birthday With This 1985 Video Tribute
Mozilla plans '$25 smartphone' for emerging markets
“Facebook turned me down…” and you’ll never believe what happened next…
Microsoft is about to buy Nokia. No way they're going to continue development of an Android phone.
Really? Because of the license, you're not interested in this project?

I find that very, very bizarre. Can you explain your thinking?
Assuming for the moment that they are doing that - is it really criminal activity? I understand that it would be in regulated markets, but Bitcoin isn't regulated.