skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of reasons to not use abstraction languages like CoffeeScript and Haml, but the reasons the author cites are weak.

> First, compiler languages require some learning. HAML is awesome, but the number of people who know how to write it is small. That means every time we need to make a change to Scoutzie, not everyone can get tasked with updates. Same goes for Coffee.

I'm sorry to hear that you don't have a culture of learning and teaching other people at your company new technologies.

> Second, both languages make debugging a harder process. When something breaks and I try to fix it, I can't always tell right away whether it's due to poorly written logic, or simply improperly written code.

Both CoffeeScript and Haml have syntax errors so you can tell whether your error is syntax related or not.

> Lastly, there are just too many dependencies.

If you're using Rails, which it sounds like you are, the coffee-rails gem is in your Gemfile by default. I've never had any issues with the coffee-rails or Haml gems in 3 years of using them. I hardly notice that they are even there.
First Meta CEO found dead in Singapore
The utility proposition of a HUD has always included data display relevant to what is in the field of vision; that's why HUDs are traditionally tied to sensor systems, whether its Glass and its camera or a jet fighter HUD and the targeting radar.
Carl Icahn 2014 Explains How Carl Icahn 2011 Has Terrible Business Ethics
The volatility skew on equities is generally downward sloping as a function of strike (because investors are scared of crashes), meaning that the puts you buy to protect your capital will be more expensive than the calls you are selling to earn the premium - if you want the same amount of downside protection as you have upside risk, you'll actually bleed cash with this strategy. The only solution is to buy less downside protection that upside risk, which leaves you vulnerable to a market crash, whilst at the same time capping your upside - exactly the situation you don't want to be in!
Isn't that against the TOS?
Show HN: Wordpress Plugins (or Themes) using YeoPress and GIT
Truth lies in the middle. I can imagine javascript concise when writing with combinators such as those in Javascript allonge, it gets close to CS. While I fear CS can cross the perlish cryptic threshold too easily.
I am simply against any law that would prohibit the public from this type of information and restrict it to only law enforcement.

If its not right for a public company to assemble such records it should be doubly wrong for law enforcement. I tire of passing the police cars festooned with cameras pointing in every direction. What guarantee do we have that the data is any safer in their hands? We don't and the reason is that a law that might offer protection today doesn't have to be in that form tomorrow or after some obscure judge rules otherwise.

So I am all for it on the grounds it puts on equal footing with government officials. We should be able to track them too which is most likely the real reason there is a law coming to prevent gathering by private individuals or companies
I am not confusing exchange value with use value. Everything you said is correct, except for the bit about scarcity.

If scarcity is needed for value, then how are write-once read many commodities worth anything? Mp3's, software, electronic books, mpeg's? They have no scarcity whatsoever. Their value is not imputed by scarcity, but as Adam Smith pointed out, by the labor it took to create them.

Almost all of the businesses on this website are about the creation of commodities because they are "scaleable". They are scaleable because they are not scarce, like a car, they are WORM (write once, read many).
What this would change? That you'd be 100% sure you can't hide on a street instead of only being reasonably sure?

The world is a small place, if you do mischief there's a good chance someone remembered you, and a quite reasonable chance it was somebody you know.
It seems to me like he's talking in manager speek/buzzwords. I'm entirely unconvinced he has even the slightest idea how it would work.
But you don't own our favorite stock at a discount. If you've written a put on AAPL struck at $450, and it drops to $400, you are forced to buy it at $450 - you end up buying it at a premium! What's worse, even if you think the stock is too cheap at $400, you have a $50 hole to climb out of before you can start realizing any of that gain.
I'm actually the most excited about JodaTime basically being baked into the language. Date and Calendar are so, so bad that it would be hard for Instants to not be an improvement.
LinerNotes.com. Taking the work out of being a music fan by providing an easy, intuitive, contextualized way to discover and collect music online.

Looking for Django developers. NYC-based, remote possibly okay.

http://www.linernotes.com/about/jobs/
I'm no VC, but do you have a plan to make money off of this? Otherwise this seems more like a philanthropy project to me.
Worst Book Covers and Titles Ever
"300,000 requests per month"

What counts as a request? A hit to any asset? A connection/
JavaScript is not Web Assembly
Well, true, no, I would always have loved to have a few more sets. :)

But I don't remember it ever being that big a deal; certainly when I had money, I rarely (if ever) spent it on Lego sets. On the other hand, it verges on all-consuming passion for my boy. (Complete with comments like "This set has a piece I don't have in it!")

That said, I absolutely love the creativity he shows playing with them.
The Walking Dead Game Season Pass Giveaway
It appears to me that much of the exchange value of bitcoin has been driven by speculation upon future rewards. If true, maybe JesusCoin has more merit than it appears at first blush. As Pascal might say, "what have you got to lose?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

Tangentially:

+ I find the use of "altcoin" to cover all CryptoCurrency that isn't bitcoin an interesting coption of terminology.

+ Non-profit doesn't mean charity. One hypothesis is that bitcoin foundation members had a vested interest in putting off MtGox's collapse for as long as possible. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the alternative hypothesis that the most knowledgeable minds in the bitcoin industry had no clue that MtGox was insolvent.

+ The technical sophistication of the bitcoin team provided the false halo that created trust of organizations in the bitcoin industry who have to roll their own security - i.e. the cryptographic sophistication of bitcoin does not make a bitcoin exchange secure. None of the "altcoins" solve the problem of stolen coins.

+ Altair was the first mover in the personal computer space.
It’s no surprise that Alex mistakenly chose a big company over a startup straight out of school even though he was already interested in startups.

That was not necessarily a mistake. As a fresh college grad (and particularly as an engineer) I'd argue that you are ill-equipped to judge a good startup opportunity from a bad one. There is absolutely nothing wrong with spending time at a large company, benefitting from their experience in graduate intake, learning a lot of good, sensible practises, then applying them to a startup.

I've also recently become deeply skeptical of working for a startup as anything other than a founder or a very early employee. You don't benefit monetarily (low pay, bad stock options) and the work environment is frequently toxic and incredibly demanding. The only difference is you'll be making your bosses rich instead of making stockholders rich.
Any reason what that isn't served over SSL?
I really like the new Flickr, but I usually just use photo stream and sets.
Show HN: Translate your content directly from Google Drive with the Unbabel API
Vizify acquired by Yahoo
Great post :D
No, I can't. It's actually a big philosophical/legal issue involving "illegal numbers"[0], definition of copying and colour of bits[1].

Don't make problems simple and obvious when they're not.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

[1] - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
I didn't say anything about it becoming "less bad", just that the discussions will mostly be purely academic and of little value to the avg person (to them gov surveillance < miley cyrus|beyonce|justin beiber|shinny new iphone app|that college degree) surrounding those capabilities under the situation I put forth, especially if such masses find any utility in having access to such information.

Edit for 1st comment: Looks like 4sq found it… and I'm sure there's room for others to follow… http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/foursquare-revenues/
Open science in machine learning
Is there an infinite crisis in gaming industry?
> there is an infinite supply of crypto currency.
> I'm a tulip bulb guy - those are at least finite.

Surely this is exactly back to front? Tulip bulbs are part of a reproducing organism and hence theoretically infinite, whereas Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies have a maximum number of coins that can be mined. Sure, there's an infinite supply of cryptocurrencies but that isn't the same at all. There's also an infinite supply of printed bits of paper, modulo trees and ink, but that doesn't mean the dollar is worthless.
Do you have opinions on the actual platform?
3 questions with technology entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa
Why do you need a file download to be over HTTPS?
Related to this is Social Tables (https://www.socialtables.com/), a DC-based startup making some really cool event-planning software.
Have you wrote about their issue somewhere else in details ? I'm on the same side as the parent comment[1] and I really wish to read and ~understand what I'm missing[2].

[1] I'm natively wired to run toward very dense 'interfaces' (ui, syntax)

[2] Honest open question, don't wanna 'argue'.
> (unless otherwise defeated by pointer aliasing)

In practice calling any other non-pure function, which the compiler can't see in to, will defeat this optimisation, whether there's aliasing within your function or not.
Also regarding the same quote, how many of those plays are from young children using someone else's phone/tablet? anecdotal evidence: my son, and nephew are always using my moms ipad to play games when they're at her house.
Great advice. i'd like to add that sometimes it's not just finding problems, but developing solutions.. but also finding out what makes them look good to their boss.
+1. I just started learning and using it a few weeks ago; it's been a lot of fun.
Yes, but the BTC infrastructure itself provides a cryptographically strong method of proving reserves. If a large nation decided to implement its own hybrid fiat/cryptocurrency, it would basically be an unstoppable juggernaut, assuming no one ever broke the crypto protocols in a widely exploitable way. (And even then, the fiat currency might survive.)
Imagine the thing tumbling. some % of the time, the remaining rotor will be pointed in a useful direction, so you can give it the falling quad a push. If you want it to fall slower, run the rotor when it's pointed vaguely up. If you want it to fall somewhere safe (say to the north), run the rotor when it's pointed vaguely north.
For now it's just another altcoin (zetacoin clone) that is riding the same speculative trend as auroracoin has been for the last couple weeks. If it is actually officially recognized by the tribe and if it starts getting used more like a real currency on tribal lands, it stands a chance at establishing a more stable value and breaking new ground as a cryptocurrency. I figure this is at least several years off and is highly speculative in itself. The coin additionally still has the problem that all the others do, and most of them will end up in the hands of cryptocurrency speculators and not indians, which would seem to cast a rather uncertain future on the coin.

That being said, I bought some and am mining some, I think it's cool.
There was a post on reddit a while ago from a former lego employee addressing why they are so expensive. It comes down to the fact that they don't want the bricks to be off by more than half a thousandth of an inch, so every brick can fit with every other brick ever made.

http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/14ccan/lego_super_star...
Sometimes if you haven't got things configured properly, you do return the script as text rather than the output of the script.

The old school default was to put executable in the cgi-bin folder (wherever that had been configured to be) and make them executable. That would run the script and return the output.
"Personal Branding for Developers" Thoughts?
I was envisioning less destruction and more standing around eating things. But goat-based destruction's good too I guess. I'd just hope that everything in the environment is edible.
It's great to see someone who reads something in depth! Thanks for taking the time and commenting. :-)

My point with with the comment "Logging in directly as root user is a bad idea — even in examples" was that you should have enough pre-requsite knowledge to understand why that is bad, and that you should not follow my examples 100%.

That and I was poking fun at myself for being sloppy. :-)
I feel as if I shouldn't be clicking links that end in the .sexy TLD at work
At this moment we haven't purchase any SSL certificates. We'll do when we'll go live. For some users that uses browsers that forces uses of SSL certificates they'll get that message.

Thanks
Yes yes yes, but the specific "money quote" above wasn't talking about that, it was talking about the number of redundant calls to strlen() in this one particular function. Extending it to mean something else by our implication makes it something rather different than a "money quote".
As long as you keep doing that, you are supporting that type of IAP behavior.

You have no one to blame but yourself.
I was making a joke....

If C is the wrong choice, what is the right choice?
I'd like to know that as well.

It's interesting that they focus on WordPress. A custom WordPress install could potentially have several requests that make up a given page. Wordpress isn't really designed with reducing the requests in mind.
Well, it depends on who thinks it "doesn't make sense". The D.C. city government believes suppressing gun ownership in every way they can get away with "makes society better" (well, it makes their ruling over their subjects easier, it's easy to punish areas that don't vote correctly by removing a lot of their police protection, or so I heard when I lived next door in Arlington for a dozen years; classic Anarcho-Tyranny). They have a lot of company, as I'm sure you've noticed.

And the fact is they uniformly enforce these laws, albeit with quite a few jury nullifications, except when people like David Gregory and institutions like NBC commit these crimes. Knowingly in NBC's case.

I wish more people would admit we have a severe problem with having effectively having two sets of laws, one for our nomenklatura and another for the rest of us.
Is HAML really that hard? It seems pretty damned elementary to me. The hardest part is simply being sure you're using soft tabs. So called "front-end engineers" who can't understand haml after 3 minutes have no business calling themselves "front-end engineers"
Economies of scale are powerful.

Some economies of scale are attainable with small numbers of (or single) craftsmen. If you can batch operations, one person can rotate though steps of a process over the course of a day, or of days.

Another factor in the Industrial Revolution was the addition of both energy and capital. Where early energy sources were often inconveniently located: mill towns were, literally, located on waterways or elsewhere free energy was possible, often quite distant (and over very poor roads) from major populations, which is to say, either labor or markets.

The revolutions of steam and electricity meant that the scale of operations of factories could be both scaled up and down: smaller-scale equipment means that a local shop can produce goods, though typically this means on a highly specialized basis.

Other factors tend to increase cost of goods: advertising, marketing, and competitive fencing via exclusive marketing arrangements, patent enforcement, and the like.
Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims
Painfully unfunny.
Coffeescript removes the trailing `});` that stacks up when writing callback-heavy code (such as node.js).
It's SFW, no worries.
Bookmarklet to help keep track of your most vain vainity metric
How to debug small programs
Develop and deploy an app with Fig, Orchard and Docker
There's only so much an API can do with garbage input. If this function took a pointer and a length, that's not a magic fix, you could still pass it a bad pointer and/or a bad length..
Incredible HD Video of Earth from Space Brings Maps to Life
It will earn you a ticket in most states, at least on a public street.

I am, and have been, very interested in countermeasures that obscure plates to non-humans. Bright IR to severely overexpose, shuttered lenses or pulsed LEDs that create severe beat-frequency disruption of the image, some magical thing that causes the characteristics of a plate (retro-reflectivity is a key signature, I think) to not look like a plate to an ALRP so that it won't even think to try and capture, etc.

—I mention retro-reflectivity only because within the last few years Washington state has required that license plates be replaced every three years rather than just getting new tabs as it had been forever. I asked a DMV engineer why this policy was put into place and he replied that it was due to decreasing reflectivity over time. Perhaps coincidental but the policy was instituted right about te same time ALRPs started to be used by parking enforcement and police.
Don't forget the most important skill for any startup employee: learn to pick the right companies to work for. It pains me to say this, but choosing the best company will pay off more than any other skill on that list (of course, you need those listed skills to get that job). Joining WhatsApp at an early stage probably led to a bigger payday than many founders see after successful exits.
I wouldn't publish JS code in CoffeeScript, but for proprietary projects, especially Rails, I'd use CoffeeScript, HAML, and also, indented Sass. Coming from a different background, I was pretty resistant at first, but I think developers need to embrace different environments fully and see what the experience is, rather than molding it into something else or trying to force tools that don't belong. When in Rome and all.

So, if you're going to be working in a particular environment, be committed and embrace the experience.
Do you do your web browsing always logged into gmail and facebook? No criticism intended.

I use Chrome for accessing gmail, facebook, twitter, and linkedin - always logged in. For everything else I use Firefox with strong privacy settings. No overhead for me to do this, and this seems like a reasonable middle-road for privacy.
Another point that should be brought up is to not overvalue yourself. I remember asking Justin (from JTV/exec/socialcam) in 2011 for some advice - I was working in the corporate world and was ready to make the jump to a startup. At the time I was an IT consultant and was looking for PM roles at Dropbox/Foursquare/insert hot startup here.

He gave some much needed but harsh feedback, essentially asking "Why should they hire you? <hot startup of the month> has their pick of the litter, why would they gamble on someone unproven?" I've never really been told to aim lower, but it made me think -- if you really want to work at a startup, you'll start somewhere and prove yourself. Justin used the example of Aram, who started out as an office manager for JustinTV and ended up founding ZeroCater. I now work in BD and haven't looked back.

Justin ended up writing a guest post for TechCrunch (I'd like to think partially inspired by me) here - http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/28/how-to-get-a-job-at-a-start...
Cool idea of a website.
To expand on your second point. Debugging coffeescript has become pretty easy with Chrome and Firefox supporting source maps. With livereload and coffee's autocompile (watch & compile flags) I basically skip the build steps. For me, coffeescript was similar in syntax to Python (our main language at work) and it makes everything much cleaner compared to JS for big projects.
Hi there,
I'm hoping to cover this story for channel four news. Would be great to talk to you. I'm at kate.conway@itn.co.uk
thanks so much
I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour.

I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right?

We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem.

How about atheists? They're more disliked in the U.S. than just about any group out there (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-atheists-we-dis...). I guess the problem isn't their boss checking via license plate scanning whether or not they go to church every week, their behavior is the problem.

I guess we better tell political dissidents to knock it off too.

And let's not forget abuse of the data. You seem to think that this data is perfectly protected, perfectly monitored. You really can't imagine a scenario where a rogue cop pulls over a young girl, becomes obsessed with her and then begins stalking her by abusing electronic tracking systems he has access to? It's happening already - Google gave me too many examples to cite.

Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation

This is astoundingly pseudo-intellectual tripe. The reality is that what people do in their own private lives is none of your business, and people seeking to track people's every movements are evil.
Be more specific. At this moment, if you signup, and setup your VPN, you'll get instant access to Metasploitable2 ( http://metasploitable.ctf )where you can train and test. About Metasploitable2, you can read here https://community.rapid7.com/docs/DOC-1875
US prosecutors drop link-related charges from Barrett Brown case?
Would anyone be interested in seeing a "Rap Genius for academic papers" to address the third paragraph of parent comment? To those who aren't familiar with Rap Genius, I basically just mean a place where academic papers can be annotated and explained in plain language by the community. Would you read/contribute?
The time zones don't quite match the map. Finland (where I am) for example should be in GMT+2, but it is drawn in GMT+1 on that map.
Microsoft’s Nadella Manages Legacy of Ballmer-Board Split
"Dudebro startups like yours get shit from angry feminists all the time." #WTH?
Maybe you consider that I'm one of those angry feminists but...I'm a girl, I'm a developer and nope...I think I won't use Vim.sexy....
Jeremy, I really appreciate this post and all the excellent content over at Math ∩ Programming. Thanks, and please keep it up!
Because someone can man-in-the-middle you and give you a potentially backdoored binary?
Agreed... I thought someone had actually released a new version of VIM with some cool new features or something. Not funny at all and wasted my time.
> the situation doesn't change in any way and I still don't need your permission even if I did the same for a thousand cars this morning, and my buddies did the same thing for ten thousand cars more.

I hate to say it -- because it's probably irrelevant from a legal perspective at the moment -- but this sounds exactly like the fallacy of the beard to me.

(edit: not to accuse you of committing this fallacy, just felt this was important enough that it should be highlighted)
Can you really patent the implementation of PID algorithm? There isn't really anything novel about the fact that it is on quadracopter platform as opposed to any other control system other than it seems to be well executed, fast, and effective.
Ukraine, Putin, and the West