skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Similarly relevant:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)#US_VX_stock...

Roughly 124 tons of VX gas sitting under 7,200 feet of water, at the bottom of the ocean, somewhere of the coast of Atlantic City, NJ, and other un-named sites off the coasts of New York and Florida.
First Bitcoin ATMs of Planned 400 Goes Live in Dubai
Tie the data in with people's lunch calendars and you can start forcasting peak toilet demand!
What the author does not seem to understand is that some people actually enjoy doing hard things. 35,755 people signed up for the Boston Marathon yesterday, and paid for it. Why pay to run 26 miles when you could be having a lazy Sunday breakfast instead?

I practice a form of rock climbing called bouldering. It's about walking up to a big boulder and climbing it along the hardest possible line you can. Hikers sometimes point out that "you could have just walked up on the other side."

Yes, doing a startup is hard. It can also be fun (probably type II or type III fun if you ask me). A climber named Kevin Jorgeson explained it quite well during a talk he gave at Google:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsl4evw0a7Q
You would no longer need "a room full of transcoders".

You would have a control plane that would determine what people were watching (a la Netflix), and then use RTMP, HLS, HDS, DASH, etc to serve "channels" across your CDN, and subscribe end-user devices to these channels.

Disclaimer: I work for a news startup majority-owned by a major market broadcaster.
Not even just that, but where they ignore your Accept-Language and just make up a decision on what language you should be using. Google has no way to fully switch languages - even after going to Google.com and setting English, you'll see images have tooltips in your "local" language.

Google's Play app does the same thing for a bit of their content. Certain headers get localized, despite everything else in the app being English. Netflix has the same problem, and then to further add insult, they send you to non-English phone numbers for support.

The most annoying thing is that someone probably got a raise for these "features".
Been lurking on HN forever, this is my first Show HN. This is my second product, the first was a book for web designers.

I used to run a meetup group for developers with side projects. We were all there for the same reason: we love programming and our jobs were not a great outlet for creativity or challenge.

This is basically a reaction to the fact that most of us never actually finished a side project, and most of us are still stuck in the same situation at work. :-(
Good point, if you're not at a startup, you're not necessarily going to be working for Google as an alternative. What if your alternative is to work for a stodgy non-tech firm because you're invested in a given domain (i.e., automotive, legal, biotech)?

The whole article is full of trollish comments like "There might be a generous paycheck in getting stuck on the Google bus for the next decade, but there sure ain’t any glory in it." - not all, or even most, Googlers take the bus. There is excitement and potential success stories even in large organizations like Google.

HN is best to ignore this kind of flame bait posting.
> CXX=g++ isn't necessary either; make already knows about $(CXX) and how to link C++ programs.

You're right, of course.

> Also, I think you wanted .o, not o.

I would, yes, but I copied the Makefile ;)

Should have been clearer; I meant that redo is simpler (and more reliable) than make.

For simple projects, redo scripts are a bit longer. However, as the projects grow, the redo scripts reach an asymptote whereas Makefiles don't.
The only way to reduce the growth in make is to add functions and implicit rules
which get ugly real fast.
My team found the git docs confusing, so I made this manpage generator to "help"
You're forgetting interest so it isn't a straight calculation like above. :)
That strikes me as a geek version of Jack Nicholson's monologue in A Few Good Men. "You can't handle the truth!"
the last 10 years in build tools has felt like 1 step forward, two steps back. i like being able to write tasks in any language other than Makefile. however, it seems like many of the new popular options (cake, grunt, etc.) don't do what, to me, is Make's real purpose: resolve dependencies and only rebuild what's necessary. new task runners have either eliminated or pigeonholed the (typically one-to-one in makeland) correspondence between tasks and files, meaning the build system can't be intelligent about what tasks to run and which to not.

computers are fast enough that this doesn't often bother me anymore, but i've run across some huge Rakefiles that could benefit from a rewrite in Make.
A funny post. I enjoyed it. I would have liked to have seen a little more interaction on the level of the critique of the Campbell influence and Jung.

Also, heads up: needs a spelling/grammar once over.
I like the hand-drawn animations on your landing page! Did you guys make those yourselves?
We failed to reach our crowdfunding goal. Here’s what we learned.
Research plan of the FLOK Society [Free/Libre and Open Knowledge]
Build your product in public
Some electric door locks (like the Codoor CD3500 [1] used at a place I used to work) are designed so after a certain number of digits without a valid code (16 for the codoor), they require the correct code to be entered twice in succession in order to unlock.

This is transparent to the user - it's just as if you hit a wrong button - but prevents using codes like this.

I don't know if this is common to all keyless entry systems, but you'd hope it would be!

Of course you can still enter every every code, just it would take 80,000 button presses on a 10-digit lock.

[1] http://www.assar.ee/cgi-bin/document.cgi?doc=356 see page 12 'access blocking'
Yes broadcast channels are on the decline but they owned and ran off the benefits of public airwaves which were/are very hard to get access to.

Before cable, Fox was successful in being the 4th big broadcast network but it was a huge battle (although it did shake things up when successful shows like the Simpsons were on).

Thankfully shortly after, we have cable and internet now, both further steps in limiting top down broadcast control. But with the support of tax money, broadcast space and lots of money the old broadcast stations were a combined monopoly on the airwaves.

You could argue the network stations have had to innovate a bit with cable and internet taking over and so they do have content that people love. The desire to use the public airwaves has been impossible for so long nobody really wants to take over the public airwaves much anymore so it is silly to fight against Aereo.
I was going to do it to my Casio GLX5600 but I realized it would reverse the moon phases :(
> "My biggest complaint with the show is that it still presents all software developers as socially awkward imbeciles who can't talk to a girl or stand up for themselves."

They do have the `bullies` at their office who are also engineers and definitely fit the `cool kid` stereotype. I think they purposefully want to position the protagonists as being walked on and socially inept even within a group already considered to be socially inept by the general public.
Yes, precisely. When enacted, 1 antenna per customer was essentially saying "you can't practically do this."
I think everyone goes through a phase where they try to find the perfect build tool, and then at least entertain the idea of writing one themselves.

Eventually, you grow out of it. There's a lot of build tools, each are better at some things than others. It's not that much grunt work to convert things from one to another (even very large projects). If your build tool is working for you, leave it alone. If it's getting in your way or slowing things down, try another one. Move on.
It is somewhat of a miracle. Flying stowed away on a plane is extremely dangerous and most will die, or at least come out with very serious issues.
Docopt-go For It
How Django REST Framework Changed My Life
The whole article was filled with absurd assumptions and claims:

"...engineers tend to do quite well in structured environments, where there are clear problems to solve, and relatively badly in the chaos of a startup, where the most important skills are non-engineering ones, like being able to attract talent and investors."

What does that have to do with engineers? People tend to do well in structured environments with clear problems to solve, regardless of their background or profession. It's a small subset of people who can survive in unstructured envs, and an even smaller one that is willing to submit themselves to that masochism. If anything I would surmise that engineers have a higher percentage of that subset, but I don't have any more data than the article's writer to prove that.

"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."

No data presented to back that up, either.

I know it's an editorial, but if the writer wants to make such broad sweeping generalizations, he should have at least a little evidence or data to back those claims up or it's just wasted text.
Given the huge security holes already known to be present in the median auto electronics system, my guess is "absolutely not".

There may be some additional consideration for luxury-branded models, but for the standard models, the consideration is primarily whether it works for the auto-buyer every time, not how this could be used as an attack vector.
Any examples of Elixir in production at a well-known company?
Maybe the bathroom lock could literally be a mutex.
There are currently no tutorial-style instructions for using anything but Vagrant, but you should be able to just to run these commands in whatever environment you are using: https://github.com/flynn/flynn-demo/blob/26fcd98cd7646199513...
One of the developers at work put an Pi-sized device on one of the toilet stalls, with a page on heroku to show the status of the stall. It worked well, and yes, we do have too few toilets at work.. :(
Hound – Review your Ruby code for style guide violations
IE6 supports TLS 1.0
The issue isn't technical. That's why attempts at technical solutions reinvent ICQ et al.

The problem with social media (which leads to the demise of every implementation in around 7 years) isn't the media, it's the social.

The problem with social media is modeling degree of interesting. Everyone joins a social media site because the people in a defined group (however that is implemented) are interesting. Over time people join the group, and some leave; alas, those joining tend to be less interesting than whoever was there (and attracted participants), the interesting people tend to leave because they're surrounded by ever more uninteresting people (and find more interesting people elsewhere), traffic increases, signal-to-noise ratio decreases, average level of interesting plummets, people leave because it's boring, cycle repeats elsewhere. Insofar as the site is a directory of connections, participants find their list is dominated by people they don't know/care, but as nobody wants to perform the cruel step of actually sever connections, nor wants to spend the considerable time required to do so, they leave for somewhere fresh (hey, the old account is still available if they want to contact someone, but that ends up just being neglected). Eventually one leaves a trail of abandoned accounts, still active but ID & password - even the site itself - forgotten.

FB has tried to solve this with some algorithm filtering thru activity of friends, leading to a disjointed slate of postings which is interesting enough to casually browse, but suffers from a still low S/N ratio and leaves it almost impossible to find an interesting post short of scrolling thru hundreds of disorganized items. Result is an experience just interesting enough to keep people checking FB, but not exactly useful.

"Upvoting" helps identify interesting posts/users, but that's the decision of the voters, not the reader.

So...someone creates yet another social media site, using some new tech to change the media or voting or ranking or filtering or something ... and it all goes thru the same social media lifecycle, dying when the S/N ratio reduces the activity to little more than yet another directory of connections.

Give me a way to filter those who are interesting to me, with some visual gradient that I can read or skip sections of as I read based on momentary whim. HN's gradients are a useful step, but in the wrong direction: I don't just want the bad posts faded out depending on how many object, I want the higher ranking posts more visible (not just in position but in gradient, as sometimes great high-rated posts are positioned low just because they respond to some mediocre parent); sometimes the most down voted posts are interesting for visceral "train wreck" appeal.

Figure out how to find out what/who I find interesting. Keep what I see interesting, and I'll stick around. Otherwise, it's just the next ICQ directory.
The key missing piece to Thiel's analysis of the design vs. statistics dichotomy is the fact that it's best to have both: a strong vision combined with a lot of low-risk experiments to shape your understanding of the best path to achieving that vision.

From what I understand, Apple does exactly this: they do a lot of prototyping before settling on a product design, even though the broad strokes of what they're trying to build are clear from the get-go. I expect the future of product development to keep moving in this direction as prototyping becomes progressively less expensive.

Speculating on history a bit: the transition from determinate to indeterminate beliefs happened because people figured out that a lot of strong proclamations about the future turned out to be very wrong. So the pendulum swung the other way for a while, and now we're finally starting to settle on an equilibrium between the two.
I think you're right that low completion rates aren't a problem. I don't have specific numbers, but I'd presume that most students who fail to complete an online course aren't motivated going in and are merely sampling or browsing. They'd probably drop out regardless and skew the completion rate horridly.

For everyone else, I'd imagine the motivation level is higher because of voluntary enrollment than a college student's who is forced to take certain classes.

Also, the current iteration of online education can survive on unassisted self-motivation. I can't recall the specific stat, but I believe 80%+ of students taking coursera classes already have a bachelor's degree. Most classes tend to be technical, where online resources are free and plenty. And given the self-paced nature of online classes, most students who learn best in group environments are probably pre-filtered and never sign up.

Perhaps discussions would be even more relevant as online education becomes more mass-adopted? Group tutoring for home-schooled kids, KUMON classes taught online, K-12 education where students need more hand holding, liberal arts classes where answers are subjective and can't be auto-graded, etc.
How do we make them not broad generalizations? How do we get the "is" right, before debating the "ought"? What's an axis along which the rich have a zero-sum quality of life versus the poor?
Things connected to the internet should expose an API defining what they are, what they do, and what they need to perform their magic, so consumers can act accordingly.

name: thermostat
task: control room temperature
icon: [base64]
functions:
- turn on
- turn off
- set temperature (temp:num)

With that information my cell phone can interact with all the things around it. If I click on the thermostat icon I get the info shown and three butons with the actions I can perform on it. If I want to control the temperature I just enter a number and done.

If a TV is around, I can easily turn it on/off, switch channels, volume, etc.

No need for specialized apps, they're universal APIs every device can access, provided some level of security or trust.

Is that the IoT we want?
Eh, 50% odds aren't that bad:

http://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamt...
Most Americans Do Not Want Google-ish Glasses, Drones, Or Lab-Grown Meat
Looks great. The majority of the classes I plan to take are on MIT OCW. Are there plans to add it?
"Competence" might mean that you don't collectivize agriculture...
Kind of what I figured-- trying it out now. Thanks!
It's significant that there is this advice, and it supports the point of the article, but this is really insufficient. If you can't be sure of the water quality at the tap (as parent notes, different from the quality at the plant where the utility measures contaminant levels), then it's best to use a filter that removes metals (as well as biological contaminants).

Also people should be aware: the government somehow allows pipes and fittings to be sold as "lead free" when in reality they contain up to a few percent of lead.
WHY IS THIS on the front page of Hacker News? This is a community of Entrepreneurs and Hackers. What is this Reddit now? Flag this crap into oblivion.

Edit: Thanks for the down votes. No I won't back down. I've seen this happen to Digg when it first started then Reddit and now HN. We used to be a community for hackers by hackers and entrepreneurs / aspiring entrepreneurs. Now we're being over-run by a group of info-addicted maniacs who want HN to turn into another time sink. Over the last 2 months I've been taking screenshots of the stupid nonsense that shows up on the front page. The pattern is undeniable. HN is getting more political and more off topic. The same thing that led to the downfall of Digg and Reddit and why we ran to HN to start anew.

Edit: Thank you to everyone who flagged it. It's gone now.
Ask HN: What games do programmers play?
What games do you yourself play? If I develop a game specifically for programmers, what should it look like?
Yep! That's one of the next we plan to add.
I still think a lottery ticket is still has far worse ROI, than the YCombinator application and startup process.

Let's say you pony up rent for your YCombinator startup and are paying about $2400 / month + utilities for 3 months. Let's say you get your food & other necessities costs to $80 / week.

That's an $8160 investment.

What you get back are the weekly dinners with great speakers. The connections you make should be worth at least $150k if your startup fails and you have to use that connection to get a job. I'm assuming a markup in your value as an employee for just getting into YCombinator.

$8160 and you can make 20% - 35% more than your peers if it fails.

$8160 in lottery tickets will pretty much get you zero if you fail.
> You offered a suggestion that was based on a false premise.

I haven't, I am not taf2. I was just saying that this inverse correlation that you see may be due to other factors or may not even be statistically significant. We're missing a lot of data here (e.g. how does the juvenile crimes rate fluctuates prior to 1990).
Five Policies to Improve Canada’s Startup Ecosystem
Testing Chromium: ThreadSanitizer v2, a next-gen data race detector
It has less issues than removing all threads period imo.
Was the codename Walt Jr?
"Given the huge security holes already known to be present in the median auto electronics system"

Would you mind listing some?
Terrorists may not act the way you expect. Some may be perfectly willing to destroy a flight without destroying themselves. For those terrorists, the wheel well may very well come in handy as an unsecured location to stash a bomb that will be protected from the elements.
Having only read the article and not the entire book, I am curious to see if the author explores the motivations behind starting a company. The article makes it sound like money and fame are assumed to be the only motivations.

I feel that entrepreneurship is fundamentally about controlling one's own future.
This intro is great, and the lighting is really, really nice.

But TBH I do not like accelerated intros/demos, because the most difficult part of the code, i.e. 3D graphics pipeline is implemented outside the demo, in a GPU driver. Many years ago, in a DOS, coders have to implement rasterization, clipping & lighting and fit everything in a 64kB. Watch for example Stash by TBL (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3), Jizz by TBL (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2), Photon by Purple (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=502).
If Kayak/MSFT uses machine learning for price prediction and airlines are doing the same for predicting their revenue, doesn't it result in both sides quickly reacting to each other moves and countering opponent's actions? After all, they're all using the same ticket sales data. Maybe that's why recommendation engines don't seem to work?
Mexico's new Anti-Freedom of Expression (Censorhip) Telecom Bill
It's been used with some internal projects at companies and SOME companies have started building systems with Elixir as a "nicer erlang" nothing major that I know of yet.

The plan is to have v1 happen early this year and after that we'll start seeing more products being built with Elixir.
Working from home? Having problems to begin your work day on time?
Humans will compete with robots for jobs by 2040
The utility of switching lanes when stuck in traffic
Great info that can help provide some insight on the highs and lows of starting a company.
Algoraves: Dancing to live coding
Not supreme court justices though
I guess it's topical if it's about proper conclusions from statistics.

I think your conclusion, from correlation between lead concentration in soils to conclusiong "lead-soil levels seem to have some negative effect" -- is entirely unjustified.

The alternate hypothesis I mentioned seems as, or more, plasuble. That it's not lead-soil levels that are having any effect at all, but rather that lead-producing activities are socially undesirable, and end up in poor neighborhoods because poor people lack political power.

I suppose the scientific method would be to devise an experiment or investigation that would attempt to distinguish between these two hypothesis. Possibly people already have, and arguing about it in the academic literature now.

One danger of concluding causation from correlation in the 'big data' era is how easy it is to go hunting for correlations. If I test ketchup consumption against 1000 other variables, it may be fairly likely that I'll find a correlation against at least one of them. (If I flip a coin 10 times; and then do this experiment 1000 times, it's not unlikely that at least one of those 10-times iterations I'll get 10 ten heads). So maybe I find that ketchup consumption is very closely correlated with public transit availability, across cultures and times and governments. That doesn't really mean that ketchup causes public transit or vice versa, it just means that if you have enough data, you're going to find happenstance correlations.
I enjoy the show as well, but no one is ever going accidentally invent a quantum leap in compression technology like that. He might as well have accidentally cured cancer for as much sense it makes.
CFOP method for solving a Rubik's cube
First, I want to know if he looked this up online before attempting it. Such a sad story (running from home) but makes me wonder if there's more "airborn hobos" out there. My next question is, what was he wearing? Did he have a sleeping bag? Did he really, really want to get to Hawaii? Did he want to get as far as possible from his parents? Or did he simply hide in the first plane he saw after jumping the fence?