skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you feel about pirated software?
I live in Silicon Valley, and pirated software seems to have mixed emotions across the board. Some are big proponents of open source, and if something isn't necessarily free , they don't mind breaking the rules to acquire it. On the other hand, many of those same people work at software companies that are providing them with a salary - and had it been the case that everyone pirates software, they would technically be out of a job.

So I ask you, what do you think about pirating software? When is it okay, if at all?
This is very cool, but I'm surprised a garage opener with this type of interaction doesn't already exists.
Not counting an introduction to fortran in college, since 1978. Language was GP300.
RAML promises most of this: http://raml.org/ Specifically, check out the projects section, which includes: an API designer, an API console and a documentation generator.
Makes me nostalgic for the early days of WIRED. This article was one of the best. It blew me away when I read it the first time-- so much so, I read it twice just for the sheer enjoyment of it.
He stated repeatedly that he supported Mozilla's inclusiveness. It did not matter, and even now many people don't behave as if they are aware of that.
Bing is here to stay
I was just discussing how we could provide this level of granularity without overwhelming the status page as we scale. What if we provided an api endpoint for you to check the health of the node?
How could I've missed this project? Looks like a nice alternative to http://www.dbmail.org/ .
Really neat representations. I've learned a lot of new stuff tonight from the original post, thanks for sharing! My favorite so far: Gibbs Phenomenon.
Visual Studio 6? Still have that installed, though I haven't done C++ on Windows in over a decade. Still remember it fondly, though, especially the debugger.
I'm not sure what you imagine when you say "modern computer running a modern OS". Does this not include anything but desktop PCs and laptops? Because phones and tablets have some rather nasty memory limits for applications to deal with, which developers run into frequently.

The space I work in deals with phones and tablets, as well as other embedded systems (TVs, set-top boxes, etc.) that tend to run things people think of as "modern" (recentish Linux kernels, userlands based on Android or centered around WebKit), while having serious limits on memory and storage. My desktop calendar application uses more memory than we have available on some of these systems.

In these environments, it is essential to either avoid any possibility of memory exhaustion, or have ways to gracefully deal with the inevitable. This is often quite easy in theory -- several megabytes of memory might be used by a cached data structure that can easily be re-loaded or re-downloaded at the cost of a short wait when the user backs out of whatever screen they're in.

But one of the consequences of this cavalier attitude to memory allocation is that even in these constrained systems, platform owners have mandated apps sit atop an ever-growing stack of shit that makes it all but impossible for developers to effectively understand and manage memory usage.
While the Huffington Post article is fully of scary alarmism, the actual referenced paper, at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3491930/pdf/ehp.... , is in complete agreement with what you just wrote. Some relevant quotes:

> Opportunities for epidemiological studies depend on the existence of comparable population groups exposed to different levels of fluoride from drinking water. Such circumstances are difficult to find in many industrialized countries, because fluoride concentrations in community water are usually no higher than 1 mg/L, even when fluoride is added to water supplies as a public health measure to reduce tooth decay. Multiple epidemiological studies of developmental fluoride neurotoxicity were conducted in China because of the high fluoride concentrations that are substantially above 1 mg/L.

Table 1 lists the results, and quantify more of what "high" and "low" mean. In all but one case, "high" is above 1mg/L (and mostly over 2mg/L) and "low" is under 1mg/L. (The one case, Xiang et al. 2003, uses "0.57–4.5 mg/L (high); 0.18–0.76 mg/L (reference)", so the high range is mostly above 1mg/L).

These results explain why the US is thinking to lower recommended fluoridation levels in the US:

> In response to the recommendation of the NRC (2006), the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services (DHHS) and the U.S. EPA recently announced that DHHS is proposing to change the recommended level of fluoride in drinking water to 0.7 mg/L from the currently recommended range of 0.7–1.2 mg/L, and the U.S. EPA is reviewing the maximum amount of fluoride allowed in drinking water, which currently is set at 4.0 mg/L (U.S. EPA 2011).

Therefore, while the HuffPo article implies that any fluoridation is harmful, the paper itself considers most US municipal water supplies - at least, those with <1mg/L - to be in the "low" category that is better for higher IQ.

What about lower fluoridation levels? From the paper:

> A recent cross-sectional study based on individual-level measure of exposures suggested that low levels of water fluoride (range, 0.24–2.84 mg/L) had significant negative associations with children’s intelligence (Ding et al. 2011).

However, that's a different type of study, so the authors excluded it from this metadata analysis.
I don't think many people would sign on to mandatory read receipts. It'd have to be forced on them by mail provider or employer.
A Love Letter to HTML
33 years ago, on an Atari 800 my Dad bought us. Learned BASIC from the books with program listings of games that you had to type in. All of them were for other flavors of BASIC, so had to modify them for the Atari. Then went in and modified the games to make them more fun or challenging.

Went from that to Pascal, to C, to Assembly, back to C/C++, then Java. Was still developing in Java until about 5 years ago, when I migrated over to "Architect" roles. Have since toyed in both Ruby/Rails and Python on side projects to keep from getting too rusty and to learn something new.
Gotta love China; I had Wasp Larvae when I was living in Yunnan, and loved it!

The numbing was probably from Sichuan Pepper Corn [1] not the bees themselves!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuan_pepper
GarageBand and various other music apps have made quite impressive use of the improvements you reference, to name just one category.
I disagree. Learn the language and discover the new way of doing things it proposes. The approach Lua takes is very elegant, worth learning.
Something doesn't sound right with this. In Atlanta a developer worth their salt with 7 years of experience is going to be getting into the 80-100K range depending on their skills etc.. The only time it is lower is if they are with a startup and taking equity. Atlanta is also much less expensive the New York, San Fran etc..

Looking at Ruby developer salaries it looks like there is a bit of a different between Atlanta and the midwest, but the spread between New York, Atlanta and the Midwest appears to be a 30k difference from what I could find online. Which skill set does the developer with 7 years of experience have making 50K?

I'm genuinely curious.
An ESP (email service provider) geared towards people publishing content instead of marketers. Marketers are certainly the bigger & better market, but they have hundreds of options to choose from. Almost no one targets publishers.

(ping me if interested... I know more than anyone should about email)
As another data point: I work in a (non-NY, non-CA) US metropolis, am largely a web developer, make $100k per year, and don't know many who don't who aren't absolutely at the beginning of their careers.

3-5 years of experience seems to be enough for 100k as far as I can tell. I don't think his lament is that far off.

edit: I may just be assuming that my peers make more than they do, though. It might be more accurate to say that it seems like most of the peers I meet socially make as much as me or (sometimes much) more, and when I hear about companies that are looking for someone, it's always in the 100k+ range.
An automated "backup" service for your website that crawls around and builds a static copy of all the pages it can see. If the site goes does (or if you push a maintenance mode button) it switches to the static site, maybe with a small warning message. You'd probably need to run the DNS or integrate with DNS services to make that easy to implement. The key is it needs to be stupidly easy to set up.

(ping me if you actually start working on this)
Object-Oriented Cult: A Slightly Skeptical View
Turning old school HTML forms into Ajax
If I can sneak a shameless plug in here, I'm the developer behind Kodable - http://www.kodable.com - an iPad app that introduces kids to programming before they can read.

I know the article said you'd like to keep Devina away from screens for awhile, but we've had kids as young as 18 months using it to learn all about functions, loops, and debugging. Even if she's too young for Kodable, or you'd like to go a different route, we've talked to tons of parents teaching young kids programming and I've learned a lot about the process. I'd love to help any way I can. You (or anyone else interested) can send me an email at jon-at-kodable dot com.
It might be fun to look at LOGO (maybe UCBLogo[1], free books included) for a first programming language. This has a first-person (turtle) view on a GUI that you move around to make shapes and do math/physics. The idea is that when programming it will be easier for the programmer to associate themselves with the turtle and interaction/exploration in the language will be natural.

The Logo way is pretty different from conventional programming models because it was tailored to be more intuitive than conventional languages like C, JavaScript, or VB. It still offers access to complex, higher order programming concepts like algorithms, AI, automata, etc. Harold Abelson from MIT (SICP) wrote a cool book that covers math/physics in Logo, too.[2]

The creator of the language has an awesome book[3] on how computers can enhance pedagogy and someone wrote a cool blog post on programming for children that mentioned it too[4].

[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificial...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful...

[4] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
I started programming around age 10 (VB, FoxPro, .NET, etc.), then switched to FOSS, have been a Rubyist since 2007.

I finished school two years ago and I'm currently looking for scholarships (undergrad level, would like to study in North America or Europe).

Currently working for ScrapingHub, doing stuff with Python :)
I'm not going to say it's trivial, but I will definitely claim that beating C is very doable, and will happen in less than ten years, if I have any say in the matter. Obviously this claim should be taken with a grain of salt, but in ten years we'll see who was right :)
Catnip-Scented Flyers Turn Felines Into Mailmen
Many people here claim “it's a $5 box, what do you expect”.

First it may be a $10 or a $20 box. But more importantly, every VPS provider of the few I've tried my self (e.g. Linode, XenCon), sends an email and opens a support ticket every time a $10 VPS goes off.

So please, do not try to change the norm. A server is a server no matter the cost and should be reliable. I like digital ocean but they won't get better by petting them.
NoSQL is fantastic for backing item-orientated webapps, it removes the transactional and relational overheads. Conversely I would not use NoSQL for anything concerning FIRE or complex inter-related data - those safeguards become important.

Scalability is something of a red herring with NoSQL. Yes it's easier to scale, but my primary criteria for choosing it would be the nature of the data, not the intended scale.
Heroku add-on for hosted Varnish (the freakin' awesome reverse caching proxy). You'd be able to speed up people's sites and potentially even save them money by allowing them to run with fewer dynos. Ideally you'd be able to tweak the config and view stats/graphs through a web interface.

(ping me if you actually start working on this)
Aw man, it's been about 7 years already, and yet I feel like I'm not that much better compared to when I started. Sure, I know a good deal of stuff now I didn't back then, but I feel like everything I've learned in 7 years could probably have been learned in 2-3 years. I need to take action, make it so that I won't look back in another 7 years and say the same thing. But how? I find it difficult to find things to work on that feels both meaningful, but is not so hard that I'm unable to solve them.
Here is a good tutorial: http://developer.android.com/training/sharing/shareaction.ht...

It can mean very different things to different apps. In all cases it means "I can do something with that data."
First, free software can be developed by one entity, or even one person.

Second, that's a list of contributors to the "Google C++ Testing Framework", not WebM.
Check out Hopscotch:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hopscotch-coding-for-kids/id...
> Editing out inflammatory language is the low-hanging fruit of optimizing for signal/noise ratio.

I'd like to gently suggest that you put that, or something to that effect, in the HN guidelines.

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

By my assessment, your observation adds information that is not currently covered. "...calling names..." is a facet of the inflammatory language that hacker news could do without. But blatant name calling is a relatively small (and obvious) portion of the noise generating language that actually occurs. The other more insidious forms of inflammatory language are either less obvious or more likely to be rationalized.

I feel like some hacker news commenters* are more likely to add inflammatory language if they feel like the rest of their* comment(s) is/are otherwise high signal.

It's kind of like dipping into a savings account to break (the spirit of) the guidelines. They* rationalize the [sarcasm, incredulity, overt disdain, indignant rage, mockery, etc.] because they* feel entitled to the luxury and misjudge the consequences of it.

* Weasel words: I know I've done this. But I suspect I'm not the only one.
This wasn't a very nice or helpful response. The OP relayed their experience and you picked it apart as if they were uninformed and incompetent. Pointing out a common failure doesn't mean that the service should not handle it quickly and keep their system status updated. Filing a new support ticket after getting a canned response that does not address an issue is reasonable. Finally, 48 hours is a long time. The post sounds like they weren't looking for instant service -- just some kind of service.
> I then jokingly opened siri and said “Open the garage”. Siri responded with “I can’t find an app named ‘The Garage’”. Lightbulbs went off. We realized we could get around the fact that Siri has no API by making apps named the phrases we’d like to recognize.

Priceless!

I wish Siri had an API though.
In the original #define, the parameter is lower case "c" and the expansion uses upper case "C".
>"everybody understands that if it makes money or makes you famous it's justified" //

I'm assuming that was tongue-in-cheek. Whilst many will accept the answer "to be famous" or "to make a profit" those are not justified motivations to others - particular not WRT research funding.
He's making 50K by choice. He has a great work/life balance and spends his free time developing indie games. I mainly mentioned him to demonstrate that it's easy to live a great life on 50K here, whereas there is no way he could support his stay-at-home wife and kid on 50K on the Bay at the same standard he does here.
wget has a mirror option that can do the crawling part for you.
Yes, probably.
I have communicated the public health app problem (actually they just need to put a CAPTCHA) many times but it seems that nobody cares. About the bank, I was working as a data science consultant at that time, so it was easy for me to knock the door of the security department and tell them about my attack.
The HuffPo article gives a false distortion of what the research study actually says. That's why it should be buried.

The article says "Despite the evidence against it, fluoride is still added to 70 percent of U.S. public drinking water supplies." While the study reports a negative correlation with higher fluoride levels, "high" in the underlying studies usually mean above 2mg/L. The US recommended levels are (as the study says) between 0.7 and 1.2 mg/L. A city which adds fluoride to get to 0.7mg/L is in the "low" category for the study, where the IQ levels are higher.

As the study did not analyze negative effects of levels lower than about 1.0mg/L, it's impossible to use it to conclude that a level of 0.7mg/L, even if reached by adding fluoride, is bad for IQ.

But the HuffPo article makes that conclusion anyway.
Telepresence for travel. One use case is that I don't have time to travel to location X, but would like to be part of a group who is hiking, etc there. Could see this being quadcopters with cameras with dual controls (remote for me and possible to be overridden by someone on site if there is an issue).

Second use case is my disabled daughter who I can bring back videos of places to, but it's not quite the same as sharing the moment, and of course would give her a sense of freedom to be able to zoom in and look at something I might not have thought to capture.

Given connectivity issues to many of the places I know "I" would like to be able to go to virtually, I suspect part of the problem will be convincing folks that it doesn't ruin their wilderness experience to let other folks attend virtually. Given that you would then have fewer travelers impacting the environment I would consider this a net win.
And that website serving the page is the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb. An incredible piece of Internet history and also an incredible resource for software development mastery.
But debits and credits do not use multiplication nor division, so for those transactions the order doesn't matter.
This is great, although it's too bad it requires such a clever twist to integrate with Siri. Cortana should shine in situations like these: http://9to5mac.com/2014/04/02/microsofts-cortana-siri-clone-...
Creepy... That is the exact progression I had... Well, if you throw perl in there around the C/PHP part. What projects did you do with z80? I created the Usgard OS/shell with some stunningly brilliant kids from around the world for the TI85.
There are people out there who don't know what communism is. Not the precise definition, just the loose concept.

50% of all people are dumber than average.

More importantly, though, is that the current arrangement is inelegant.
Yep. In my experience it tends to miss a fair bit of stuff, though. I think you'd want to be more aggressive about sniffing out files loaded by javascript or linked from CSS. Wget could probably serve as part of an MVP though.

I don't think the crawler is actually that hard. The killer feature would be the execution and the UX. It should be usable by anyone.
Actually it would be useful if it included measurements of your doors so that items you aren't going to be able to get into the house unless disassembled first can also be appropriately filtered.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ballast/files/ - no sign of a VCS, I wonder what they use internally?
Thanks.

If it was just my wife and I like it has been, I wouldn't mind the risk. We've gotten this far. My fear is in hiring a new employee and having their livelihood dependent on my business that has a single point of failure. Granted, it's a fairly entry level customer service position so it's not like someone's going to retire from the job, but I would still feel just awful if I had to let them go because we had no traffic due to something like a "mysterious" Google penalty that I can't figure out and will get no help from Google on.

I'm hoping we can use the free time we'll have from mundane tasks to think about how to make the business work with other traffic sources.
> Hybrid turbine/electric propulsion has been used on trains for decades…

I'd love to see a citation for this statement—it's far more accurate to say that turbine/electric propulsion has been tried for decades. Since 1969 there have only been a few test units built. [1]

The largest fleet of gas turbine-electric locomotives was operated by the Union Pacific until 1969. "Fuel economy was poor" and the units were not considered a success. [2] These units are quite well-known in railroad circles.

If gas turbines were as good as you say they'd be in heavy use on railroads today. Instead the dominant motive power is electric for lines already under catenary and diesel/electric everywhere else.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine-electric_locomotive

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_GTELs
IMO, developers underestimate the actual costs of adding a new tech/layer/interface to their design which is why they use "a stupid amount of different components".

I suspect that's also why new architectures/langues can catch on so fast. They don't really have to be much better just avoiding the cruft is a huge leg up until the next wave of small 3rd party library's show up and tracing a bug can once again involve tracing though 50+ files.
In 1997 I was in 5th grade and curious how 'punterz' and 'progz' were made so I joined an aol chat room, someone sent me 'Visual Basic 3.0' in 47 email attachments and I downloaded each over 3 days. Got my grandma to take me to Barnes and Nobles to pick up a book on making applications and cobbled my first program together to kick my friends off AOL.
Michael Parkinson interviews Dr Jacob Bronowski
you try the Yahoo answers homework helper? The questions in the algebra & geometry math section were getting answered within a couple mins. I'd have to race to answer them or someone would get them before me. Were you thinking primary school stuff or college?
I volunteered at a Startup Weekend in Johannesburg last year and do agree with this statement. With that being said I do think that the investors or starting to get more tech savvy.

My family on my fiancee's side is from South Africa and I regularly travel back and forth between South Africa and the US. Whenever I'm there I try to line the trips up with tech conferences and/or local meetup groups. South Africa has a strong tech community that is doing really interesting things.

The thing that surprised me was that on my last trip I found out that one of my fiancee's family members is a investor in a startup. This guy is not very tech savvy, but even he could see the possibilities. Does the community still have a ways to go, yes. But with that being said I do think they will get there.

Also, the stuff happening in Cape Town is really exciting.
All three of the replies to your comment are true, but they don't cover everything.

Car engines are heat engines, they extract mechanical work from differences in temperature. Heat engine efficiency is n = 1 - sqrt(Tcold/Thot)

If Tcold, the cold end, isn't cold enough, then you lose efficiency, and thus horsepower. A badly overheating engine loses a lot of power. If you can cool the compressed air back down to ambient, then your engine produces more power.