skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there is a different definition of 2D in the materials science field.

http://www.mri.psu.edu/centers/2dlm/

http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/4976821/Is_Graph...

http://gigaom.com/2013/07/19/graphene-isnt-the-only-2d-mater...

http://www.mrs.org/s13-cfp-o/
2 suggestions for Flickr’s [wonderful] new iPhone app
I think that given MS's own history of creating dead ends, then dropping them you can't fault them too much. MS does simply respond to market demand more or less than anything. And sometimes there's internal developer demand.

MS invested quite a bit into NodeJS and libuv for windows. That said, they did little to actually get a tooling option for making native modules easier. I would think that this was to first and foremost get node.js into a place where it is an Azure option. Not to mention that it seems some of their own tooling in this space is using it.

After MS announced the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with managed JScript as it's debut language of choice, I was rather excited. When they brought in IronPython and IronRuby, I was happier still. A unifying platform for many dynamic languages seemed pretty awesome. Then JScript fell to the side, and before long MS support for IronPython, IronRuby and the runtime itself fell to the side.

MS can't support everyone 100%, and backing nothing but .Net has certainly cost them mind share. It's also not like MS is a single hive mind. There are lots of people that have come and gone over the years. I think MS does what its' paying customers (and potentially paying customers) asks of it.

The irony is a lot of this effort has been into a platform (Azure), whose sales and marketing tactics were the biggest driver of me to look away from .Net in the first place. For many years every .Net presentation from MS was pretty much an Azure demo.. and only in the past year or so has Azure actually become a platform worth considering. That said, I hate a hard sell.

I think MS sees the writing on the wall, and knows they'll remain a first class citizen for many developer desktops, and an also ran for the mobile space. That means going hard into both tools, and support. They need Azure, and they need Visual Studio to be a best of breed platform. They've done a decent job at both. If they can get your code to run in Azure, you're a potential customer.. so they'll work to support that.
Sure, anytime. I'm not an expert on any of this, but I've been forced to learn a lot of stuff over the past few years of my own entrepreneurial adventure, and I enjoy sharing knowledge and helping other people. I hope some of this stuff proves to be useful to you.
I read it thoroughly. Ask yourself two questions. I) if your company discriminates or exploits its workforce you've got bigger problems than set time vs unlimited. II) it confuses causation. Companies with set time off will still discriminate against employees if that's their DNA. So your back at "hey If my company gives unlimited time off and I still feel uncomfortable maybe I need to make a change" vs going on and on with ever more tweaks.
Worm Tangent: If you have children and enjoy gardening you should look into setting up a worm compost bin in your basement. I do not have kids but a lot of the kids in the neighborhood enjoy looking at the worms in the compost bin and seeing how they move up a new layer once they have eaten all of the food in the bottom layer. The biggest hit with the kids is the moving pink brillo pad that is pile of baby worms. When I got the worm farm setup my only goal was cheaper food for my roses. The worm casing/compost is great for my roses and the neighborhood diplomacy is a great side benefit.
I've used C++Builder (the 200x versions) and I really can't recommend it. Lots of compiler bugs and no improvement from release to release.
Screenshot Saturday
I really enjoyed last weeks Screenshot Saturday[1]. So here is this weeks post:
"If you like the idea, please post a screenshot and a few words of explanation on what you have been working on for the past week."

[1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7579982)
>IBM shares are essentially centrally controlled by IBM.

Why does that mean we have to trade IBM shares with a centralized system? There are huge advantages to having decentralized trading systems.
Akamai scale > Cloudflare scale.
>If an asset is backed by a vault of gold bars, it is inherently centralised because the gold is in a central location and has counterparty risk as well as being prone to confiscation.

That's true. But gold is a physical asset; shares in a company are not. There is no technical challenge to distributing abstract assets (like shares) over a decentralized system, and there are many advantages to doing so.
I wonder if we're going to eventually wind up with policies similar to commercial aircraft crews. Like, for every N weeks of work you are required to take Y time off. It seems like the logical endgame (even though I hate vacations, and would be annoyed by being required to take them).

I don't think that the companies who are advertising unlimited vacation are doing so as a way to covertly pressure their employees to not take vacation; even if it might be having that effect unintentionally. Or maybe some are, but I can give most of them the benefit of the doubt.

I still have this nagging feeling in the back of my head that the eventual makeup of businesses is a sea of 1099's, self-organizing around particular projects and then dissolving at the project's conclusion. People seem to have way too adversarial a view of employers for this not to seem like the future.
Stupid but serious question...

If I get a National Security Letter am I allowed to show it to my lawyer? If so, is there any limit to the number of people in my legal council? If NOT, what's stopping having everyone in the country as my legal council. Then, as I can only show the National Security Letter to my lawyers, I can then host the NSL on my website for everyone to see.

Crazy or illegal?
The World's Dumbest Idea: Religion
> it compiles ridiculously fast

Courtesy of its simple precedence grammar ... as we all undoubtedly remember ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_precedence_grammar
I can't comment on the web capabilities of Delphi specifically, I'm thinking your standard boring enterprisey CRUD app with various calculations/business logic/reports, etc....thousands of new apps of these kind are written every year, nowadays typically with a web front end (regardless if that's really necessary, all things considered). For most complex applications, a client based GUI is superior for power users, the portions of the app that need widespread distribution can be implemented with a web interface.

The big difference to me is the automatic binding of data from the database through to the UI, you're "done" the requirements so quickly that the currently standard practices of "improving" things with some design patterns and what not gets skipped. It's not so much that Delphi's language capabilities are superior (other than the binding), I think it's that so much of the currently fashionable bloat is more likely to be skipped.

> Modern languages don't particularly encourage or discourage that style of programming

I agree...this is not forced on us by modern languages, it is current culture/fashion. There are so many cool geegaws out there today, it would be a shame to not use them such that you can include that experience on your resume (to hell with the additional costs and complexity, let someone else worry about that.)
Care to elaborate? Because from reading what you just wrote, I have absolutely no idea what you mean by group freedom here. But one thing I know is that a restriction is still a restriction whether it's one, five, or fifty people who want to do a thing with the code. That is probably not what you meant by group.
Just picked it off my Bookshelf, nostalgia..
I'm a bit farther east.
What's up with these odd diamonds? Graphical artifact? http://i.imgur.com/uPxPPI1.png
Why you shouldn't use Socket.io and use Socket.io (Engine.io) instead
Discrimination can happen unintentionally, and it doesn't have to be limited to specific groups of people. A manager could have a rough month due to some family issues, and end up turning down more vacation requests during that month. That sort of thing. If you have a set number of vacation days, it becomes a lot harder to unintentionally discriminate, and a lot easier to notice intentional discrimination.
Ask HN: What apps did/do you use for cold calling?
Hi HN,

I spent a day making cold calls to businesses on behalf of a friend's startup the other day. I lost a lot of time between calls grabbing information about the next lead (from a pre-compiled list) and typing in the number.

A simple app to automate the above would have been great, but I couldn't find one that just does this and little else. The apps that I did find were either designed for large teams (and so too expensive for the 3 of us) or tried to integrate inbound calls (and so was unnecessarily complicated).

Talkdesk.com as advertised pretty much matched our needs, and will be what we probably end up using. But we can't find half the features that they promote, since all of their screenshots seem to be before some massive redesign. Their power dialling feature, for example, would be great - if we could find it!

Has anyone else ever needed such a simple tool? Has anyone found it?
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I think it would be a good idea to not show the initial result when the page is first loaded. The first thing I tried on the page was to click the Run button without changing the expression, so of course nothing changed. This was a bit confusing.

Of course I soon realized what happened, but it would be less confusing if my very first click of the Run button actually appeared to do something.

I would go so far as to do something like highlighting the result with a yellow background that fades out over a second or two, to draw attention to the result. Maybe you'd just want this at the beginning and then stop doing the fading after a few clicks of the Run button, I'm not sure. But it would at least be helpful when getting familiar with the page.
Nothing is perfect, least of all email. But it did one thing right, and it's a big one: any email user can send to any other email user, regardless of provider or platform. We still lack that capability when it comes to IM, social networks, and most software in general.
I watch TV and I believe that the ethnic mix of people on TV (in the UK) is fairly representative of the mix you would find on the train going in and out of London.

I look at marketing material prepared with stock images and fashion catalogues. What do I see? Lots of white faces. Maybe there is a picture in there somewhere of some black girl playing with young Tarquin (who is obviously white). The word 'tokenism' springs to mind.

I don't believe most people care less about what colour people are, however, if you use a lot of stock photography, step back, look at the body of your work and wonder why all the faces are white. It happens. Sometimes all the images that are supplied are of white people, yet you may not notice this until, for some random reason, you get a person of colour showing up. Then the '98% white' trend is revealed.

The thing is that not everyone wants to be white. People might want to be young, thin, beautiful, with a full head of well groomed hair - that is aspirational. So you can keep the old, fat and ugly people out of the marketing material - that is fine. But to consciously or otherwise end up with only white faces is where TV was more than a generation ago. We should have moved on, perhaps even more so than TV as the internets is global rather than parochial.
> Gold (or other physical commodity) backed shares can be centrally issued by each holder of gold

I am a bit confused. My impression so far was that something like this would be commonly seen as a decentralized scenario?
Yeah. Wasnt DabbleDB smalltalk too? Picked up steam there for a little while.
Thanks! good point, and I agree, will remove the initial results from the code, thanks
Email server administration has its challenges, and the tools could definitely get better. But email is one of the few decentralized forms of communication, and all of that fixing, patching, and protecting is the product of a decade of hardening the system so that it can survive. If we're lucky enough to have a decentralized social network get the kind of adoption that email has, it will have to tackle the same problems.
Yes, it was our course book and pretty comprehensive.
Can you sue the engineer if the builders don't follow the spec?
Amusing indeed. I'd forgotten about it.

For those wanting to see it today:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140209235144/http://harmful.cat...
Thanks! again all credit for the cool execution engine should go to the http://codebrew.io team (http://scalatutorials.com/about.html)
Goto Fail – Free and Open Source versus Closed Source Proprietary Code
Show HN: My first eBook.. Lean Prototyping and User Testing
Unlimited vacation is a somewhat-mislabeled thing because the benefit obviously is not that you could take unlimited time off. Instead, the benefit is that you don't have to think about it. That day you take off somewhat spontaneously because some friends or family members came into town? You don't have to think about if it'll affect your banked vacation hours w.r.t. that big trip you were planning on taking. That week you were home sick because of a nasty flu? Again, not taking anything away from anything else (I think shared vacation+sick PTO pools are just about the worst policy I could imagine).

It requires you to be a mature adult about it, and not take off huge amounts of time that put the rest of your team into bad situations, or disappear for long trips on short notice, or such, or the company will have to address that. And the company has to have management willing to address edge cases or abuses rationally.

But it's pretty awesome if you're working with mature adults who don't take advantage of the system on either end (to take excessive time off OR to try to keep employees from taking adequate time off).

And at my current employer I do accrue some regular, paid-out-on-leaving-but-never-deducted-from "vacation" hours too. So that's extra nice. I didn't have this part of it at the company where I was previously, but frankly I wouldn't want to go back to tracked vacation even in exchange for that accrual (maybe with the exception if I expected to stay somewhere for decades and they had unlimited accrual...).
Entertaining cat photo
A nice and funny cat pic about how to follow a diet!
Ask HN: Who are some of the must-follow Twitter users?
No, not Justin Bieber. Let's post links to profiles of developers/hustlers on Twitter who have amazing things to say, but don't have as much exposure.

Requirements:

- must be active user

- may/may not be very popular

- must be in software/startup scene

GO.
The FBI and CIA dont seem to weed out poor quality candidates maybe they are placing to much reliance on patriotic hooha and polygraphs and not doing proper vetting checks.

The uk found out the hard way that he seems a good sort of chap belongs to all the right sort of clubs isn't agood selection criteria for the SS and SIS the hard way with the Famous 5 (Philby Maclean Burgess Blunt and Caincross)
China still has a MIPS programme, including supercomputers, and some PCs. But its pretty much all embedded elsewhere, especially routers.
Reminds me of ColdFusion. It should be dead, but it's not.
Is there an agreed upon max if both poles melted?
i don't think it's clear that there's any misinformation in the cnet article. Nike is officially denying killing the product, but they aren't denying that they've laid off the majority of their hardware team.
On a lighter note there is always 'Triop World':

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Interplay-UK-5026175001302-Triop-Wor...

The aim is you grow worms and see what happens. Here is the 'must read' review:

Is it possible to become emotionally attached to a kill-crazy cannibalistic worm that looks like a facehugger from the Alien movies and spends most of its time attempting to eat its siblings?

Having recently shed a tear while burying my last one - Chompy - in the back garden, I'd say yes. These little beasties inspired fear and disgust in my girlfriend, but to me they were true friends.

How could I forget the way Chompy used to play with his smaller brothers, chasing them around their tank for hours on end? Every couple of days, one of the brothers would vanish completely, and Chompy would do an extra-long poo to show how much he missed them.

After about 30 days, Chompy disposed of the final, equally large brother - Ripley - by eating him from the tail up. I caught the two of them playing on the bottom of the tank - Chompy had Ripley's face in his mouth, and was munching away without a care in the world. The rest of Ripley was nowhere to be seen.

Heartbroken, Chompy only lasted another week after that. For a while, he ate his fish pellets and bits of carrot as normal, but a triops is only half a triops without his playmates. Eventually Chompy turned green, and the end was nigh.

Would I repeat the experience? Maybe, but next time I would have to steel myself for the inevitable tragic end. Triops might not live long, but they've got personality. And they eat Sea Monkeys for breakfast.

So, if this open source 'digital organism' can evolve to be as cool as Chompy then there could be quite some appeal.
I would say that most of the "loopholes" that you're referring to aren't really accessible to the average Joe because most of us make what's considered "Earned Income". That's what your salary is considered and it's taxed according to your tax bracket. Wealthy people will structure their income and their holdings in ways to minimize the amount classified in the earned income bucket. The extreme is when executives take $1 salary.

The AI is going to be superior in terms of explaining which factors played in your return. This will become clearer how powerful it is when the application suggests ways to optimize your situation and you basically have a playbook in hand to use.
This article is ridiculous. F# is used in production in lots of places from startups like Tachyus and SnappyGrid, to mid-sized firms like Trayport all the way to huge corporations like Aviva, Credit Suisse, EDF and Barclays Capital.

IDE Support: Sure, the IDE support might not be quite as developed as C#. But frankly most refactorings are just pressing tab a few times with F#. Refactorings for C#/VB.NET are mostly workarounds for languages that require huge amounts of excess syntax. The IDE support for F# is still way ahead of most of the competition (particularly dynamic languages). The intellisense and error highlighting work fantastically well.

Options/nulls: Yes I suppose you still occasionally have to do a null check if you interface with legacy libraries. but I think having thousands upon thousands of .NET libraries means this is a worthwhile tradeoff. Plus you can use the TryGetX methods in F# far more nicely than in C#. http://luketopia.net/2014/02/05/fsharp-and-output-parameters...

F# missed by Roslyn: F# has had an open source compiler written in F# for years. C# is a ridiculous language to choose to write a compiler in. See http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/roslyn-vs-fsharp-comp...

What's coming next: F# is so far ahead of C#/VB.NET that this argument is ludicrous. Even if F# remained stagnant it would still always be better than C#. It has sensible defaults: immutability over mutability, functional over OOP, parametric polymorphism over inheritance, lack of nulls over null checks everywhere.

C# has poor defaults that are now irreparable due to the need to keep backwards compatibility.

F# is open to contributions now so I would expect some great things. Joinads, for example... http://tryjoinads.org/

Hiring developers is hard: This is a nonsense statement. Sure, if you want to hire 100 F# developers you might struggle, but you're going to struggle to find 100 good C# developers. Yaron Minsky from Jane Street reports hiring OCaml developers was "the easiest hiring he's ever done". If you tweet that you are looking for F# developers I know from experience that you'll get a lot of responses from very talented developers. Most places I've worked have a terrible time finding decent C# devs - interview:hiring ratio is around 50:1.
Still figuring out gumroad a bit. Since HN has been an source of continued pleasure for me over the years here is a link for early adopters:

https://gum.co/leanprototyping/earlyadopters

Would love everyone's feedback and impressions.
After the huge success [1] of SoundCloud Instant [2], I started working something else using the SoundCloud API.

For the purpose of surprise, I'll just leave the screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/PP4LN2J.jpg

The prototype is ready and it does what it's supposed to, but it's not ready to be released yet. If you'd like to know when it's ready, you can join my (new) email list: http://eepurl.com/SRIPT

[1] https://twitter.com/TheKaranGoel/status/457563836225056768
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602045
Really? What makes you say that? I really like it.
What's the performance of a MySQL LIKE query on a similar sized table (with an index)?
I don't know the particulars of the Nike position. In general it can be because of geography (if the cancelled project was run out of a different region, which can be especially true for skunkworks or acquihired teams), or job specificity (it's not clear how many sensor engineers, low-power engineers, or even hardware and software engineers Nike needs if it's not dong projects like this).
This seems like a perfect use case for print your own book services. You could create a book with a family tree, organize photos by history and have captions and titles, and have copies to give to family. One day historians may discover your family book and learn something about our time.
The only reason I say that mindset is problematic is because the way you frame your statement is "this can't be done" when what is actually the case is that we have never really tried because there are many other easier problems to solve. I don't think anyone who has spent even a limited amount of time modelling expects to be able to stick a few equations together and have it all work. It is still an open question as to whether we can capture say 95% of the variance in a system using a collection of simplified models or whether we have to go full monte carlo and study models that have the full complexity of the system they represent because you really do need every last single part and can't simplify anything.

There will be novel results no matter what happens, maybe not about c elegans, but certainly about the models themselves.
from what i've seen of the fitness tracker market, the customers buying these aren't typically athletes, they're dieters. People buying devices to track their workouts are a smaller market than people buying wristbands to track their steps over the course of a workday. Fitbit is for people who want a record of the fact that they took the stairs instead of the elevator every day this week.
It says they will stop making wearable hardware in the title, which Nike is flatly denying.