skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why "x"? It's idiomatic, like using T for a type in C++ templates, argc and argv for the inputs to main in C, making the second returned value in a Go function the error and calling it err and not error or e or er or failed, using the type "t" in OCaml to specify "the" type a particular module is defining (I think...), or anything else. X, y and z in maths are idiomatic; there's no good reason they're used instead of a, b, c, or LR, UD, FB (left-right, up-down, front-back) for coordinates except that that's what people are used to, and sticking to the convention makes code/equations easier to follow because your brain is used to seeing x used a certain way, so you don't need to keep checking to see what it is when you see it in longer code/equations.

Many haskell functions operating on lists are described in terms of the first element "x" and the rest of the elements xs (exes or "the rest of the x's"). It's a common convention used because we have no idea what x might be, all we know is that, in this case, elements of the type that x is can be ordered. This means that one function works on lists of numbers, letters, string, lists of numbers, booleans, etc. Basically terse names like that are used because many haskell functions are very general. We could have decided on (hd:tl) or something, but there's something nice about stating that there is one value x and some values which are also x's.

You have to remember these are not features of the language, they are the idiomatic styles that are built up by the users of the language. Haskell's community encourages writing short code which is clear once you understand whatever abstractions are being used (Applicatives, Monads, lists, curried functions, type classes and so on). This is in some ways the essence of programming, building abstraction upon abstraction to make beautiful, "obviously correct" code. Haskell allows very (cognitively and syntactically) cheap abstraction, so they're used everywhere.

You complained about having to "decrypt code" in order to understand it, but this is true of any language; you may understand the keywords and how to put things together, but you won't get far if you can't get used to the idioms and conventions used by others using the language.
High School Students Solve "Ketchup Water" Problem with 3D-Printed Cap
Ask HN: Do you start with a visual prototype or backend code?
I've started working on a project from a visual prototype before I get into the backend code. I wanted to find out what approaches others use.

I find it easier to understand how to hook up the backend code, once I know how the product should work visually.
Last September I spent a little time going through Beowulf and pulling out words we no longer use but are still active in modern Swedish. I got to 100 very quickly. I can't speak so much for German, having only a basic grasp, but to me it looks like Scandinavian languages are closer to Old English now than Modern German. That might give a picture of how English would otherwise look without a Norman conquest (or if the Normans had retained their Norse language).[0]

For info, if you hadn't heard yet, Tolkien's Beowulf translation is due out on the 22nd of May. Scholars say it is likely to just be his working translation and teaching notes, unlikely to rival Heaney's efforts. I think everyone interested will want to see it though. Myself included. [1]

[0] http://lukespear.co.uk/2013/09/old-english-vs-modern-swedish...

[1] http://www.tolkienbeowulf.com/
This makes an excellent testimonial for Stripe. Consider the ROI just realised.
Sorry for OT, but.. Jeremy Clarkson has ruined all carby.* names for me - I can't stop thinking about his joke.
A performing juggler once told me (an amateur),
after he showed me a technically challenging bit:
There are bits you do for an audience, and there are
bits you do for other jugglers. It sounds like Gatto
liked the doing the technical bits more than he liked working for
an audience.

Now, years later, I find that programming has a similar
pattern: there is code that one writes for an audience (and that
thus is more maintainable) and there is code that one writes
that may show great technical skill - but that is more ...
challenging to enjoy.
Personally, I am for a hard fail OCSP option in HSTS or certificate plus OCSP stapling. Default to soft fail with a warning message for now. Remember captive portals can use OCSP stapling too.
Most of the stress comes from expansion and contraction of the graphene when it's heating up and cooling back down again, which can be more or less pronounced depending on the substrate (glass, SiO, etc.). With chemical vapor deposition for example, often the substrate needs to be heated and the graphene has to be transferred from one substrate to another so there is still plenty of room for stress during the process. At this point any poor alignments of graphene sheets or individual atoms (I think there's three classifications for the edge of the sheet alone) can cause cracks.
Has anyone used neovim yet ? Is it usable ? Is there any new features or are they only refactoring under the hood ?
FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014 Schedule – Pocket Edition – Bookmark it for later
i wonder why they chose to deviate from the 3D model terminology for this: rigging.
It's not all that helpful to compare version control tools with cars, I don't think. Users of a version control tool do need to know about branches, tags, commits and such because they are the heart of what version control is. If you've ever seen an environment where version control tooling has been introduced without the support of the developers you'll have seen what happens when you treat it like a car: empty check in messages, commits getting clobbered by "I'll jut check in my version" merges, and contention over file locks in tools where locking was part of the model.
Seinfeld covered this scenario over a decade ago, complete with visit from Postmaster General: http://youtu.be/JpUqLjjKk4Y?t=3m20s
"der Rest" is German, and so is "ordinär".
I build a visual framework first. It generates momentum for both me and the client.
I'm thinking

0. A few smart undergrads become briefly the most popular people on campus for passing out $50 bills to a large portion of the student body.
but it's not an official app though...
"Rest" as in take a break from something is Germanic, "rest" as in remainder is Latin, they probably got mixed up.
Great article. This "Eric" the author speaks of must be pretty cool.
I attempt to keep the two separate. Designing your back end while keeping the frontend in mind will tend to create tightly coupled code that is hard to maintain.

Even if you're not creating an api, treat your back end as such to avoid that tight coupling.

That's how I approach it anyway. Generally works, there is always exceptions but for the most part it works out ok.
I am sure I saw similar tool months ago on HN. Someone commented that it looks like inetd in disguise.
There are definitely consumers who are willing to pay 2x the market price for a job exceptionally well done. However, they're not going to assume that because someone juggled exceptionally well that they'd do an equally good job at construction. He'll have to build his reputation in the industry independently, and given that he's not using his juggling persona to market his construction company, it seems like he's OK with that.
Can't wait until apple put this in the market.
why not:

[receive]
onlyFastForwards = true
Wikipedia content is licensed for redistribution. That isn't scraping.
It does not convert currencies like Google.
Cricket has a much, much bigger audience globally than Ice Hockey - there's a lot of Europeans, Australians, South Africans and Indians on HN who have likely never seen a hockey game :-)

It's also not so much of a team game - cricket statistics are much more likely to reveal an outlier than hockey, football, rugby or handball. It's possible to separate to a much greater extent a player from the quality of their team - if you put me and three other random guys on a basketball team with Michael Jordan, he would look a lot less impressive than he did with one of the greatest teams ever assembled! The same goes for Messi, Maradona, Gretzky, etc. Their talents need, and encourage to some extent, wonderful performances from their teammates to make passes, runs, tackles, interceptions, etc.

The only effect that a similar substitution would have on Bradman would be that he'd need to concentrate on 4s and 6s and keeping the rest of us 'in' long enough. If you wanted to sub in a North American sportsman as an outlier, it would need to be a baseball player, I guess :-)
4 Tips to Hire an Awesome Software Engineer
Because everyone else was either pushed back, left or got assimilated into the supermajority of self-identified Englishmen.
Depends on who you ask. I doubt that the Scots or the Welsh or even the Cornish would consider the Anglo-Saxons to be the 'natives'. Fortunately hardly anyone in Britain actually thinks in terms of racial or ethnic purity.

There definitely is a sense in which French and Latinate words are considered more upper-class, clever, fancy or polite - my favourite example is how referring to someone as 'fat' is considered rude whereas 'obese' is not, with the only difference being that one word is Germanic and the other Latinate.
map/zip/range isn't cryptic once you get used to it. You start thinking them as additional CS concepts, which you just apply in one "chunk" to problems. This is working-as-intended: it's you learning how to think at a higher level so that you can solve more complicated problems quickly. Once you've done this you can actually "back port" this knowledge to traditional programming languages: I often think of Java or C code in terms of "Oh, this is a map" or "this is a fold over a tree traversal".

There are a bunch of other, legit readability problems with typical Haskell style: the fetish on single-character variable names is just nuts (it comes from math, where it's customary because mathematics culture arose before computers and autocomplete), and once you get into point-free style, combinator libraries, and monads/arrows things really get nuts. In general I've found that abstractions should only be used when they're re-used frequently, so you can internalize them, and Haskell tends to encourage rather overzealous abstracting. But map/zip/range show up all the time in typical industrial programming, and learning how to think of it as a unit frees up brainpower to think about higher-level algorithms.
Babe Ruth? So by "a higher percentage of people" you mean "Americans and few others"
I think they should focus on refactoring the core and letting people add features through plugins.
I use this as a firefox bookmarks toolbar item:
javascript:void(document.body.background='')
> The usual strategies of sportswriting depend on the writer and reader sharing a set of passions and references [...] but you almost certainly don’t know as much about juggling as you do about football or baseball.

Nope, I knew more about juggling! The author only lost me at the end when it got into analogies with various names in basketball/tennis/golf that I was at most barely familiar with. But other than that, this is a great article. I realized midway through that I've actually seen Gatto's cirque act and didn't realize it was him at the time.
TV and Social Media: a Chicken-and-Egg Problem
shykes: you are shadowbanned for whatever reason.
Even when using an IDE I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts - they are part of the tools available to make my workflow quicker.
> Advertising a food as GMO free is banned for good reason.

Well, except that it isn't banned (plenty of foods are advertised as GMO free [1]), and if it was, the reason you state would be bunk.

> and GMO foods have decisively been shown to have no health impact.

No, they haven't, though regulatory approval of individual GMOs for food use does require a number of steps intended to minimize the risk of health impacts.

> Since GMO food is unequivocally proven safe

Nothing is "unequivocally proven safe", and newly-engineered foods (whether actual traditional breeding methods, or the advanced modern techniques that are called traditional breeding rather than GM, or actual GMOs) are most emphatically not "unequivocally proven" safe before being introduced, though GMOs (and pretty much only GMOs) actually have to have some evidence that certain particular source of risk are addressed.

[1] See, e.g., http://www.nongmoproject.org/learn-more/understanding-our-se...
The reason it seems funny to see the word "stuff" in a scientific essay is that it's very much not a French-derived word. French-speaking people ruled England for a while starting in the year 1066, and quite quickly in that region the use of French-derived English words became seen as a sign of high class. That sort of thing, once strongly established, becomes self-perpetuating.

That's why, even today, a police officer might say in court, "I observed the individual in the vicinity of the canine" whereas among family the officer might be much more likely to say, "I saw the man near the dog."

The first sentence is full of French. The second, Anglo-Saxon.

It's the same reason we eat beef and pork, but raise cows and pigs. The people eating the meat were upper class and thus used the French-derived words; the people taking care of the animals used Anglo-Saxon.
The Surprising Compensation Trends of Startup Executives
[Ask HN]:what was your best hackathon project?
I am bored of seeing the same api mashups everywhere. Which was your unique and best project?
Anatomy of a free-software fundraiser
If we're talking about a chromosome going away quickly, then "quickly" in that context means at least thousands of generations. We're not there, but it's not that far away.
20%? Are we even looking at the same charts? After closing 5 tabs 270mb -> 480mb! Those numbers don't lie and your guarantee is worthless to those of us that have seen Firefox's memory bloat over the past year.

When Chrome started to get fat, it was great to have a lightweight alternative like Firefox. But lately even Firefox has been causing my 1GB netbook to thrash. I hate to have to junk a perfectly good machine that is only used for email and browsing just because of software bloat. After doing a factory restore, it looks like that or a lightweight Linux distro(while losing flash and HW accel) are my only options.
Oracle Solaris 11.2 announced, includes full OpenStack distribution
Similar use case here. Same opinion, I wanted aws style instancing with basic api operations available without all the hidden costs and complexity of aws.

For anything more complicated you probably will run into issues, but honestly it would also complicate everything for everyone else.

Op doesn't really look like target audience.

Finding this digital ocean sucks claim a bit link baity considering the argument.
Node.js framework with RoR-like generators
The bookmarks toolbar is already used by... bookmarks. Who would have known? We shouldn't have to find new places for things that display status just because Mozilla takes away their designated space. "No more status bar. Hey, why don't you stick that in the bookmark bar. You don't use that for bookmarks, do you?"
I'm sorry, but I can't hear you over the sound of the joke flying overhead.
totally news-worthy, HN
The ROI of FinTech is that you're still in business in 5 years
There is another strategy for dividing the space called point quadtrees (p quadtrees) which divides the regions at the point you are inserting. This gives an upper bound of the tree depth as the number of nodes inserted, which is still undesirable. To fix this, you have to choose the correct order for point insertion to obtain a well balanced tree with log_4(n) height.

It seems like you could balance as you went along in a similar fashion to balanced binary trees such as b-trees or AVL trees.
Why was internal storage for the video camera not available?
This reply goes to axman6 as well:

I for one, write code under the assumption that the reader will have to decrypt it in order to understand it. Therefore I postpone implementation details until the very end. This leads to code that outlines the logic in a fairly readable manner. Of course the implementation details are still code, but at that point there is so little code that you will understand it in no time. The Haskell examples of elegance I've seen so far seem to cramp so much responsibilities in so little code, yet nobody seems to bother about the Single Responsibility Principle.
I like operator overloading, but I use them for implementation details, not to keep the number of lines small.
The downside is that I have a deeply nested programming structure, which can be unfamiliar for people who churn out 500 lines of bare implementation details in one function.

My criticism towards math goes further than variable naming. The language of math is non-descriptive and anyone accepts it with the reasons that:
a) That's how it's always been.
b) It's short and once you get used to it it's easy.
But this just keeps people who struggle with the language of math to embrace and love mathematics.
I don't say I have a better solution, but I say that we can get in programming right what's wrong in math: a descriptive language with a low entrance barrier.
I would like to suggest mitmproxy as a well-designed CLI. It is a dream to work with and takes a little bit of effort to learn how to navigate but afterwards you fly around effortlessly.
Good question. I firmly believe that beginning with the visual prototype is the right thing to do. That way it becomes much easier to hash out the requirements with the client (they always change) and let "what is it you want to accomplish?" questions decide how the system should be implemented.

Crappy programmers always start with the frontend first because they don't know anything better. Good programmers often start with the backend, and specifying a huge database schema. In my experience that invariably leads to a rigid system with way too many complicated relations and features no one need or asked for.

One concrete example I've seen a million times is someone making a feature for advanced access controls, privilege levels, user accounts, who can edit this, who can see this etc... And in the end it turns out all users are using the admin account anyway!
Microsoft R&D does some cool stuff. Kudos. I love where this is going—a laptop with this style tech and no trackpad at all would be very interesting, very minimal. At some level it seems like the kind of thing Apple would do—they've already removed the separate button from the trackpad, so removing the trackpad completely is almost a logical next step.

Looks like it might need to be a little higher res though, before it becomes productizable.
I wonder which IR proximity sensor they used. I'm currently using the OSRAM SFH7773 in my projects — it's the cheapest one I could find, but it is still quite expensive ($1.20 at qty 25 from RS/Allied). They are using 64 of them.

I also wonder how they deal with interference. Each sensor emits IR pulses and measures the light that bounced back. On the SFH7773 at least, there is no way to synchronize the pulses to an external source. Which means you will get light bleeding inbetween sensors.

Sadly, the publication is not (yet) available.

On a side note: I noticed that ETH Zurich seems to be doing a lot of groundbreaking work recently in electronics and robotics related fields.
Do you want to understand exactly how a car works, or do you just want to go places?
Obamacare Enrollees Emboldened To Leave Jobs, Start Businesses
I'd love to have a way to do this automatically with my text .. anyone know of a good way to do this, maybe there are some already-established dictionaries which remove the non-Germanic words out there, somehow?
methane detector..
The text selection thing probably means you turned on caret browsing; press F7 to turn it off again if you need to. That's been there ~forever (like, Firefox 1.0 or earlier).
Help Desk 2.0 – Fourerr Announcement
Then you'd better make sure you know your surroundings. In my building we've had quite a few of diseases, including a ~10 year old dying to brain tumors, attributed to a bad floor glue. At some point the social insurance paid the inhabitants the reconstruction costs to get rid of it. It's called "lepik asfaltowy" (asphalt glue-ish?) in Polish, there's no Wikipedia page for it in any other language.
Compiling OpenSSH No Longer Requires Linking in OpenSSL
You don't have to understand how a carburetor works to drive a car, but you do have to know that "Drive" connects the engine to the wheels.

Git is like driving a manual transmission. In a manual car you have to understand that the clutch disengages the motor from the drive shaft and how the different gears work in general. It's not rocket science and most people can pick it up.
Loving the progress of Neovim so far, even better that notable plugin authors (https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/622#issuecomment-415...) are getting involved.
This is a project of Microsoft Research. It's purely academic at this point (done in collaboration with ETH Zürich), and at this stage it has nothing to do with the commercial side of the company, except being funded by them.

Apple flamewars and speculation about when this will hit the market are out of place here. Right now it's a bunch of academics showing off a cool prototype, which they couldn't be doing if this project had been developed with immediate commercialization in mind.

TLDR: Yay science!
Stock Footage Video for $1