skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you on the 5th floor of an apartment surrounded by skyscrapers? Or maybe at the bottom of a valley just outside a major city's limits?

Many people are unable to receive digital broadcasts over the air. This is a solution for them. The features on top of that are just gravy.
I like to play Team Fortress 2, Age of Empires 2 and Dwarf Fortress 2.
The only games I play are board games with friends.
or good ol' typedef, no?
That's not the greatest of endorsements to be honest.
Well, I'm an engineer who quit my cushy job at Google to go it alone. So, I suppose this makes me an idiot.

I think the big question the author fails to address is: Do these deluded engineers end up regretting their decisions in the long-term?

I think most people in the startup community understand that failure-- and the misery that comes with it-- comes with the territory, and the key is whether you can learn with each failure. And I would argue that there's no better to place to learn than an environment where your income depends directly on whether you're genuinely solving a problem for people (the people who "run the lottery" are your target customers, not the VCs, by the way). In my case, I've failed at over a dozen projects (some prior to my time at Google) while finding a few moderately successful ones along the way, and I'm continuing to fail, learn, and grow.

And I like to think that this better understanding of harsh realities of how the world actually works gained from doing a startup-- whether you succeed or fail, whether you end up at a small company or a large company-- is a return on your investment that continues to serve you for the rest of your career.
The first thing that comes to mind is the vehicle audio system using the same electronic communication bus as its critical engine electronics.
Named parameters don't help in the case where you have (for example) one function returning (pos, size) and another function expecting (size, pos).
There is also something beyond just penalizing domains. I tried submitting a link to something at chess.com and it was immediately marked dead. I emailed the admins, and found out that chess.com submissions were indeed banned from HN. They said that they unbanned it, and told me to go ahead and submit the link again.

I had, by the time, decided that the story wasn't actually all that interesting, so never did resubmit it.
Cut a separate piece out and flip it.
> But it does not follow that it's one's responsibility to marry and have kids. There have been plenty of people who contributed a lot to society without ever marrying or raising kids.

One's responsibility is to do the right thing, to do one's duty. For some folks, that duty has not been to form a family, but for the vast majority of folks their duty has been to do exactly that: to repay their ancestors' millions of years of evolutionary investment by investing in their descendants.

There are some folks who have repaid that rather massive debt in other ways, but they are few and far between; far more these days simply renege on it.
And I understood correctly about who chose the "size of the lifeboat", also because of what Langley said.

The person upthread unhappy that Chrome didn't pick up their revocation (einhverfr) isn't worried about a measly blog, but their SaaS business.

If 2.3MB isn't enough to protect everybody, make it 23MB or take whatever other design steps are necessary. The world's most popular browser, from the world's most profitable internet company, in 2014 shouldn't be showing the lock-icon and "valid certificate" hours/days/weeks after a publicly-available revocation.

"Manual curation", rather than being impressive, is a design-smell here. And none of Google's work to outcompete other browsers, using proprietary Chrome features, is being done for me "for free".
This is the face of the New Internet, whose seeds were sewn in 2010 and have recently started to sprout. The New Internet is a public opinion platform dedicated to dictating/shaping the technotariat's perceptions using distraction, shilling, disinformation, censorship, and divide-and-conquer via social media. As the public at large becomes more integrated with social media and less with traditional media, propaganda will ramp up on the Internet accordingly. Internet based propaganda is particularly dangerous because it can create the appearance of social consensus, which silences people who might dissent.

Reddit's full infiltration by corporate and government (and not just the US government, mind you) groups has been in the spotlight lately, and I wouldn't be surprised if the more informed users start to migrate to greener pastures without propaganda flux. It's no secret that the NSA files specifically detail propaganda operations against social media targets, and for now, the best bet for escaping them is smaller, more focused communities.
An awesomely thought-provoking essay indeed.

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

I just wanted to point out for those who were as inspired by this "Thomas Jefferson" quote as I was, that it was not actually TJ who said this, but a man named Coleman Cox [1].

[1] http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/21/luck-hard-work/
nitpick - the haskell version should be

newtype Kilogram = Kilogram integer

The issue with doing this of course, is that it's mostly useless to computation. You lose the ability to use mathematical operators because you're no longer an instance of Num, and even if you create the Num instance, or use -XGeneralizedNewtypeDeriving, you can't multiply a Kilogram by a Meter/Second for example, since the arguments to (*) must be of the same type. One would need to use a generic "Measure" type instead, where the unit is some metadata attached to it, and the Num instance implements the typechecking on units.
Second-to-best solutions with older Distributions (Ubuntu 12.04, Debian 7, RHEL 6).
In Haskell? I wouldn't do that. That improves readability, but it doesn't allow the compiler to enforce correct unit usage. If a Kilogram is just a synonym for a Double, you can pass it in where other meanings of Double are expected. E.g. you can pass Kilograms into a function that takes Pounds. Which you don't want to do.
Ah, did not realize that. Thanks for clarifying.
Check out SpaceChem for a great programmer-friendly but-not-explicitly-about-programming game.
Speaking only for myself: Because it's a fascinating story. It is, simultaneously, a story of extreme security failure, the body's amazing abilities to cope with extreme circumstances, and a story where someone lives to see the end.

Is it about technology or business? Not directly. Is it about an event that we, as technologists or entrepreneurs, might care about? Yes. This makes it worth keeping on HN to me.
Chill dude, call yourself a hacker if you wish, has no strict definition anyway.
I believe "fun" and "easy" projects have no merits, them being hardware/software/whatever (unless you are in high-school)

It's nice to make one once in a while, but if you only do fun and easy projects then you are wasting your life. You should try to push yourself to make things that are not easy. Get outside your comfort zone. Doing stuff with a supercomputer like the raspberry pi is easy (BTW also, it is very cheap, and sometimes projects are good only because of that).
F# allows you to do these 'small types' in a few different ways, including unit annotations... http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/units-of-measure/
Is this true?

The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum. Even on a purely financial basis, if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful ones. A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money.

If it's true, that will strongly influence my opinion of the startup scene.
A good start would be putting your contact info in your "about" on HN. I know a few people here in SF looking for contractors who'd probably be happy to send some work your way...
Here are some more ideas for you to use the data

* What's the most common pattern for two occupied toilets (from the frequencies, it appears to be the classic occupied-free-occupied, to allow more space between users)
* What's the day of the week that the toilets are most used? And less used? (it would also be nice to cross-reference that with the menus from nearby cafeterias)
* Check if there's any correlation between the frequency of people going to the toilet and issues on you bug tracker. What about the average duration?
* If you extend your system to a coffee machine, correlate the coffee consumption with the toilet's usage.

Actually, with this, you could use most of this data and train a decision tree with it. Then, you could warn your co-workers with "In 10 minutes it is expected that the toilets will be occupied, maybe you want to go now?".

On the other hand, maybe you just want to keep this functionality to yourself, otherwise everyone will just go to the bathroom 10 minutes earlier.
The FAA’s First Drone Test Site Is Live
Am I the only person who thinks the body text on the shrunken preview cards looks terrible?

edit: was reacting to "meticulous attention to detail in the text rendering"
Only because lead paint is excluded from your statement by definition. It's already "emitted."
The way these are implemented, the short answer is yes. There will be more memory pressure on the garbage collector in Scala. The long answer is, "mmmm maybe, you should test it" because due to escape analysis, eden generation collecting speed, JIT, etc. It can get very complicated very fast. It can also be very dependent on what you mean by "significant penalty" and "performance".

As an aside, Scala does allow for compile time only small types in the form of AnyVal's. They won't help in the examples in the article, but in the simpler kilogram wrapper around float it will and there will be no performance penalty as it will be elided by the compiler.
I know. I don't agree with it much either and I found this least intrusive (wasn't aware of issue on mobile). If I can find a better solution, will change.

Thanks.
Was it? one can argue Job's departure helped him grow up as a person, take a step back, and improve himself both as a manager and a visionary.

In addition, Pixar wouldn't have existed if Jobs would have stayed at Apple... so no Toy Story... and no inspiration for millions of kids throughout the world.

All in all, I argue that it was a good decision :)
What floodgates? We had a wave of "chemical weapons rotting in the Baltic Sea" posts this morning. WTF does that have to do with tech? Apparently the filters didn't recognize those as OT.

And yet, HN survives.
Hide The Angular Bug - it's a simple game that I like to play when I'm under deadline.
I'll tell you from experience there is a fate worse than your startup failing. That is that your startup bumps along neither making it big nor having the good grace to go out of business. You just have the monthly stress of making payroll with no end in sight. (Thankfully I'm out of that and working for The Man, and never happier)
> This was tried before with the "rent a DVD and player" streaming service (Zediva).

A huge difference between Zediva and Aereo is that Aereo only rebroadcasts network television. All the content that Aereo rebroadcasts is already required by law to be publicly accessible and unencrypted(!)[0]. This is why they only serve over-the-air content - the same law does not apply to DVDs rented, or even to cable television.

Also, to my knowledge, Aereo does not deduplicate content stored, whereas Zediva essentially does. You and I know that there's no difference between "my" digital copy and "your" digital copy, but Aereo does store a separate copy per-user and only distributes each copy to the correct user.

The reason that Aereo separates those copies is because we already have case law that establishes my right to record an over-the-air broadcast and replay it for myself[1]. Aereo maintains that it is acting on behalf of the customers to exercise the customers' right to create personal recordings. If they de-duplicated the data (as Zediva did), they'd certainly save a lot on storage and hardware costs, but they'd no longer be protected by this legal precedent.

Aereo has a very well-funded legal team that is certainly aware of Zediva and other landmark legal precedents[2] - they specifically crafted their entire business around the Cablevision ruling and other case law.

[0] In 2012, the FCC decided to allow cable operators to encrypt these signals, but even this only applies to the retransmission: "The FCC wants to ensure that consumers can still access basic cable services without specifically renting a box from the cable companies. And so the FCC is requiring that the cable operators make the unencrypted TV signals available to third-party device makers and Internet TV service providers." (http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-allows-cable-operators-to-encry...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

[2] Aereo's raised $100MM in 4 rounds. Three of those rounds included IAC, which is run by Barry Diller, who has plenty of relevant industry experience, to say the least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Diller
What proportion of atmospheric lead comes from lead paint?
Celsius and Kelvin are supported.

I'm not certain, but it would appear Fahrenheit support is not built-in. There's a module called NonSI:

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dimensional-0.13/docs/Nu...

I would have expected Fahrenheit to be in that module if it were supported.

But I presume you could add Fahrenheit yourself, if you were willing to learn a bit about the library's internals.
The "magic" explanation doesn't satisfy me. Any physicists in the crowd who can explain why rotating the film 90 degrees creates a negative display?
Google Glass Adds Limited SMS Support For iPhone, Gets Calendar App
Though he says that tonal languages are 'weird', I found it to be a bit more troublesome than that. As a lifelong monotone English speaker, I was actually unable to hear tonal differences that changed the meaning of words during my short attempt at learning Chinese. Made me glad I had the good fortune to be born in the country that was 'first to internet'.
Ah okay, thanks for clearing that up, I wasn't aware that was possible.
Python argparse uses heuristics to decide if something is an argument or value
Should you apply to an accelerator?
In the last months, the goal of been accepted in an accelerator program is taking the mind and the goals of many entrepreneurs. Yes, it is a reality that every day we see more and more new acceleration programs, but…
I had an AT&T salesman come to my door just a few days ago to try and sell me their new "fiber" they had just installed in my area (I'm in a large city mentioned in the article), telling me all of the benefits of having fast internet. I had to lie and tell him I didn't own a TV in order to get him to stop talking about the 300 channel TV/internet bundle.

When I finally squeezed the actual speed of it out of him the answer was 18 Mbps, for $60 a month (of course he could get me a special deal of $40 for the first 3 months, which is the same deal as on their website).

I've used them before (AT&T Uverse) and they require an ATT router/modem, for an additional fee of course, even though using their hardware is technically completely unnecessary.

I actually told him that Time Warner was currently cheaper and more reliable than what he was offering, which is true unfortunately.

AT&T is a joke.
If the issue were so obvious it would not have made it through multiple courts up to the supreme court.
I'm always deeply suspicious of "statistics" that claim startups only have a 1 in 10 chance of success. From the article: "if 90% of startups fail, it simply can’t be the case that all of the startups they know are succeeding."

But it looks like that may not be so far from the truth: "About three-quarters of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don't return investors' capital, according to recent research by Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School."[1]

1: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/21/the-most-ex...
100% agreed. I've been looking at Elixir occasionally for a year or so... It's getting better and better. It certainly takes a lot from Clojure, but with a real Erlang / OTP twist. (It also recognises that "homoiconicity" doesn't always mean lisp). Elixir's Design Goals are stated here for those who've missed them: http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2013/08/08/elixir-design-goals/
Video 2: Responsabilidad legal de los arquitectos peritos
Seconded on tup's greatness. Go through the example to see what all it's doing:

http://gittup.org/tup/ex_a_first_tupfile.html
If you accept the terms without reading them (Not un ticking the newsletter button) then its your fault and you should be penalized for wrongly marking email as spam when you didn't even read the signup form to realise you were agreeing to receive emails.

Its people like you that make it so hard to send emails to people, even when they agree to receive emails.
You're quite right about the limitations imposed when you make your own dimensional types like that. It turns out the problem isn't trivial. Which is why I prefer to use a library like Dimensional. With Dimensional, you get plenty of units out-of-the-box, you can define your own if needed, and you can perform arithmetic in a fairly natural way.
Ask HN: Resetpassword.co – Now what?
http://resetpassword.brace.io

I made this site that tracks all the direct links to change your passwords across the web.

Not too much traction, haven't really put it out there.

This past weekend I randomly got a bunch of blog coverage in Japan...

Two questions:
1) What should I do with all this random coverage?
2) What should I do with the site? Is it helpful?
ICEPOLE: High-speed, Hardward-oriented Authenticated Encryption
I agree. I abhor both of those genres, but I bet we'd get along plenty when it comes to programming(or not, who knows!) As you said, programmers are multifaceted, and video game preference is probably highly unrelated.
Golf, pathfinder, and random board games people bring over.

They are all social and usually involve beer.
Space Invaders!

My significant otter loves board games and has dragged me into Carcasonne. That shit is addictive.
I'd sympathize with this point more for startups that aren't on the "take money from VCs, sell company to BigCo" model, which puts your future pretty squarely in the hands of the VCs and BigCo execs.
Polarization.

This article contains helpful diagrams and an obtuse but reasonable explanation:

http://www.gizmag.com/stealth-computer-display-lcd-polarizin...
Do the Coursera courses and demonstrate an interest. When we hire we look for developers with 2-3 languages under their belt. Only one has to be professional for a jnr/mid candidate. Most other Scala shops I know of work the same way.

Even this low bar eliminates 90% of candidates so it won't take much for you to shine at this level.

If you're snr then you might find yourself actually having to introduce Scala at a Java shop. Run dojos, lunchtime lightning/brown bag talks and lever it in as a testing framework or throwaway prototype. If that doesn't work, start questioning what you did to deserve being called snr.
AT&T's door-to-door salespeople told me that my 30-year-old single-family house in Austin will be eligible for GigaPower in the summer, so maybe it's not quite as bad as the article says.

Charging $30/month to not spy on me is bullshit, though.
> The vast vast majority of developers work in small businesses or start ups

[citation needed]
I have to agree, I was almost in and I know a friend of mine would be (he's got a pile of 100 notebooks laying in his closet).. but that PDF was a letdown. (Time to grab my paper cutter, chop off a binding and get my ScanSnap out again)
Microsoft vs AOL "Chat Wars", circa 2000
The ethical dilemmas today's developers face every day
They run fiber to their Uverse nodes and then apparently tell their salespeople to sell this as a feature. I remember one telling me the benefits of a "fiber optic signal" somehow going to my house over copper. I still ended up switching later on since they're cheaper than my local cable provider, though network performance doesn't seem to be as good.
> In short, if your city plays nice and gives AT&T what they want legislatively (namely gut consumer protections requiring they keep serving DSL users they don't want so they can focus on more profitable wireless)

I think the author is being hypocritical in holding this against AT&T while ignoring the fact that Google is only rolling out fiber in cities that agree to basically leave them alone from regulatory standpoint. And while the author complains about AT&T not upgrading legacy DSL users, you don't exactly see Google or anyone else going after that "lucrative" market.[1] You don't see Google, or anyone else, jockeying to offer service in cities with insane build-out requirements.

The author, Karl Bode, clearly understands why nobody wants to roll out these services: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Baltimore-Still-Begging-V... ("Baltimore is one of many cities who simply want somebody to come in and provide better broadband service, but don't offer an attractive enough return on the investment for any large, investor-forcused private company to bother.") That's true for Google as much as it's true for AT&T. Google's ability to cross-subsidize with its advertising business changes the numbers a bit, but at scale, that's the bottom line.

That said, I think Google Fiber adds a lot of value. I don't think they're going to shame AT&T/Verizon into doing deployments that don't yield an attractive return on capital. It may have the more important effect of putting municipalities on notice that if they want fiber, from anyone, they need to cut the strings attached.
Again, standards don't need to be a blocker for the revocation issue (as CRLSet itself demonstrates). "Standards are hard" is an excuse for inaction.

I can applaud Google's efforts in general yet still point out when there's one egregious, embarrassing gap. They are one of the only three institutions worldwide that could possibly fix this for users, and I'm not picking on them over the others.
Perhaps this will help: http://qxwujoey.tripod.com/lcdworks.gif
For those who cannot access Google web cache (in China):

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_66674dbd01019jpz.html
Starcraft 2, Starcraft, Warcraft(the strategy game, not the MMO), Dwarf Fortress, And a few First Person Shooters to unwind when I have a headache.

I have a feeling that programmers might be slightly inclined to games of strategy and complexity.
> I was actually unable to hear tonal differences

i find this difficult to believe. how can you tell when someone is asking you a question when speaking to you in casual conversation?
I remember doing that to my calculator when I was a teenager. Thought my unique calculator was badass then, hehe.
Review of Thomas Piketty's Capital: Capitalism vs Democracy
Good observations, but let's also review what this does accomplish. The train system is reliant on mechanical linkage and line-of-sight, so can serve only a limited audience. While the Pi-powered version scales, making the toilet status accessible to everyone everywhere in the world by leveraging the connectivity of the Internet.
As a Chinese American, this is so true. Despite going to Chinese school every weekend for many years as a child, I still can't write a damn sentence in Chinese and find it impossible to read a newspaper article. Not having a phonetic alphabet is a real killer.
Starcraft

I still believe that my first understanding of 'conditionals', and other standard programming concepts, came from using the Custom Map Editor for Starcraft. Thanks Blizzard!
Strategic thinking games like Civ, Starcraft, AoE, Heroes, SimCity...