skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Give Android Studio a shot. Makes laying out the UI in XML a breeze with its excellent intellisense.
Show HN: Koldsnapp – Teaser launch Site for college comp
Hey Guys, long time rss lurker here.

My college, Colorado College, is putting on a $100k startup competition on April 1st, and here's the teaser launch site for our product.

Basically, Koldsnapp is a wireless sensor system for small business freezers and fridges. Getting warned before the ice cream melts or your produce goes bad will prevent >$1000 losses that many of these small family-run businesses incur. It only takes 20 minutes to setup, and our first vertical is ice cream stores.

I'll release the product slides on the day of the comp, and i'll post here again if there's interest, and especially if we win some money!

Thanks for being such a great resource over the years, HN!
-Azeem

PS. Since the pitch is on April 1st, can anyone think of a good april fools prank to do that wouldn't destroy a pitch?
Dark Hacker News Solarized Userstyle
What crime was it?
Curious as to why you didn't use the ActionMailer delayed extension? https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki/Delayed-Extensions#a...

Also isn't it dangerous to override `EmailDeliverer.send` like that?
Isn't the case for owners that the quantifying is "what ever is left over"?
No, I meant the famously violent prisoner, trying to use a US and non-US example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bronson_(prisoner)

Not the star of Death Wish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bronson

Sorry, I can see where that would have been confusing.

Apparently Charles Manson has been placed in solitary for debatable reasons:
http://mansondirect.com/solitary-confinement.html
Ironic, isn't it, that solitary is a severe punishment in one context but is also part of the traditional means (going off to a lonely cave for a few years) of obtaining enlightenment?
MOOCs will only work if they garner a reputation of providing education relevant to employers or even lead to jobs. Also important are college connections to businesses to facilitate internships. Internships can really make or break you in same cases.

I know most MOOC courses are up to par. I've taken several and the introductory Python programming course at Udacity was more difficult than any of the classes from my arts degree. Right now, a certificate from a MOOC is about as worthless as a certificate I make for myself. I could take those Python skills and do useful things that would make me stand out among other candidates, but that requires a willing ear. Rare exceptions are employers who are actually aware of MOOCs and also favorable to the idea.

I could sell the idea of a MOOC in an interview, even show what I've learned, but getting the interview with MOOC credentials seems very suspect unless you find that aware employer. The idea of MOOCs (free education that leads to employment) threatens colleges, but I don't think the existing MOOCs are currently having an impact on price. When they will begin to have an impact is anyone's guess.
I wonder how much of it had to do with how graphically inconsistent Android was until 4.x

I had Stock Android 1.x and 2.x devices (before switching to iOS), and there was no consistent UI anywhere to be found, even different parts of the base system did things differently, not to mention non-scrollable UI elements that'd render off partially the screen (parts of the menus for example) - and thats just the interface - while android is better now, you still have the supposed fragmentation issues, and the fact that if you have a single device that has some issues with your app, you can end up with comments and ratings that reflect that minority rather than the majority of users for whom it works fine.
Hey Guys, long time rss lurker here.

My college, Colorado College, is putting on a $100k startup competition on April 1st, and here's the teaser launch site for our product.

Basically, Koldsnapp is a wireless sensor system for small business freezers and fridges. Getting warned before the ice cream melts or your produce goes bad will prevent >$1000 losses that many of these small family-run businesses incur. It only takes 20 minutes to setup, and our first vertical is ice cream stores.

I'll release the product slides on the day of the comp, and i'll post here again if there's interest, and especially if we win some money!

Thanks for being such a great resource over the years, HN!
-Azeem

PS. Since the pitch is on April 1st, can anyone think of a good april fools prank to do that wouldn't destroy a pitch?
I personally hate this model. Layer2 networking architectures like this need to finally die off, as they are extremely complex and difficult to troubleshoot.

For high-availability HAProxy I've found ECMP to be by far the most simple way to achieve very reliable redundancy, with a side benefit of more or less infinite horizontal scaling (depending on what routers you're talking to). I've served hundreds of gigabits with this model, and it works well. You can even scale it out on a global level by utilizing anycasting.

It works pretty simple. Run bgpd on your HAProxy boxes talking to your router. Each HAProxy box advertises your VIP, and your router will load balance this via ECMP. Should a HAProxy machine die, the BGP announcement gets withdrawn and traffic flows to the remaining proxy servers still advertising the VIP.

The only thing left to do is get some sort of service monitoring going that can automatically down bgpd should haproxy die/otherwise mess up on an individual machine. Add a couple checks in to ensure there is always a "path of last resort" should you have a bug in your app or monitoring code, and this proves to be very resilient, scalable, and is something nearly anyone can troubleshoot in a very short amount of time. It also works well in a cloud type on-demand/devops model - as it's extremely easy to simply spin up additional haproxy machines and have them automatically announce their configuration via bgpd.
Fragmentation is a real thing, not laziness. Almost 98% of Android users don't run KitKat.
what is Mo/s?
I did the same – cut my teeth on a 4A well into '94 or so (~9 by then) using old magazines. It doesn't really matter what's "current" when you have no-one but yourself to learn with.
Computer technology is about 60 years old, though. There were people doing some pioneering work in the 50s and 60s, and the modern hacker culture really has its roots in the 1970s, just prior to the rise of personal computing.

There was lots of stuff going on with the DEC minicomputers, LISP machines, early UNIX systems, and big-iron mainframes long before most of us were even born, let alone getting our starts on TI-99s, Apple IIs, and Commodore 64s. And let's not forget that the people who were creating those early home-computer platforms were themselves all from the previous generation.

Would you turn people like Steve Wozniak or Al Alcorn or Ken Williams away from your new startup? You'd be a fool if you did. The basic architecture of computers hasn't changed at all since they did their most important work, and the cognitive skillset that makes a great programmer is the same as it's always been.

In fact, I'd expect that people who cut their teeth on early systems, and had to work within narrow constraints, without a big stack of abstraction layers and frameworks, would be all the more adept at writing robust and efficient code than those who learned on modern tools. And I'd bet, with Moore's law slowing down, and with better-optimized code becoming more advantageous in building scalable systems, older programmers will soon be in higher demand.
How cool would it be if there were a Chromecast which had HTTP Web APIs available to stream content to it?
They design for the devices they have. They also design for the largest part of the viewing traffic of the web (ios). Apple is still a design deity.

Apple had the first big app platform and clients still demand iOS first. In game and app development, it still gets the most focus.

Finally, and a bit of a trick almost, is the review times are longer for Apple when talking about apps, this causes a focus on iOS earlier many times. Projects tend towards getting iOS ready early and in the queue and approved and the Android platforms second because Google Play is instant almost (Amazon is as slow as Apple on reviews). Like complaining customers that get the most focus, the more difficult to approve platform gets the most focus but only because of its market share and past (new entrants need to be easier).

However with Google's beta system on Play more and more projects are starting there now that a good chunk of clients have Android devices. Apple really needed to buy testflight because they didn't have anything as nice. Android is becoming a better test market and something you can iterate on faster early to prepare it for iOS, lots of game developers are thinking this way now, primarily because iOS is so hit driven at launch you have to get right and Google is better long tail is seems.
This seems like a case of circular reasoning. "Google's results are not as good as the CDC's because Google's results are different than the CDC's." But why do we believe that the CDC estimates are better?

I have never gone to the doctor when I had a flu. If it had lasted more than one or two days, or if I had a temperature higher than 102, then I would have gone. But as it was, nobody ever knew that I had the flu except myself and my family.

Even if I had wanted to go to the doctor for every time I got a flu or a cold, it takes at least a day or two to schedule a doctor's appointment. By the time the appointment had rolled around I would probably have cancelled, since the flu doesn't usually last very long.

This being the US, there are also a lot of uninsured people who can't go to the doctor even if they wanted to. For those people, Google is the only option. The CDC can collect as much data as it wants from the laboratories, but you can't collect what isn't there.

When you add in the uninsured people and the people who get better before visiting the doctor, it's not at all surprising that the lab estimates are 2x lower than reality. In fact, I would kind of expect them to be even lower than that.
Scientists Discover Potential Way to Make Graphene Superconducting
>The question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like.

Wrong question, I think. Talent does increase with age, at least if the developers in question actually care enough to stay current. [1] I don't think it gets better by orders of magnitude, though -- the mythical 10x-20x programmer starts out as a 5x+ programmer. I know I was already at least that much better than most of my coworkers when I got my first day job.

What does happen is that developers are less willing to work crazy amounts of overtime just to impress management, and it's overtime bias that's the real problem.

I just blew away a team of two developers (both much younger) who had been working on a project for 9+ man weeks, catching up and passing them in less than two calendar weeks of development (on an implementation of the same code on another platform). And I did it in 30-40 hours per week. At a "traditional" company that rates performance by the number of hours each developer sits at their desks, I would have been the worst performer, and it's only the fact that I was doing almost exactly the same thing as the other team that made it clear I was getting more work done in less than half the work hours.

The corollary is that, as a young programmer, I cost the same as an idiot who couldn't put two lines of code together without creating three bugs, but I was already at least 5x as productive as that idiot (well, infinitely more productive than some developers I knew back then...). But now I have a track record and I make a lot more money; if I'm as good as 3-5 typical programmers, 3-5x the average starting salary is a bargain (considering reduced overhead, management, and increased chance of project completion because of reduced complexity).

But most companies don't recognize that, so they'd rather hire and manage 3-5 young developers for "cheap" who are willing to work lots of overtime. If they get at least one who's good, they may get more than their money's worth. Otherwise they're likely to end up with a project that's late, has tons of preventable security issues, and that is harder to extend than if they'd hired the expert.

That's what's broken. As to how to fix it: Would be wonderful if there were some verifiable way to rate programming skill, but until someone comes up with a system that can't be gamed, I don't see how.

[1] I've known many developers who effectively "give up" on learning new things at some point, and from that point on their skills rot (and/or they become managers). The ones who keep learning don't seem to hit a "skill wall", at least into their 50s, where my sample size drops precipitously.
> Much of machine learning is done empirically.

Yes, it does seem so.

> Mathematical guarantees are interesting, but really who cares?

We should all care. The guaranteed help us know
what the heck we are doing and what the heck we've
got when we are done. E.g., in statistics we
like estimators that are unbiased and minimum
variance -- that's 'goodness' and good to know
and potentially valuable in practice. Estimators
that are biased and with variance larger than
necessary are not good. We like regression in part
because it is 'least squares' which means it is
a projection and, thus, in mean-square sense, the
most accurate approximation we can get. We like
statistics with loss and risk functions because
they tell us what to do at least cost. Etc.
I have long since switched to Ghostery ever since Disconnect frequently broke YouTube videos and nothing was ever done to fix it. Does anyone know if this problem still persists?
I beg to differ - I distinctly remember getting TI magazines well into the '90s. IIRC, there was one called Micropendium that kept publishing until 1999.
Maybe I'm just some young punk but I have a clear picture of the "old man" engineer I don't enjoy working with. I will say when you were born has very little to do with what makes you that old man, though.

I'd say its the "I'm too old for this shit", attitude. If you want to get in early and leave early that's fine but If you don't put in extra hours, there will be decisions made when everyone else is in the office and you went home. Then you bitch and moan like its ageism but they're asking the team to conform to their hours and that's just not going to happen.

Plus there are plenty of people who have the "I've been doing it this way for XYZ." Don't tell me innovation stopped when you got the Sr. in your title. If you're coding in Java and refuse to type your collections, I hate you.

If you click with the team and have gray hair, I'll love to learn from you.
So, because Netflix and Youtube get the same deal to compete w/ Apple, it somehow affects companies in the dropbox space?

I think there are a few things -- like video -- that are sensitive to latency and need consistent bandwidth. Most things aren't like that. Dropbox specifically was built to sync over slower connections.

I'm not sure how I feel about what Apple's doing here, but I know I feel differently than you do about the implications.
I remember seeing that video and balking - even reading Machiavelli's the Prince can get you thrown in solitary under the pretense you are gang affiliated.

If you're interested in the prison industrial complex, the very same Shane Bauer is using my site, Beacon, to crowdfund an entire year of in depth, independent, and ad-free reporting on the prison system in America.

http://www.beaconreader.com/projects/the-prison-problem

You'll directly impact his ability to produce original long form pieces.
Emails From Google's Schmidt and Brin Show Shady Agreement Not To Hire from Apple
Ask HN: What was the verdict on PG's "Pending Comments"?
Ask HN: What was the verdict on PG's "Pending Comments" feature? I see over 800 comments in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761), but it doesn't seem like the feature is presently active on the site and I'm curious where things landed.
I assume you mean 1. But if they're complaining they can't get enough engineers, it can hardly be that they're also hoarding them, right? At the very least, the companies that are a) paying the most and b) looking for ways to access a larger labor pool have got to be using the engineers they have at near maximum efficiency. Otherwise, those would be weird levers to pull. They actually are the companies that in an honest market get the engineers anyway; they already pay at the top of the market. That they've dodged paying for it in full doesn't change that.
Youth is wasted on the young. My younger self included.
>That however is what sounds like actual age discrimination...

And? What is this article about? Do you think it's productive for older guys to cry about age discrimination when they can't find a job? All I'm saying is you play to your strengths when you're looking for a job, no matter what your situation is. And being an older guy with just a handful of years in a brand new technology is playing to your competition's strengths.

Companies that wouldn't hire an older guy as an Android programmer for $35/hr will shell out $300/hr for that same guy to teach an in-house six sigma class for two weeks. So be the six sigma guy. Does it make sense? No. Does that matter? Again, no.

>But if you assume work performance based on age, gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, you will always be doing it wrong.

That's all very nice and totally irrelevant when you're the one looking for a job instead of the one doing the hiring.
I can say the same for XCode — it's insanely horrible and completely unusable.
option -O2 -Wall -std=XXX is very helpful for me
For programming issues, I'll often google just to get to the reference pages because it's not worth CTRL-F-ing through a local site to get docs on the class/function/etc you need (or installing your own search engine).

And there are times when Stack Overflow is a lifesaver for weird bugs, poorly documented APIs, etc. It's much better than the alternative of, say, reading the release notes for the last 20 versions to see why code breaks on the latest.

Also, I think googling for CSS issues will be a never-ending thing, because the technology is so weird sometimes, and inconsistent (is it white-space:nowrap ... or whitespace:no-wrap ... idk, grammatically they each need a dash). For some reason CSS's approach of just having hundreds of attributes the can be individually set is not memorizable to me, whereas Java SE mostly is.

And there's always that rare linux command that's kind of a once-a-year thing, like setting the trackpad timeout while typing (syndaemon -i .1 -d ... I don't care if I never remember that program... probably how some people feel about programming questions).
I've heard that, and that's fine - I appreciate the suggestion and will probably use it, but if that's actually the best then people will take Android dev more seriously when the best is the standard IDE. Right now Eclipse is the default and it blows.
And then you read about stuff like this[1]:

"Mika says it spent 20% of its total development time last year on the process of porting two of its games to Android and then tweaking those titles for individual devices. It could never even get Battleheart to work on Galaxy S phones, because they can't download .apk's larger than 30MB with stock software. For all the months of "thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through," Mika claims it never made a profit off either of its Android games."

Geez, I wouldn't go into Android game development after reading this. And we haven't even breached the piracy issues.

[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/03/12/mika-mobiles-decisio...
Do you mind if I ask why you find it insulting? During my last job search such tests were pretty typical. We use one as part of the screening process at my current job. It's just a low pass filter and saves us from wasting time on someone that looks good on paper but can't actually do the job well.
For what it's worth, #4 is a moot point: DO has said that they're not currently billing for bandwidth overages.[1]

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/where-can-i... (Kamal Nasser February 13, 2014)
I suppose to each their own, but if anything except for the provisioning/plist stuff in Xcode is complicated to you, you must be used to something else because in and of itself xCode is phenomenal.
I should point out that your Expected career earnings has nothing to do with your profession and everything to do with what you actually do.
Granted I'm a developer who's just starting out with Android, but for the life of me I can't figure out any reasonable way to position things with percentages and maximum widths. I tried weight_sum and weight and gravity=center and that gets me percentages but then maxWidth is ignored.

Most of the advice online seems to be "you must construct additional LinearLayouts".
Another option would be to put a 5mm embossed "K" on the bottom of the container, and call it a trademark, or trade-dress. Then make the receptacle require that exact "K" as a physical lock.
I think this more or less nails it. I'm not a programmer, but I have hired a few in my day. My best hire I've ever made was out of high school, and this kid blew away any developers of any age by 3-5x easily. He now is 15 years along his career (long since moved on - I can't afford him), and working for Google.

He's going to be great when he's 60 years old, because he's great at what he does, passionate, and lives for learning new technology.

The only difference is that yes, he will not be working those crazy hours.

You do have one mistake in your post though. While yes, a single developer who is 5x more productive than another programmer is worth more than 5x as much - for a small team that may not matter as much as you think. As a business owner, I would want to hire you, but I also need another developer who can "keep up" so I have business continuity should you quit/get hit by a bus or something. This is worth a considerable amount and I would not be willing to hire you vs. hiring 3 lesser developers to get the same job done. It would be too much of a risk.
It is both a real thing and laziness. With decent technical design and Google's Android support library you can pretty much code as if 98% of people run KitKat and not worry about it, the support library will fallback gracefully down to all the OS versions you do care about.

Most of the time when I hear designers complaining about Android fragmentation they are really just using "fragmentation" as a scapegoat to bemoan they fact that they can't just create a very small set (1-3) of universal "pixel perfect" mockups and ship those off as a PSD to a developer as the end-all, be-all "visual spec". They have to worry about things like how different parts of the app should scale as more real estate is made available, really understand DPI (I've met more than a few designers who shockingly don't really grasp DPI scaling), etc. Some designers are awesome at this and welcome the challenges (and benefits!) that "responsive layout" brings with it, but a lot of them (most of them, in my personal experience) just want to punt on all that shit.
hmm, been using Disconnect for a while in FF and Chrome, haven't noticed any issues with YouTube videos.
5 website that showcase the power of webGL's 3D art