skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can only agree that it is generally not very insightful — however, tracking might help some people focus and help them not necessarily understand, but realise, as in take a more emotionally loaded grasp, what is happening. In general, I would refrain from absolute when it comes to motivation science.

One practical application that I have found to Moves (one of the tools listed there, and the most used one) is journaling: not really detailing how much calories I have burned, bus simply where I was, and what I’ve done. The integration with FourSquare is great to help me remember “that great little restaurant I when to when I was in Barcelona… was that in June or April?”

In my experience — admittedly anecdotal and (I wish on everything that is precious) representative to no one — I torn my knee a year ago: ACL, the very bad kind. The pain… I spent a month in bed, convinced for the first two weeks I might not ever walk on my own (that wasn’t remotely possible, and sometimes making a jockish surgeon burst out laughing at your naïveté is all you need to feel oddly better). I still couldn't barely walk and had to: exercise, as soon and as hard as you can, is the only treatment. Moves really helped me track my every step there, and a dozen stepped counted at the time. I am emotionally quite fragile in general, more so then (because the accident had cost me a good client, delayed an interview with an amazing company, forced my long-distance girlfriend and I to cancel holidays together, ridden me to a windowless bed while Spring was finally out) and the pain… Without that bouncy blue dot proclaiming 360 steps was a ‘Personal record!’ I wouldn’t have gone through it nearly as well. Without the app to track on its own the time it took me to tumble on crutches to my very good, very busy and very time-conscious physical therapist (a block away, that is… 20 minutes the first days), I would have had no idea how to be there on time. Not representative, indeed. Bit not useless.

None of the tracking apps that I’ve used have had the expected impact: some revealed to me how my psyche was at stake more than training, some that GPS technology sucks, or that good design is still direly needed… None (with the notable exception of Moves) I’ve used durably, but all have had a positive, eye-opening experience on me. Often, help me realise what you describe quite well. But experiencing it still beats reading about it.
Source code is a poor way to specify the behavior of a system. It is complex, verbose, and difficult to reason about without proper language abstractions at appropriate levels. Worse still are machine optimizations obscuring intent as the software evolves, work-around "patterns" for inferior PL designs, and other savageries inflicted upon us. It is highly unlikely you could give a brilliant programmer a few hundred thousand or millions of lines of code and ask them what the program does in an afternoon let alone ask them to find the bug in it.

Good unit tests provide the specification for a certain low-level of the code to a developer. You will never catch everything but their purpose is not to test for absolute correctness. Their purpose is to specify, for a given range of expected behavior, what the boundaries are. If I write the test first in earnest I am telling my future maintainers what I intended to write. We can execute that intention against what I wrote and make assertions about whether it works as expected. That's all I expect unit tests to do.

Formal correctness proofs for all possible inputs is way out of my league and beyond the scope of almost every project I've encountered save for automated proof verification software.

You should write unit tests and you should write them first. They are the executable specification you will run your program against to ensure your software behaves in the manner in which you intended it to. With solid, well-thought out tests guiding your design you should be able to optimize and refactor your software over time and see that it still behaves as expected in the face of change. And you should be able to hand a suite of well-written tests to a new developer and expect them to understand what a given piece of software does in a day (perhaps in even less time for smaller pieces).
This is amazing! Scala right now doesn't really have a good story in terms of user-facing apps - it's not impossible to piggy back on Swing and Android, but that's about it for now. Definitely looking forward to seeing this mature!

As for the haters, there's no real reason at this stage to worry about "why would you use this for that" - people said the same thing about Java server-side (it's slow and on servers, cross-platform doesn't matter), Javascript server-side (it's single-threaded and clunky and people only use it because they are forced to), C# for iOS development (but it's from Microsoft), etc, etc.
That is a start, but any interruption at any time can be disruptive, and email is a particular problem.

What would be handy in a tool like this is being able to set up what I described above; normally don't ever notify me, but allow me to turn on real-time notifications for particular people on demand, or other rules for knowing when it makes sense to interrupt.
One of the technical people at Echo Nest writes some pretty interesting posts about music and how they analyze it. He mentions the acquisition today:

http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=399
That's an interesting observation and now that you pointed it out, I think I agree with you. However, I think that more than autistic people lack interest in "being rich". If I had $400m, I'd buy a house and pay off our car. The remaining $399.5m would be invested. I'd take out $40-50k per year for spending. Extravagant lifestyles are overrated, I think.
What bothers me at the moment is that photographers can't opt-out. Since a lot of them are paid on a royalty basis, it appears they will be the ones really giving away their content.

I am often asked by photographers if we offer their photos for free at CrowdMedia (http://crowdmedia.co), and the only valid answer for them is NO. Whatever people do, if they do it well and it is useful to others, eventually they should get rewarded for it.

I like Getty's initiative for small non-commercial blogs, but I don't think photographers should be the ones paying for it.
I once took a class in business school on medical pricing and the instructor said that if you look at a graph of life expectancy that a large percentage of the population dies in the 50-60 age range, but statistically people who live past the age of 60 or 65 (I can't remember the exact figure) will be likely to live to be over 75. In other words, once you make it past a certain age you are sort of screened out as somebody who is high-risk to die of certain ailments like heart disease or cancer.

So if we take that to be generally accurate, then these findings make sense because I would wager that if you studied any diet or habit thought to be unhealthy, more people would die off between 50-65 than after 65.

This also explains why averages don't make sense with regard to any conversation about life expectancy since the averages really need to be observed in bands.
I'm already mad at apple because allows the NSA to spy my phone, but when it got stolen I was left with a baby-level find-my-phone idiocy, for a mobile device that costs a month's salary where I live. So basically it's okay to use technology to spy on me, but to help find my phone it's a no-no.

Now the ads thing? I think I'm going to ditch all my apple hardware at once.
I don't think this helps. Are you thinking that what, certain 8x8 blocks of pixels appear in photos much more than others? I don't think that's true except for general cases like monochrome blocks or smooth gradients, and you don't need a dictionary to help compress those.
First, it’s cheap.

Second, it's integrated. Which, to me at least, feels much more natural than AWS where you rent a virtual server, and then a database separately, persistent storage separately... Because it's integrated, it's also simple.

And they have a datacentre* in Amsterdam. Even two of them, right in the heart of the European Internet. That means latency to their servers is not noticeable in much of the EU.

* Yes, yes, probably more like a cage or whatever they rent.
The Echo Nest blog announcement:

http://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941/the-echo-nest-join...
This is a common pattern for embedding scripts, so the browser will use the same protocol as the parent page loading the element (http or https), avoiding issues with embedding insecure content in a secure page. I thought it worked for iframe elements too - but I guess it's not consistently supported? It works for me in Chrome on Win7.

Edit - more info about "Protocol Relative URLs": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/550038/is-it-valid-to-rep...
Does the Internet have a mother?
Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.
There's a separate thread discussing the actual Echo Nest post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7353874
[search saver :]

Personal protective equipment (PPE) refers to protective clothing, helmets, goggles, or other garments or equipment ...
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_protective_equipment )
"When I was programming on a daily basis, I did make code for
testability purposes but I hardly did write any unit tests. However I was renowned for my code quality and my nearly bug free software. I like to investigate WHY did this work for me?"

Here's why: anything that focuses attention during development improves quality. Unit tests can be that thing but that means that their value is in a place that Cope is not describing.

See: http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/200...
Correct - IIRC their entire Radio feature is powered by The Echo Nest.
Illuminate your life with Kickstarter's SnapRays
Senate staffers slipped secret CIA documents from agency’s headquarters
If I understand the argument there correctly, the responder is saying: Nobody should ever use this functionality, instead they should always check that the date is not None. So, we should leave this broken, because we don't want to break backwards-compatibility with that class of applications that nobody should ever write.

That philosophy, taken to its logical conclusion, results in everything being broken forever.
"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage."

Looking at the feedback from their user base, and even rom my own experience, different storage options would be way more useful than IPv6 or even load balancing.
5 Quite Interesting UX Definitions
The NHS makes me very proud here. A well written next-day response to widely published bad science journalism of the worst sort.

That headline was plastered across the front-pages of all the newspapers I read with no caveats. Both scare-mongering of unproven dangers and diminishing of more certain dangers like smoking & dietary excess. IMHO media outlets should be heavily fined for bad science journalism. Its a grave form of libel but poor injured science isn't able to sue them for it.
That's why the user was suggesting deprecating the feature.
Thanks, I didn't know about that one; haven't checked the labs in a while. Also found a preview pane feature which I'm going to test out.
A big part of it is about user expectations. I would be shocked if any experienced Python programmer who wasn't familiar with this exact implementation detail expected the following:

if datetime.time(0, 0, 0):
print "foo"
else:
print "bar"

to print "bar"
This is a sequel to my previous GUI iBeacon Creator about how to hack the iBeacon Protocol. Please take a look!
Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music.

Like Carthage, it is my opinion that Spotify and the music /industry/ founded on copy-theft must be burned down.
Gavin doesn't know who Satoshi is. He just regrets speaking to that reporter. His tweet doesn't lend any credibility to the story.
In Defense of Candidness
Most of that information is already available on the open Internet, given someone's full name, which many people use (or don't go to great effort to hide) on the Internet.

Given my full name, you can figure out, in about ten minutes, where I live, pictures of my house and my car (thanks, Google), the amount of property taxes I pay and the value of my house, my approximate net worth, my family, my academic history, partial work history, and many other details I would personally prefer the Internet to not know. All this is easily available on open public Internet sites.

And that's me. I make a concerted effort to remain pseudonymous on the Internet. I don't have a Facebook. I think you'd be surprised what people can easily find out about you if they want to.

What I do find interesting is the dichotomy between what I perceived to be the HN majority opinion in the story about license plate tracking and this story. In the former, it seemed to me that most people declared that privacy was basically dead and we should get over it; it was perfectly legitimate to collect public data regardless of whether the aggregation of that data led to information that many people would consider an invasion of privacy. Indeed, many commenters justified this point of view by saying that, essentially, data collection didn't really introduce any new problems, it just made it easier to get caught lying (e.g. having an affair) which is your fault since you shouldn't be doing it anyway.

But here many people (perhaps it is entirely a different set of people) clearly feel that the opposite is true: individuals, even those who may be involved in very public projects, have a powerful right to privacy. Or is it just that we feel its OK for companies and individuals to buy and sell information but less OK for the media to publish the same information wholesale? If so, why? At least when the media publishes my information, I know what you know. If people are buying and selling my information, I don't know what they know about me, I don't know what they're doing with that information, I don't know if its accurate, and I don't know how that affects decisions that companies and governments make about me.

I especially find the argument that we shouldn't publish the information about Satoshi because it puts him at risk interesting. I think most of us dismissed the same arguments when it came to informants identified in the Wikileaks documents.

I don't buy the "seeking attention" argument: many celebrities and people in positions of power aren't seeking attention and fame - it's a side effect of the job, or something they have done. The case is no different for them than it is for Satoshi.
Isn't Nakamoto the only person who lives in LA who also controls >10% of a currency?
Well said. This is closer around the corner than most can realize.
What looks like is needed is a serialization of user transactions.

And also risk-avoiding schemas (in the general provisions of the business, not only on the system running it)
What is integrated about it? They're just a VPS provider, which is a strict subset of what you can do on AWS.
I've seen enough of those app claiming to be platforms to say: five, actually working, relevant services, correctly pooled together is an impressive number. Not f*cking up the timezones would be a great improvement.
Integration tests would be more useful, no?
I haven't finalized the pricing yet, but it should not break the bank. I am going to start with SSMS 2012, and if there's a demand to support older versions, I'll do that. I am curious what you would consider as a reasonable price for this? Also, I think you can use SSMS 2012 to connect to older Sql Server Databases. Is there a reason for you to use the older SSMS?
"Founder of Bitcoin" is not the same as "founder of Bitcoin exchange". It's like saying the founder of the dollar is the same as the founder of Bank of America.
Unit tests are a tool for understanding. Their value does not come from targeting coverage and formal correctness.

At the end of the day, we have to convince ourselves that our code works. We can do that by looking at it and seeing what it does, and by writing tests to demonstrate that we are not lying to ourselves about what we've reasoned.

Write tests for things that you are curious about or don't understand - those are thing things that need to be tested.
I'm sad to hear this, since the Radio feature is pretty bad. I guess that means losing The Echo Nest is no big deal, though.
Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music.

Care to expand on what you mean by that? I'll agree with you that the music industry is deeply messed up, but it has been for a very long time. If anything services like Spotify will allow artists to abandon parasitic record labels and release material by themselves.
Breaking The Record Of Continuous 120 hr lecture by an INDIAN professor.
Mr Arvind Mishra, Asst Prof of Mechanical Engineering will deliver a continuous and uninterrupted lecture of 130 hours on Scientific Computations.
Sorry about that, I live in acronym land.
Love DigitalOcean. Sorta sad they still don't offer OpenBSD though.

OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, and the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax.

https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...
>Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music.

Why do you think this? Because of the insultingly tiny fees they pay out?
Scientist-devised crypto attack could one day steal secret Bitcoin keys
Using something like QuickCheck, you can generate a lot of different input for one function, including edge cases and everything in between.
The status page is also serving and invalid certificate (wrong domain).

Looks like a fun day at Bitbucket HQ.
If so, then the radio won't really improve. I prefer Pandora, but I can't get that now in my country.
A good rule-of-thumb: If it's packaged in cardboard it's almost always 99.99% processed. If it's shrinkwrapped (how meat should be) it's almost always 99.99% unprocessed, or minimally at the most.
This is a real problem, especially in Homeric Greek and Biblical Hebrew. One approach to figuring out what such words mean, is to go to similar words in related languages. Another is to use earlier translations (such as the Septuagint from Hebrew to Greek in the first or second centuries BCE), when the translators likely had a better sense of what the words meant.
Show HN: Unmark - An open source to do app for bookmarks.
>>> They dont care about real security of data, all they care is compliance.

Not so sure about that either:

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/08/target-to-pay-6...

"Target has settled a class action lawsuit with the National Federation of the Blind over accessibility complaints with Target.com. Despite the law being unclear as to whether the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to websites, the company will pay a substantial fee and update its web site to make it accessible to the blind."

This was after repeated appeals by the NFB to have them correct the site. It took a class action lawsuit for them to actually to do something. Even then Target sought to have the case dismissed:

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

"Target moved to dismiss the case, claiming its brick and mortar stores are accessible to the blind, and that civil rights laws apply to the accessibility of its stores."
The way I found to maximize this is:

1. TDD is for when I am learning new programming as it keeps my wrong assumptions in check when learning new stuff

2. BDD is when you have decrease the learning curve to a low level and helps verify behavior of the system.

I use a combination of both but generally my TDD number of tests decreases when I get at a certain advance level of programming in a subject while my BDD tests generally increase.
That’s the price.
Picking on C's error handling mechanism is like picking on its non-existent standard library: it's been done to death.
Today was a bad day to send my proposal for introducing bitbucket to my new company X_X
I didn't know that -- that's very interesting! Thank you for showing me that.

I learned about Kalman filters in a mobile robotics course that made explicit Gaussian assumptions early on for the primary topic (SqrtSAM), and they brought up Kalman filters in its own lecture as kind of a "this is how they used to do SLAM" lecture. Considering the large amount of overlap in the methods, such as the use of linear covariance projections, I guess I made the assumption that Kalman filters had the same Gaussian assumption.
How to Convince Your Company to Go with Go
It's been incredibly difficult to get an answer out of them on whether they pool bandwidth[1], which would allow you to just build your own load balancers on their smallish instances while leveraging the transfer included in the rest of your clusters.

I finally got an answer last night[2]

1. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...
2. https://twitter.com/jedgar/status/441314391301296128
I've never seen a good argument for anything beside "false" to be considered false. Likewise for "true". Keystrokes are not a commodity for most coders, and compilers are not dumb; just be explicit and write "!= 0" or whatever.

(And 0 == False, "" != False, but both 0 and "" are considered false? C'mon Python, that's borderline JavaScript territory.)
That's not an assignment. That's telling the solver "Do whatever you need to do to satisfy this condition". Either the right or the left or both may change.
You need Powerpoint, a credulous VC and a good ability to peddle manure.
I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean in this context. Testing for "is not None" is more explicit and avoids the trap being discussed. I don't know how the second sentence applies, maybe "if timeval:" is simpler?

BTW, do you know the original author of the Zen of Python has posted to this very dicussion (while also being the orginal author of said module):

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-March/02...
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-March/02...
App to Read Novels In Under 90 Minutes
I wrote a book called 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' that's really all about testing code that is not easy to test - real apps beyond toy examples.

There are techniques in the book but really you should try to write tests for code as you write it. It's the best way to make sure that your code is decoupled enough for testing. If you do that, you don't need the techniques in the book.
My bad. I tested it by loading a page from the local filesystem rather than over the network. It works fine as is, of course.
I just watched a video from her a few days ago on exchanges and fraud...I'll get the link if anyone wants it.

Edit - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzVxRmvipVY
> I like how people think one study is enough to upend an entire body of knowledge

almost nobody in this thread thinks this. in fact, quite the opposite. it seems everyone thinks, "well, this study doesn't conform to my preconceived notions, so it can't be true".

in fact, this is one study (although there was also a similar one done on mice) that shows a surprising result. i think an appropriate reaction is: maybe its true, and we should definitely do more research in this area.
Is anyone else surprised that that police know that Satoshi is the creator of Bitcoin? That seems like an esoteric piece of knowledge for someone not in the tech space.
Infographic was a nice touch! Accurate article.
Learn about IE's special pseudo elements for input's
Is the PC apocalypse upon us? Latest sales figures say it might be.
Wow, I missed that. Great to hear!
TL;DR

Can anyone that read it provide a summary so that I know if it's worth spending time reading it ?
Being a private person doesn't necessarily mean that you go to great lengths to conceal yourself. It just means you don't offer more for free, like posting your personal life all over Facebook for example.