skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Not sure why this is relevant to HN."

You know what would be a huge PITA and a lot of work? A death app. Even if its nothing but a flowchart and checklist and the best customer support on earth. Presumably everyone who owns a smartphone will eventually have a friend or relative die. Plus you could coordinate marketing with the funeral racket. Death is a big (highly corrupt) business and a startup could collect a slice of that pie.

For example, for gods sakes whatever you do, don't go and stiff the IRS (oh the pun) in favor of paying off Citibank credit cards, especially after probate begins. There's a whole complicated legal hierarchy and set of definitions of who's responsible for what, WRT probate. If you basically appoint yourself probate judge and probate executor all on your own, as a loose cannon, you have no idea how big of a legal pile of bricks will fall on your head even if you're "just trying to help out with the paperwork".

Or another example, unless you're the named or appointed executor, for gods sake never take a phone call from a debt collector, fraudulent or possibly even legit, unless you're a cosigner or joint owner and even then talk to a lawyer first. Crooks will be ringing your phone off the hook if its known the deceased had a positive net worth. Its fairly likely you'll have both the mortgage company and two or three crooks falsely representing themselves as the mortgage company all trying to get money and/or identity theft information. Repeat for all possible services, including public utilities. Shut off the phone ringer and have a close-ish family member with a clear head take all incoming social (and criminal) calls.

If you use the deceased's credit card to pay for the funeral, legally or not, you can expect the debt collectors to go after you personally for the full balance on the card, legal or not. Usually it only costs a couple thousand in legal fees to fix this if you make that mistake. How to properly and legally pay for a funeral is an excellent question and probably varies a little from state to state.

Even just a checklist could be valuable. Did someone contact the cellphone company both on the phone and in writing as most require, and if so, who, and when? During probate they're going to be discussing this so not losing the data might be a good idea. Ditto the water utility, the water softener salt delivery service, the electric company, etc etc.

Those are just some anecdotal stories I've heard over the years that could get rolled up into some kind of advice app or service or whatever. I'm sure there are many more. Usually it doesn't turn out that bad, of course. But it can be very bad, yes.
If you put * on both sides of some text, you get polite emphasis.
That would be nice if they liberated some of the code. However, "vast majority" is another way of saying that the phone runs proprietary software. I think Replicant is still the only Android distribution that has the ability to provide any sort of real security to its users.
If you watch any of Carmack's recent keynotes you'll see hes advocating doing the opposite now. Whats changed is the multi million dollar risk profile associated with modern game releases, the huge increases in the sizes of the teams, the large scale complexity of modern AAA code-bases, etc. And also the fact that most games now are data-dominant rather than being sold entirely on some new game-engine feature(s).
Well, this gets you the day of the week for whatever the current time is. The example in the article didn't do that exactly. It took a string of some sort (in what format, exactly, isn't clear to me) and mapped it to another string.

Assuming that the input string is a formatted date of some sort, then I think this would work, using JodaTime (minus exception handling):

public String getDayOfWeek(String s) {
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormat.forPattern("dd/MM/yyyy");
DateTime dt = formatter.parseDateTime(s);
return dt.dayOfWeek().getAsText();
}
It's been standard practice since long before the Web to have pre-written obituaries for high profile people (politicians, royals, the Pope, etc.) and to update them periodically. When someone of this stature dies, the newspapers will have multiple pages of content ready to roll-out with minimal editing.

Some people once found a bunch of work-in-progress obits on CNN's website:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_premature_obituaries#Th...

And the BBC had a 30 min comedy about an obit writer who saved their job by murdering high-profile individuals:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0653345/
You can ask any questions you want. Potential employers are not obliged to answer, of course, and you may decide that their lack of answers is a reason to seek employment elsewhere. On the other hand, there may be cases where employers are not able to answer questions (e.g., due to confidential negotiations which are underway) so not getting an answer doesn't necessarily mean that they're trying to hide bad news from you.

Similarly, the questions you ask might lead them to decide not to hire you (e.g., if one of the questions is "how on earth do you expect to get people to pay for such a stupid product?").
Currently, not being on iOS is invalidating Micrsosoft Office. It's miraculous how many things in stodgy IT Departments had to change shortly after the CEO got an iPad and iPhone. Probably a lot of those people felt they were secure with their Windows desktop only solutions, turns out they were wrong.
Piers Morgan ‘Quits’ CNN
Well what's stopping you? Stop regretting and pick up a book!

I don't have much love for C# but if your fundamentals are sound you won't have too much difficulty picking up a new language. 6 months ago I wouldn't have known an NSMutableArray from a bar of soap, a couple of books and some elbow grease later and I'm beta testing my first iOS app for the app store (with a ruby backend : D). And I am far from one of those "polyglot" hyper programming geniuses.

Stop regretting, start working, and keep going. This time next year you'll have another arrow for your bow. It's not rocket science, believe me.
> Can _you_ explain why do _you_ think someone loosing interest in the project because of its license choice is bizarre

If it's a project that interests or is useful to me, then personally that trumps the license. If I discover a project useful to my workflow then I'll find a way to work with it, despite the license.

> What makes _your_ "I don't care about licensing, and neither should you" opinion not bizarre

Because it's my opinion and I generally don't find my opinions bizarre, otherwise I wouldn't hold them.

And I didn't say "I don't care about licensing, and neither should you" or even insinuate that.

He's more than welcome to care more about a license over a usefulness of piece of software and I'll still find it odd.
Ok, problem number one: Without looking at the code, what day is number 3?
Boffins flap to the future with ‘insect’ drone
There is eclipsefp. http://eclipsefp.github.io/
At some point, you are interviewing them.

I've made a few mistakes in that direction. One memorable one is the startup where (a) I learned the phrase "train wreck", (b) witnessed a fight between VCs wherein various employees had to pick sides, (c) had to talk to a psychologist the company hired to find out "what was wrong in engineering" [ans: managers were morons], (d) had a meeting with Smokey Wallace -- an early Adobe heavy -- one fine Sunday morning to do a technical brief of what the company was about [ans: not much, could have been replaced with 2KSLOC of Perl], and (e) had the president of the company break down crying when I told him I was quitting.

Due diligence would have saved me from everything, but at east I got some interesting stories. I'll never get that ten months back, though.
That could be it. My first glance lead me to think it could all be replaced with an enum rather than 7 switch statements (or, better yet, a library function).

"data" is ambiguous, too. I think that perhaps there are a few errors to demonstrate his point.
Never fails. One day after I install the latest Ruby, they release the next version.
Full disclosure: I work for Qubit who published this white paper.

Maybe the confusion here is in tests which have a "true" effect and an "observed" effect. If an experiment has a true effect, then you have some chance to observe it, which is the power.

But false positives have by definition already been observed as winners (that's what false positives are), so there's no need to apply the factor of 0.8 to them.
The ice is floating, it would just lie higher or lower in the water depending on what melted first. No change of water level.
Money is relative. Education is one of the easiest 4 year degrees to get. The low pay for teachers is a myth compared to other jobs with similar qualifications. At least, the hourly rate isn't that bad. You get lots of holidays and summers off so your yearly wage looks bleh. It's still way less than what I make as an engineer, but I dare say most teachers could not get an engineering degree.
FWIW, the default Java API to get weekday strings is also 1-based (DateFormatSymbols.getWeekdays(); and Calendar.SUNDAY is 1).
Understanding Node Generators
Dallas Buyers Club startup advice
Aggregating and sorting tweets to bring you local news
Exactly.

I've had this discussion many times w.r.t. global warming, and am amazed so many people, including scientists, just don't get it. The level the seas would rise is not so much dependent on floating ice (north pole) since the displacement is exactly the same, but on ice that was on top of land (e.g. Greenland, Antarctica, etc.).
Those questions are excellent.

Taking a job at an early stage startup is a lot like making an angel investment. Consequently, you need to think like an investor and ask tough questions. While you're asking the questions (hopefully you get to ask the founders), pay attention to both what they say and how they say it. If they're resistant, avoidant, or generally difficult to get answers out of, you should be very careful.
They kind of have to say that though, the same author wrote this:

"While Android is open, it's more of a "look but don't touch" kind of open. You're allowed to contribute to Android and allowed to use it for little hobbies, but in nearly every area, the deck is stacked against anyone trying to use Android without Google's blessing. The second you try to take Android and do something that Google doesn't approve of, it will bring the world crashing down upon you."

And his colleague wrote an article titled: "Neither Microsoft, Nokia, nor anyone else should fork Android. It’s unforkable."

So they'd look a bit silly writing about this in any other way.

Maybe it will get canned, but then before today I would have said that it was only for internal purposes, so scare Microsoft into buying them. Turns out I was wrong, and they went public with it.
Allow me to shamelessly throw my project into the ring: https://github.com/ipartola/groper. It is Python-specific, but for me it fulfills a very real need: to have a single library that I can use to both read a config file and command line parameters. getopt/argparse/optparse do not do config files, while ConfigParser and friends are at least less than friendly to use and definitely don't to command line arguments.

My colleagues and I have used this library in at least a dozen projects and it worked great. I am actually wondering if this is worth writing a PEP about to have something like this included in Python's standard library.

Edit: I forgot to mention my favorite feature of this library. As you develop your program, you define the parameters that each module will use, optionally with defaults. When you are done, you can get groper to generate a sample config file for you that includes all the options you defined in your program.

Edit 2: It looks like there are a few people downloading this package from PyPI which makes me very excited. Please feel free to let me know how your experience was with groper and what features you'd like to see added.
Cloudant and IBM
I'm not that surprised though. Line and KakaoTalk both implemented voice call between users this past year. I think WeChat is working on this too.

I'd actually consider WhatsApp behind its Asian competitors in terms of features. They also might be an indicator of what features we might see roll out with WhatsApp.
You'd be baaa-my to do so.
Like SEO :)
Some more things you could ask in this article by Hacker School alumna Julia Evans [1] and this article on Runtime Era [2].

[1] http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/30/questions-im-asking-in-interv...
[2] http://www.runtime-era.com/2013/03/my-interview-questions-fo...
yes, and while that's all good the scenario is quite different. they were protecting from an external threat.

we're protecting from an internal one. the moment you go out the door, we're in the public. law enforcement doesn't really need an excuse to follow you around while you are in public.

on the other hand imho you can safely assume that all crypto will eventually be broken. the question is when, and will your adversaries still care at that point. not quite the same, but still kinda related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
Any library with a really short name (<= 2 letters) should be prepared for name collisions. If they wanted to avoid name collisions, they should have chosen a slightly longer, more descriptive name in the first place. I think in this context (i.e. really short name) it doesn't really matter who was first.
Since water reaches its peak density at about 4 °C, the actual outcome will vary slightly depending on the initial and the final temperature of the water once the ice has melted.
It should be a challenge for Nokia buy not allowing Google Play Services and Promoting Windows and Nokia based apps but this is the only way windows will allow Nokia to develop more android based devices.

As of this post from Nokia
http://conversations.nokia.com/2014/02/24/nokia-x-family/

I think they still allow other 3rd-party sources for downloading the apps and there are still more Android based phones to come.
Nokia is really a confused middle aged man.
>Tried texting in class without looking?

What the hell? Are you really that addicted to your phone you can't put it away for 2 hours to pay attention to a class you are paying hundreds of dollars to attend? If anything it is incredibly rude to the professor.

I'm old and cranky.
From an interview I read a while ago I got the impression that Blackphone wouldn't claim to protect from state-level adversaries, and maybe if you were to ask them to be explicit about it they really don't. One could easily come away with another impression from the description here though.

That's a shame, since protection from state level adversaries is really what's at the top of my feature wish list, and that probably goes for a fair amount of other people too, in this day and age.

Is anyone here aware of cell-phone-like projects that have potential to resist exploitation of the type we've seen reported from Five Eyes? I'd be particularly curious about ways to mitigate the location tracking.
Hakyll：a Haskell library for generating static sites
Yeah, GSI Commerce (now Ebay Enterprise) I think.
Upgrade to Android. Never look back.
If you need only a subset of full SQL, e.g. just joins, counting/aggregation, and date manipulation (as in several of these examples), I've found it fairly easy to work with a mixture of the standard Unix join(1) [found on nearly all systems], and some of the additions from Google's crush-tools (https://code.google.com/p/crush-tools/), mainly 'aggregate', 'grepfield', 'funiq', and 'convdate'. I find chaining them together a bit easier than writing monolithic SQL statements, but there's probably some crossover point at which that wouldn't be true.

It'd be interesting to compare runtimes as well. I would guess that there's some overhead in loading into the DB up front, but that you might gain some speedup by converting longer chains of Unix pipes into one SQL query. On the other hand you might lose some parallelism. Would take some testing on different kinds of queries and data sets to get an idea of the pros/cons I think.
Great point. While you still could be spied on, for instance with a bug stuck onto your back or classified nano-drone (if it exists yet)... that would be extremely expensive. If they wanted you that bad, it's like, fine. Listen to me talk about my motorcycle.

The issue with computers is they are so, so, so cost effective to tap & data mine. And storage just keeps getting cheaper. Hence, illegal mass surveillance.

Also, I had to make a meme:
http://i.imgur.com/bk16CyB.jpg
Those are all good questions. (I have been asked all of them by people I've interviewed.)

Also, necessarily all the people interviewing you have already made the choice to leave whatever they were doing before and join the startup, you should ask them how they decided that was a good risk to take.
OpenBSD bcrypt password hash bugs fixed, version changes and consequences
Yeah I wondered the same thing. Needs some clarification - it reads to me like "we plan to be in business for at least 2 years, during which time your phone will work", but leaves me wondering how useful the phone would be if they went out of business.
You've missed several relevant studies.

First, the Mincome experiment in Manitoba (confusingly, while "Minimum Income" is something different than "Basic Income", the experiment did test "Basic Income"), which ran for five years in the 1970s and found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less.

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

Second, there was a case in London recently where a large lump sum was given to each of 13 long-term homeless men.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-t...

Third, unconditional income on an Indian reservation (derived from Casino profits) showed a substantial improvement in the welfare of children from poor families:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/what-happens...

You can absolutely find nits to pick about all of these, but they are not "remote places with extremely poor people having no experience with the welfare state". I'd love to see an experiment conducted in Chicago or wherever else, but if people in all of the above, diverse situations (some of whom certainly have experience with a welfare state) behave one way it starts to be perverse to expect something different for an arbitrary new group of people (which isn't to say we couldn't be surprised or shouldn't do more research, to a point).
Well that's too little too late. Had they done this several years ago, it might have been groundbreaking.

As it is, now they have two operating systems they need to support and use. Have they not learned from their earlier mistakes with OS fragmentation?!?
But there is some ice peeking above the surface. For this reason, I feel like the level should stay the same as the ice melts.

My only concern is the ice being "held down" by other ice cubes. It doesn't get the same treatment as the ice peeking above the surface.
The email I received from Cloudant:

"Hello-- Today is an exciting day for Cloudant as a business: We have agreed to be acquired by IBM [press release].

What does that mean for you as a customer? Not too much changes, actually.

The key elements of Cloudant that have helped make us successful will not change. Our team will remain intact and will continue to focus on delivering innovative products backed by our world-class operations, services and support teams. Cloudant’s product strategy and roadmap will continue as before, only with faster innovation. By tapping into IBM’s global resources, we can rapidly scale our service and introduce new products that will benefit customers.

Our position of providing a cloud-agnostic data layer will not change and remains an important differentiator for our business. We know that customers need options to prevent vendor lock-in as the cloud industry consolidates. Cloudant and IBM are the latest example of this trend, yes, but with some important distinctions.

We have a clear agreement in place to continue developing and promoting Cloudant as an open platform. Widely accepted standards like JSON and REST APIs will remain, so customers can quickly migrate onto and off of Cloudant as needs change. Cloudant’s participation in the open source community will continue, and at an accelerated pace. IBM has a track record of funding and promoting open technologies, like Linux. Over time, we’ll work toward a similar model with the open source communities close to Cloudant.

Thank you for your continued support of our business. And look for more good things from Cloudant and IBM, coming soon.

Sincerely,

Derek Schoettle
CEO, Cloudant"
The Role of Analytics
Kremlin Says Ukrainian Instability Threatens Russian Interests
This is timely as I have been replaying X-Wing lately (specifically, the Collector's Series version that uses the XvT engine, aka xwing95). X-Wing was one of the first PC games I played when it first came out (I was in middle school) and thus I have an endearing love of space sims. (I have high hopes for Star Citizen and Enemy Starfighter.)

I think an interesting project would be creating a modern graphics engine that can parse and run the various X-Wing game data files. The XvT and X-Wing Alliance engines run ok on modern Windows but still have some compatibility issues (graphics glitches, etc). If a modern graphics engine (written in Unity or some such) could capture the look and feel of the X-Wing games, that would be great. It would be even better if it was an official game and not someone's open source project that never gets finished :(
"do you plan to move the company to another city in the next 2 years?"

This happend to my girlfriend recently... She got her dreamjob, moved to the other side of the country, invested some money to get a nice flat and then after 4 weeks they told her: "btw, we are going to move to a town 100 km from here in 5 months". Since she got the job I also moved to this new town and now we both have to move again.
are you the only one working on it?
> The question creates doubt because it asks you to choose between two wrong options.

I think you misread the post:

> Does it rise and over-flow the glass, remain constant throughout the melting process, or go down?

Also,

> Assuming the above-surface and below-surface ice melts at the same rate

You don't have to assume anything about ice melting rates. All the info necessary to solve the problem is provided.
I find that I have the opposite problem. I think I know less than I actually know. Sometimes I feel (as a mathematician would) that I don't understand something unless I can prove it, assertion by assertion and line by line.

I dropped out of grad school after one year, and it seemed like a bigger risk/deal than it was. My sense is that the major benefit of having a PhD (especially from a top school) is the confidence that comes with it. It gives you faith that you know enough to tackle the interesting problems, and an assurance that people (usually uninformed people, often without the educational credentials they overvalue) won't try to peg you down as not up to it. Socially, it gives you the right to be an expert, which is not the same thing as expertise but just as valuable (if not moreso) in the work world.

So, even in traditional education, I'd argue that much of the benefit earned (maybe 85%) is confidence, both your own and others' in you. You can get a lot on your own by reading the papers and books, but you never get that official approval or that "proof" that you learned the right stuff.

Oh, and the answer is that the water level stays exactly the same. Archimedes' Principle is that a floating object displaces as much water as it weighs. When melted, the iceberg (90% submerged) takes up as much space in the water as the submerged part occupies.