skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if this is meant to be pithy or serious, but I think I disagree. Agriculture is big business, farmers are smart people, and there is a history of lots of mechanization and interesting technology being applied. The productivity gains that we've already seen in the last hundred years (and before) are tremendous.

I'm sure that there are areas to be improved upon, but I expect a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, as it were.

I also tend to think of farmers as the original hackers, they often have problems, and they cobble together a solution that might not be pretty, but works.
This would be more interesting to me, as someone who's building a forum as a side project, if there were a bit more to it than a landing page.Why does a simple landing page with an email form need to load that much javascript?
That's exactly the idea behind ZenQuery. It's FireBase / Parse but for your own in-house database servers.

I understand that the phrases "as a service" and "on premise" might be conflicting, though. I'll think about how to express this more clearly.

Thanks for your feedback.
Out of curiosity, are all these sites purchased by the 'affiliates'? How are all the themes so consistent?
Sorry to say, but klmr is right. Since functions are first-class objects and references are evaluated late, these issues are already managed by JS and native scopes. There's no need to recreate this functionality in a framework. You might just want to consider the entry point to your code.
Agreed. It's very positive that the distribution channels are opening up such that more companies are distributing shows like this -- yet as a casual viewer, it's hardly worthwhile for me to subscribe to Amazon Prime and buy some specialized proprietary device, just for one network's older shows.

And presumably there will be other vendors offering other narrow selections, only on their own or "partner company" devices or DRM-ware. This sort of thing makes sense if you already have the device or service, otherwise it just prices the video files beyond any reasonable market value.

And piracy will continue as long as this "jump thru hoops" mentality goes on: compared to the hassle-laden commercial experience, pirating is convenient, and files are high quality, free from junk, and play on VLC.

The copyright holding companies will probably die off before they realize that they could have done better just selling files. They're convinced that only a few would buy and they would put them on torrents - but if I paid a dollar an episode of a series, with no DRM, trailers, ads or other BS, I wouldn't bother sharing, I'd just refer people to the same source to buy their own copies.
Aw man, what happened? I tested it on three different computers with three different browsers. Is there any output in the console?

I'm really disappointed in myself now.
The metadata problem is so hard that if you actually solve it you are not using email anymore. This is why I'm saying it's a boondoggle. Even in the best case where my mother and I are running our own STARTTLS secured MTAs, oh wait, timing and message size.

GPG gives you actual privacy but minimal resistance against traffic analysis. All this other stuff gives you NO end to end privacy, AND minimal resistance against traffic analysis.

Messaging is a weird special case and GPG is behind the times (because people are coming to realise that repudiability and FS are important), but it's still a heck of a lot better than even working TLS slapped on SMTP (which doesn't even currently exist).
Is starting your company with 'Zen' the new startup fad?
"Easy" is about proximity to the subject (As in Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy). Hard books are any books you aren't ready for, and I don't recommend them either.

One of the learning buzzwords is "Zone of Proximal Development" which basically means the concepts that are 'nearby' what the learner already knows, and can be learned with help.

The author has some keen insights when talking about Familiarity causing recommendation problems. We compress that knowledge down into a very powerful but compact form, and often have a lot of trouble decompressing it when describing something. "What do you mean, 'what is a function?', it's a function, it just is!"

I also agree that sometimes people recommend books, even books they have not read, that make them seem smart, which is often unhelpful. Other books have useful content, but are just badly written. We use them if we have too, but we prefer better writing.

On the other hand, books like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs are beautiful, useful, amazing works that when explored at the right time, can be eye opening, profound experiences.

A given book may be recommended because it is a simple beautiful elegant work. Simple doesn't mean easy, that's separate. You have to be ready for the book and its concepts before you can benefit from it fully. A good book can challenge you to understand simple, but deep ideas. A good book can be a lot of work and exploration, and may go slowly. But a good book at the right time will be worth your while.

So hard books are overrated, but maybe that hard overrated book you rejected before may be more approachable today. Keep in mind when recommending texts to others that they may not be ready for the advanced text yet.
Having split my life between Seattle and San Francisco, I feel comfortable making the generalization that many Seattleites are very shy in real life.

If you moved to another city you might be surprised at how much easier it is to make new friends out of absolute strangers.
Man and Machine Become One; Inventor Raymond Kurzweil talks nanobots (1999)
A lot of university students are clueless about this sort of thing. If it's possible to complete the homework by just relying on lecture, then there's no reason to be reading the book. That's a common sentiment, even in some math classes.

Somebody, at some point, declared a book to be "great". And now you have a bunch of people recommending that "great" book because that's all they're familiar with (and why would this top notch faculty force us to use this book if it wasn't great anyway?). Few professors actually make an effort to structure classes in a pedagogical way.
Corporate Acquisitions of Startups: Why Do They Fail?
Awesome Themes for Small Businesses
Redis implements operations against simple in-memory data structures with a network frontend, not a distributed storage/replication system.

Sirius lives at a lower level: you could, for example, use Sirius to build the storage system backing a distributed Redis clone.
I was actually hoping this meant shows like The Larry Sanders Show and Dream On had found a home online. Darn.
Huh, interesting. Any idea why they would even include HBO in the chart if they weren't offering it?
> I think that's the wrong way for Google to look at it. The question should be "how many users will I lose if I don't enable something like this in my services soon?"

Since this answer is "an insignificant amount", I think you'd be happier if Google looked at it the wrong way.
Prepay won because it's generally better, but postpay is still viable. Certainly the solution doesn't need to involve a 10-30 minute delay for validation before dispensing product.
You don't even need a drone for that: http://www.terravion.com/
I wholeheartedly agree that building a project is many times more useful as a learning tool than little 'for loop' exercises, but completely disagree with the idea that you should be learning DNS/Hosting/Dev Tools as step 1.

These concepts/tools are important to learn eventually, but are not the core of building software. One of the great things about Codecademy is that it abstracts away all of the yak-shaving/ops work so you can dive into what is actually interesting. Obviously this approach can only take you so far, but from my experience[1], I can't think of anything that would motivate a prospective learner less than banging his/her head against the command line, googling cryptic error stack traces, for X hours just trying to get a dev environment setup, just to (finally) write your first line of code.

[1] Quick background: I'm a full time developer, completely self-taught (did the HTML/CSS, and basic JS track on Codecademy back in early 2012 before diving into The Hard Way series and Michael Hartl's book)
> This one could really go either way. A broad selection of fifty popular science texts will teach a person more than one really hard book

This statement seems obviously false. No amount of reading analogies about science will teach you any actual science. Also, the author seems fixated on measuring learning by "things" (facts?). That's a terrible metric, unless you're trying to collect facts, in which case, you'd probably be better of reading the encyclopedia.
It's also worth putting this in a bit of geologic perspective. The article mentions this, but doesn't explain it.

The Eocene is just before the earth went into a period of "icehouse" climate (that's still going on). During the part of the Eocene this article refers to, the earth was in a "greenhouse" phase, and global temperatures were much warmer than they've been any time since.

At that time (and throughout the majority of Earth's history), there likely weren't any significant ice caps on the planet.

On very long timescales, the Earth goes through periods of icehouse and greenhouse climates. We're currently in an "interglacial" within a period of icehouse climate that has persisted since the late Eocene. Most of Earth's history is dominated by long phases of greenhouse climate. During these, the global climate is more stable and much warmer. We don't have ice ages, and there probably aren't any ice caps at the poles.

The last period of icehouse climate began just after this, in the late Eocene. (Again, the "ice ages" you hear about are glacials and interglacials within a period of icehouse climate.)

Also, as other folks have mentioned, the Eocene is relatively recent, and Antarctica was essentially in its present-day position (the coals and other "warm-weather" rocks in Antarctica date from much earlier when it was near the equator).

Regardless, it is quite interesting that sea surface temperatures were as warm as this evidence shows! I just wanted to put this into a bit of perspective.

*Caveat to all of this: I'm a geologist and not a climatologist.
Congratulations Mr Nystrom! I've been reading through each chapter as you posted them, and I've found your writing style throughly enjoyable and your ability to describe complex code patterns with ease.

It's really hard to get the motivation to finish such a project, serious kudos to you; I shall be buying that e-book!
Or the solution could just be to not wait for validation. Yes, it will mildly increase fraud, and thus costs, but evidently not a huge amount. It could make bitcoin-gas more expensive than the regular kind, but so it goes. Given the difficulty of carrying out a real double-spend attack, I doubt it would happen with any sort of frequency.
I think this is overstated. Truck crops are certainly difficult, but row crops are mostly solved.

Automatic berry picking for "tree type" bushes is a reality as well.
hotmail used to actively blackhole e-mail from smaller servers, no bounce, no warning, nothing. just accept it and throw it away.

i don't know if they still do that, but it was far easier to convince everyone i knew at the time that hotmail was garbage, rather than making any headway with their mail admins.
The OnePlus One Smartphone
See, I've always wanted someone like this, but never found it. I've always found people that sell one thing only (cannabis), or maybe a couple, but not the "drug supermarket". I mean, it makes sense as the article points out, if you're going to take on a big risk you might as well not do it halfway. I probably travel in the wrong circles, to put it lightly.
Hazelcast is a favorite of mine: http://hazelcast.org
I was suffering the same problem about 7 years ago on my own personal mail server. I discovered that if I padded out the message headers with a load of junk headers to push the message size up beyond about 50KB, then the otherwise exact same message would arrive in the Inbox at Hotmail rather than being blackholed.

https://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20070614.130838.42d1bd...

I haven't done this for many years though as it was such a terrible hack. I do wonder if it still works, or if the threshold has changed though.
This is a really cool solution to a problem I run into constantly. Media queries are nice, but at the end of the day I really care about element size.
A Brief Guide to Email Marketing
Meet The 5 Biggest Airbnb Hosts Being Targeted By New York's Top Lawyer
I second this idea. Just talk to the other three mouths. Ask them what they are bringing to the table, what their contribution will be, how they will add value and how they should be compensated.
Does anyone know about such a book/list with game-play patterns?

Most of the time I work with game engines, which already use the patterns mentioned here. I struggle with stuff like moving entities in specific directions, collision detection, physics, gravity, etc.
The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos
This is definitely a step in the right direction. For the past year, students have come to Odin after completing Codecademy and asking "okay, I know some syntax, now how do I actually build something?". I'm glad you've got your sights set on getting them out of the sandbox and toward the real world. The empowerment of knowing they can actually build something on their own is totally addictive and you've until now left students still hungry for it. I hope your new offering really helps them take that first concrete step into real-world development and I'm excited to see what it can do.

Plus then I get to focus more on the other major issues with online education like helping students work together :)

[1] http://theodinproject.com
Only Classic Google Maps uses Flash for street view; recent versions use HTML5. If you haven't migrated yet, see http://www.google.com/maps/about/explore/
As born in the USSR I can confirm that the USSR was a much better place to live in than modern Russia from almost any point of view: the best education system, better and affordable healthcare, practically no crime (if to compare with modern Russia), books and movies of much better quality than the flood of post-modern shit we have now, zero unemployment rate etc...
I'm perfectly comfortable with concision, thank you.

Clearly one can interpret the Golden Rule two ways depending on whether you take into account the other person's different values or not.

For example, you're probably patting yourself on the back for being "concise" despite using more words to praise your original comment than it would have taken to clarify it, whereas I'm resenting you for the way you've ostentatiously foregone social niceties at my expense.

Is that really what you would have wanted in my place? Despite your ability to parse it, I don't think you understand the Golden Rule very well.
Cue Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch.
"Driverless" tractors have been around for quite a while. Most large ag operations have very little human input when they're planting and harvesting.
Having never seen Designer News before this, the icons were meaningless to me. A tooltip on hover or something similar would be really helpful.

(I realize this is mostly a problem with DN, but either way I think it's good UX.)

Otherwise, very cool!
LSM tree, anyone?
My god, that website looks horrible. A stylesheet, a stylesheet, my kingdom for a stylesheet!
IBM Opens Power Microprocessor Architecture
Fascinating. I must be worn out and bored. Huh, I think I already knew that. But linking specific behaviors to it is good. Maybe if I take some time off and find something new to do, I won't be worn out and bored.
This is not true.

FIPS requires that any 'approved' included crypto algorithm implementations are self-tested, and pass a verification program (just a big bunch of somewhat poorly conceived known answer tests).

It also has a list of 'allowed' algorithms, which don't need to be tested but can be offered by a FIPS crypto module.

The CSPRNG used for key generation must be of an approved construction, but there are a number of choices ranging from stupid shit nobody sane would choose (Dual EC DRBG) to ones which are trivial variations on hashes, HMAC or block ciphers in OFB or CTR mode. Sadly, it says nothing about the quality or construction of actual entropy sources.

Naturally, everything not 'approved' or 'allowed' cannot be offered by a FIPS crypto module.

On the plus side, this means vendors can't offer proprietary stupid-shit like LFSR stream ciphers. Unfortunately, the approved and allowed list rarely keeps up with good quality or fixed crypto (you'll not find any eSTREAM finalists, or EdDSA, or deterministic DSA, or curve25519 ECDH, for example).

Also, the rules are pretty poorly enforced: you'll still find new FIPS certificates issued for boxes which do TLS < 1.2. This is a lie: MD5 is not allowed or approved, and is a fundamental (if conservatively used) part of the protocol in those versions.

Source: I used to make FIPS-approved HSMs. AMA? :)
I think these are all excellent points. I wonder what the author of this would say about your last point.
Love it!

I started creating a new course, how can I split the code across multiple files?

(http://www.codecademy.com/groups/codecademy-course-creators/...)
You can ear a lot of money by selling drugs to masse. Much harder to get that much by selling it to minors. Incentives are different in both cases.

Plus, most people do not feel like they are doing something wrong using/selling little pot. It is just illegal, not "bad". It might be different with selling to minors.
yes, it does help, everything's JS, I wasn't going crazy
> One is that you have to raise all of your capital from your members, rather than relying on outside investment.

Actually, it is possible to raise outside capital. One way is a traditional bank loan, though that usually requires collateral. There's also "patient capital" available from some institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_capital

http://coopcapital.coop/coopcapital

We also have a National Cooperative Bank in the US, created by an act of Congress and later privatized (as a co-op, naturally), that specializes in banking services and loans for cooperative enterprises. They may not be completely up-to-speed on worker cooperatives, however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cooperative_Bank

A really interesting option is a direct public offering, where you can sell non-voting shares to individuals while avoiding most of the legal implications of an IPO, as long as you comply with various restrictions and raise a limited amount of money. There's a case study about a pickle company that transitioned to a worker co-op by buying out the previous owners that way:

http://www.buylocalfood.org/real-pickles-financing-case-stud...
Please, please do not release this sort of thing for Ubuntu; target Debian instead. It's far easier to build Ubuntu support upon a Debian base than vice-versa.
Major step taken toward error-free computing
That's part of the culture. It's nothing personal. Don't take it to heart if what they say offends you.
In mathematics, my experience falls emphatically on this explanation: "Hard texts are that much better than anything else." Books like Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis are mathematics; their more accessible counterparts are more "about mathematics." As to why successful people don't read more difficult books, well, being a great mathematician just isn't that important to success. Reading Rudin sets you on the path to being very good at mathematics, but that isn't most people's goal. If your goal is material success then yes, hard books are probably overrated.

The programmers here may appreciate this analogy: reading Rudin is like reading the source code, whereas more gentle texts read more like documentation or UML. That's not to say good doc can't be enlightening, but in the end only the source code matters. The doc can be wrong, or misleading, or incomplete. If you want to really understand what's going on, you need to read the source. It's the same way in mathematics.
Seconded. With the Moto X you get great build quality and hardware, personalization, excellent form factor, stock Android with genuine enhancements, and the price is now down to $350/$400 unlocked. Sadly, some people are put off by the spec sheet, but I find that the X has excellent performance and a beautiful screen.
> In many circles, drugs are nearly as easy to find as liquor.

I can't figure out if this is a mistake, deception (liquor is not a drug, it just contains one), or implying that "drugs" means "illegal drugs".
Windows Phone mobile ad share: Barely even measurable
What might be cool is to actually create a 'simulator' that puts people through the process of 'purchasing' a server, domain name, and through the actual server and DNS configuration up to the point where you can get a 'success' page on a server, then have them add some code and show them how all the files interact with each other.

Then teach them how to code the files.

Maybe after that something like a whole MEAN/LAMP stack development course. Personally I think the technologies used in MEAN are easier to understand and you can do a lot of neat things with angular in just a few lines of code. An interactive angular course would be really awesome. But people definitely need to know how to interact with a database. What would be nice would be to actually learn MEAN and LAMP side by side to actually understand the differences, but I guess that's diverging from the 'beginner friendly' approach.
You guys are talking about different things. He's talking about unit margin on each phone. You're talking about overall profits.
Great! IMHO the main problem with CodeAcademy was not teaching how to build things. I have several non-tech friends who have done 30 exercises about loops but have no idea when to use a loop.

I think this is the right direction. Give a more complete view and do it step by step so the person learning can be rewarded and keep the motivation.
Also, I believe that only binaries can be FIPS certified, not source code, so there are times when one has to use an old, out-dated openssl binary in order to be compliant.
I think fanatic and zealot is the key word.

I'm more of a pragmatist. I think one size fits all is a bad strategy, and different projects have different needs.

There is nothing I hate more than working with people who passionately believe that there is only one true way to do something (like testing) and believe the process and 'craft' is more important than other factors like, say, delivering business value.

There is a lot between your extremes of TDD and no tests at all. And when I hear a developer say some methodology is the ONLY WAY I find it's best to run, not walk.
Start to draw. Practice.

Or hire someone who's good at it.
Marketing Suite For Visual Web Piqora Raises $7.7 Million
Google's removal of SD card has nothing to do with making device useless ever few years. It has everything to do with their cloud strategy. Google wants everything in the cloud. If your information is in the cloud, they can possible get access to it to better understand you so they can target more relevant ads. If your information is on the cloud, you will also have to spend more time online. That's why google devices, phones, tablet, chromebooks don't have removeable storage.
But the NFL, the big kahuna, does not. It really stinks; I'm going to have to figure something out come fall as I cut the cord a few months back.
The security of email will never be perfect; that is obvious. But there is still legitimate and real value gained from making small incremental improvements to it. If you can hide the To/From/Subject of a message from a passive or even active MITM (because of DANE), then that's a good thing.