skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Partner and three children. Life isn't quite balanced right now but my partner and I agree that my startup is the right thing to do at this stage in our lives. The unbalanced lifestyle is hopefully only temporary.
It's written in Java, that's compiled to JavaScript.
Funny enough, PowerShell was supposed to be a command line shell equivalent for Windows. Turned out to be just a scripting language to replace Windows Scripting Host.
Todd Brun is notable for being a collaborator (student?) of Jim Hartle for a number years when they worked on the decoherent histories formalism of quantum mechanics. Jim was one of the original developers of the formalism.
Does the work ethic and intensity follow the western world in the technical fields like startups? Or are long hours and cheap labor only for factories?
Hope, confirmation bias and entrepreneurs
Are these algorithms just reverse engineered from pokemon ROMs found online?

Pretty cool nonetheless.
P2P mail FlowingMail: draft of the protocol specifications
The FlowingMail specs have been almost rewritten from scratch after the risk analysis.

Reviews and comments are welcomed.
I don't understand this bit:

> But if we were to write one to convert quadratic to cubic, the best the program could do is an approximation of the original outline, usually keeping the anchor points it already had, but adding one more control point per anchor.

Isn't quadratic just a special case of cubic? i.e. a cubic curve with C1 == C2. It does add one more control point per curve (so it's bad for the overall size of the drawing) but it's not an approximation, it's the exact same curve. It also seems like a much simpler conversion than the other way around.
This I/O talk may have some pointers:

All the Ships in the World: Visualizing Data with Google Cloud and Maps (https://developers.google.com/live/shows/505972914)
If you like the reminder functionality but don't want to switch to yet another mail application on all your devices:
https://followup.cc is a great service, you can also try my own (less sophisticated but FOSS) implementation at http://www.pfalke.com
interesting topic, you'd perhaps do better reading the wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

they've found out about it because the uranium ore had smaller ratio of U235 than usual so they suspected that some of it might have been stolen for weapons.

The reactor worked because U235 was more abundant naturally 2 billion years ago, now it has decayed more, so it's no longer possible.
The reactor was periodically flooded with water which moderated the reaction. After 30 minutes of reaction all water would boil away.

It is interesting for the study of nuclear waste disposal - this is 2 billion years old nuclear waste still sitting exactly in the place where it was created
I meditate for about 30 minutes each night before sleeping and it does make up in multiples in lack of sleep. Without any scientific evidence but at least I feel more rested the next day.

7 hours of sleep with a full time job, a startup, kids and exercise? Is this even possible! One great life-hack we have is to sleep with the windows open and with thinner sheets. We both feel more refreshed the next day. And apart from the alarm clock, there are no devices :)
Not bug free: grabbing the star doesn't make Mario invulnerable.
Not quite the same, but you can view the position/heading of some ships here: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/
8 reasons why you shouldn’t rely on source lines of code as a software metric
Why we again treat our mail box as a GTD list? Isn't it more convenient to use a fully functional GTD task manager such as org mode?
1) I'm not even going to entertain that one. I'm doing this the right way.

2) That's a good point. I have considered looking at the funding route but with being so close to launch it feels like I'm wasting equity when all I need to do is just temporarily put aside these emotions and keep on trucking.
I am a scientist, and I have seen a lot of terrible code. Most scientists have no formal training in computer science or coding. Many advisors don't place much value in having their grad students take such classes, though even a short language-specific introduction class would vastly improve their students' productivity.

I recently undertook a complete rewrite of our group's analysis software that was written by our previous postdoc. It was ~30k lines of code in 2 files (one header, one source file), with pretty much every bad coding practice you can image. It was so complicated that that postdoc was essentially the only one who could make changes and add features.

The rewritten framework is only ~6k lines of code to replicate the exact same functionality. It's easy enough to use that just by following some examples, the grad students have been able to do implement studies in a couple days that took weeks in the old framework. The holy grail is for it to be easy enough for the faculty to use, but that will probably take a dedicated tutorial.

My point is that following "best practices" may be overkill, but taking a thoughtful approach to the design of the software can vastly improve your productivity in the long run. Posts like the OP help scientists who write bad code defend poor practices. Any scientist worth his salt should support following good practices because it will always lead to better science.
Is this intentional lucid dreaming a skill you've developed or did it come naturally? I've heard you can increase the probability of having a lucid dream by keeping a dream journal, doing "dream checks" in everyday life, etc... but i've never heard of a surefire way to have them.
Searching for "usb 7.1" on amazon.com gives these top products with decent rating:

http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-External-Channel-Audio-Adapter/...

http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-USB-SND8-8-Channel-External-Su...

Here's the Razer Tiamat headphones, I'm using them and like a lot:

http://www.amazon.com/Razer-Tiamat-Surround-Gaming-Headset/d...
> Oh, and one really mean observation that I'm afraid is too true to be omitted: idleness is the source of much trouble. A scientist has his science to worry about so he doesn't have time to complexify the code needlessly. Many programmers have no real substance in their work - the job is trivial - so they have too much time on their hands, which they use to dwell on "API design" and thus monstrosities are born.

Jesus, seriously? Can't tell if the author is just trolling flippantly in response to what may have been an unfair post...but ignoring the "programmers have no real substance in their work" thing...the OP mistakes thinks that "science" is all one needs to keep something on track. Uh, no. Just because someone thinks they know what they're doing scientifically doesn't mean they are good at examining or scrutinizing the way they work...which can include everything from the efficiency of data collection to the accuracy of such measurements. A good software engineer is not just fluff in such a situation.
Independent Report on E-voting in Estonia
Alex Papadimoulis (from The Daily WTF) wrote an interesting short essay on exactly this problem, why this is caused and how you can detect and prevent it in yourself.

Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Programming-Sucks!-Or-At-Lea...
I also like to quote the following description of the problems generated following apparent "best practices":

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2007/02/02/performance...

"The project has far too many layers of abstraction and all that nice readable code turns out to be worthless crap that never had any hope of meeting the goals much less being worth maintaining over time."

The problem is that once programmers learn something that is "hard" to them, that is, something that demanded from them a big investment some of them then start to believe that anything they touch will benefit from using these hard-to-aquire techniques. That's how we end with "far too many layers of abstraction" and "the nice readable code turns out to be worthless crap." There's a lot of code produced following some recipes, without questioning if the recipes are appropriate to the problem.

Another problem is what I call "religious approach" to programming and design: blindly believing and applying without questioning all that is written in some books. It's an interesting psychological problem that often ends implemented in the code, which often happens due to the often "solitary" approach to design and code writing. If you have "architects" that don't look at the implementation and aren't ready to question and redo their own designs you can be almost sure the result will be ugly and maybe even totally wrong.
Steve absolutely detested the idea of apps and it was only forstall who actually got an app store implemented...
I has someone contact me about a "big data" start-up recently, and did I know anyone that would be interested.

I replied saying "I may be" and what size was their "big data", as usually I don't see the point in taking it out of a traditional relational database in most cases. I don't think they like my attitude, as I never got a reply.
This Guy Arrived In The U.S. With $26, Sold A Startup For Half A Billion
Developers pour into Market and Van Ness
Setting aside the straw man of needlessly baroque architectures, I think there's an argument to be made that erring on the side of verbose but primitive code works in science because:

A) It needs to be read and understood by scientists who are primarily oriented around data rather than code.

B) Many people will need to read and understand the code who are not part of a core team maintaining a system over time. Peer reviewability is paramount.

C) In fact there is likely no "system" to be designed and maintained anyway, all scientific code is one-off in some sense.

All that said, software engineering as a discipline can further these goals, and it's a mistake to assume that getting "software engineers" involved will inevitably lead to complexification. A good software engineer can assess the goals and improve code along many axes, not just traditional enterprise software development patterns.
Note that it's the norm in the film industry. For a new movie project they'll peocure the element and people they need, do the movie and then disband.

In The Nature of the Firm [1] Ronald Coase wondered why companies didn't contract out instead of having employees and why indeed firms exist in the first place instead of using the movie industry system.

His answer was that there are transaction costs associated to using the market. There are also other costs such as search/informgation, bargaining, trade secrets,.. The costs of going to the market makes it less attractive. He got the Nobel Prize for that.

Internet lowers that cost and makes it possible where it was impossible before. It's definitely a new opportunity companies don't exploit.

Kaggle [2] does it for predictive modelling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
[2] http://www.kaggle.com/competitions
If you're "that guy" I am too.
Seems too fast on IE, interestingly.
How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Mobile App?
It's always difficult to judge from a sample size of one. Some take our apparent loneliness itself to draw conclusions about this subject, but that's a difficult proposition as well since there are so many different factors imaginable - any of which could be responsible for the Fermi paradox.

I think science and technology are probably required in all cases where a species is to transcend the confines of its evolutionary heritage. It may well be the case there are many more species out there with vastly greater innate intellects than ours, but at some point they too have to use tools of some kind to grow beyond the limitations all bodies inevitably have. And it's not just about overcoming specific obstacles, it's about acquiring the meta skills necessary for intellectual and mechanical self-extension. The basic argument here being that minds without science and technology are still in a primitive state, regardless of their innate capabilities.

But it's also not difficult to imagine a civilization where tool use doesn't exist or stagnated at an early stage. However, if the opportunities for this type of advancement exist, it's only a matter of statistics over time in order for development in this direction to occur.

Whether we are in a privileged position to enjoy these opportunities is an open question. We are lucky in some respects: our planet has a large land mass, somewhat easily exploitable mineral deposits, easy access to energy, relatively stable weather conditions, and so on. On the other hand it's certainly possible to imagine planets where conditions might be even better. Or worse. All things being equal, it has always been a good bet to assume we're close to the average.

So to address the issue of hyper-intelligent cephelopods without space technology, yes, that's certainly possible. In fact, we're also not a species that colonizes space. We could, but we don't. Hyper-intelligent cephelopods could likewise have a culture or genetic disposition not to develop advanced tech or go to outer space.

You could argue though that in these cases (which includes ours for the moment) low-tech states are likely to be transient. Specifically, since Earth cephelopods are already tool users right now, it's difficult to imagine they'd stay without technology for long.
I am a programmer who previously wrote scientific software, as a scientist. I can confirm the author's impression: the worst code usually came from the people with more "software engineering" expertise, but there was a catch: I can't think of any of them who were actually good programmers in the first place. Most of them couldn't fix a division by zero exception if the program consisted in a single line that read "1/0".

This isn't unexpected: everyone fucks up things that are his profession to fuck up. I was fucking up mathematical models of integrated devices and they were fucking up code.

But things really aren't that bad. Honestly. When I moved to industry, the first company I worked in was a small place place where the lead developers were exceptional, both as programmers and as leaders, so we wrote exceptional code and I also thought gee, I was coding a load of crap back then.

Then I moved to a larger, fairly well-known company and frankly, it's comparable. The mission-critical parts are ok, but the rest is such a gigantic pile of shit that it probably led to a few PhDs being awarded.
Tutorial: Integrating Social Media in your iOS Applications
> better option is to use their history opt-out

I found that Google Now recommends me stuff based on what I have searched before even though I have search history turned off.
Our arms are far more limited in movement, and probably don't require as much processing power to operate. Easier to do from a relatively remote location like our brain pan, I guess.
Is a Web URL map really an "Internet Map"?
ninya.io combines data from StackOverflow and ServerFault
Because you wanted to build something cool and didn't care if it existed or not:

https://www.google.com/search?q=markdown+gist&oq=markdown+gi...

There's nothing wrong with that, I bet you enjoyed it and now everyone has a very nice alternative.
Great and "fun" experiment :-)

Would be interesting to see how these "types of titles" (How, Tips, Shortcuts)convert in terms of "time spent", "bounce rate" etc...

I guess that this is also really "Twitter" oriented. On other distribution channels like HN it might be different.

Last thing, I'm wondering if it's sustainable. So many "tips" and "shortcuts" articles are shared on Twitter nowadays. Maybe it's rooted too deep in the human brain :-)
How to Build A Smartphone Microscope Stand for $10
> as the whole server been setup for a very important client of me, and for unplanned downtime, we have to pay huge fine.

If your availability requirements are such that you get fined for downtime then you can never ever rely upon a single machine, no matter who hosts it.

Even if you have your own dedicated server it will eventually fail. (Be it a dead drive, dead NIC, or blown PSU/PSUs.)

You need to be setting up a cluster for high-availability, without a single point of failure. Even then you're at the whims of the network between your clients and the location where you're served - some ISPs will have issues at any given moment, and will have broken routes.

Really your problem here seems to boil down to three things:

1. Your server was rebooted and you had no monitoring in place to detect the downtime - pingdom, etc, would have alerted you.

2. You seem to think a single guest/droplet/host will be 100% available.

3. You have a spare host/hosts to failover, but that process is manual, so without advance notice you didn't know to do it. See point 1.
I used to work in a place that had a mix of Java and C or C++ projects going on, and different groups specializing in each. I always said I preferred dealing with the legacy C code than the new Java code. Function too long? I don't care. I can start at the top, read to the bottom, and understand what it's doing. If it actually is too long (rather than just longer than some new graduate's magic number k that is supposed to be the hard upper bound on function length), then I can quite easily break it up.

I could take Java code written by the best minds in that half of the company yesterday, and have absolutely no idea what it did, how it worked, where the files were or what resources it needed. Nothing actually happened in the code that anyone at the company wrote, as far as I could tell. They spent all their time writing what look to me to be prayers to the gods of third party jar files asking them to do whatever function needed to be done. "Well, I need to get a list of customers sorted by last name. Those heathens over in C++ land would write a SQL query, but I have Spring, Hibernate, and SOAP, so instead, I'll edit a generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to create an object creation factory to create an object that can read something from a generated XML file that loads another generated XML file that tells Hibernate to load four gigabytes of customer data which I need to then prune down to what I need by editing a generated XML file so that Hibernate can send 20 records to a SOAP library that reads a generated XML file that reads a generated XML file to write a few bits over the wire where the client can read a generated XML file that parses a generated XML file that reads a generated XML file before crashing because the client's JAX-WS jar was 0.0.0.0.0.0.2 iterations off from the server's JAX-WS jar. But at least I don't have to write a difficult and error prone for loop."
Training Deep Fourier Neural Networks To Fit Time-Series Data
Email that you delete from Gmail (once it falls out of the trash) IS deleted permanently after a while. It's not immediate because it has to wait for backups to cycle around and rewrite old storage, but it does happen.
I believe it's against the Adsense ToS to share any data except gross earnings. However, I find these data very interesting and am personally glad you shared them.

Quote:

9. Confidentiality

You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without our prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes: (a) all Google software, technology and documentation relating to the Services; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance as pertaining to the Services; (c) the existence of, and information about, beta features in a Service; and (d) any other information made available by Google that is marked confidential or would normally be considered confidential under the circumstances in which it is presented. Google Confidential Information does not include information that you already knew prior to your use of the Services, that becomes public through no fault of yours, that was independently developed by you, or that was lawfully given to you by a third party. Notwithstanding this Section 9, you may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments resulting from your use of the Services.

https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms
I don't have this working on chrome (Arch Linux, chrome Version 34.0.1847.132). Works on firefox though.
Also mouse wheel doesn't fire when I try it :(
This topic has been making the rounds the last few weeks around the various technical-oriented sites, with mentions on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687948 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7683888 .

I don't believe the author of this Extreme Tech piece quite understands the deep time involved. The article says:

> This boil-seep-boil system would have made the area extremely volatile — perhaps some remnant of that violence explains why the area features so heavily in local lore and has even grown to prominence in modern day religions such as Falun Gong.

It also points out that the natural reactor was 2 billion years ago.

That's long enough for a mountain chain to form and erode back down into a flat surface. Any physical remnants from that era should be much less interesting than innumerable more recent geological events.
Take Part – FutureBook Hack
The Bookseller is launching the first ever book-based hackathon in the UK. We're delighted to have on board support from big names like HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Blackwell's, Pan Macmillan and more.

The success of a hackathon depends on participation of top quality coders, designers, developers, engineers and Programmers!
Hackers should be innovative, inventive, enthusiastic and love problem-solving.

The goal of this project is to build on the work of Perseus and their partners in the US, to bring fresh eyes to an established industry, to tackle the challenges facing book publishing, to adapt to a changing landscape and to help readers discover the perfect book.

The event takes place at UCL in London on the 14th-15th June. If you want to be a part all you need to do is register. Go to www.futurebookhack.com for more information and to sign-up.
Lets take an example.
If a bug is found in Android and Someone first reports it on HN.
Will google acknowledge about the bug on HN?
Marriage rate in Alabama correlates with ...
I have a friend who says pluralising "octopus" as "octopi" shows ignorance of three languages - English, Latin, and Greek. "Octopus" is of Greek origin and the Greek plural is "octopodes". The Latin plural is "polyporum" (the singular being "polypus"). The English plural is "octopuses" as we add "s" or "es" when pluralising.
A word of warning here. When I grew up my parents weren't around much because of their business. They did allright businesswise, but my brother and I grew up very independent. Not neccessarily a bad thing, but we don't have a strong bond. This is something I didn't realize until I met my wife, and her amazing family.

What I'm trying to say is: if you don't make sure your work/life balance is balanced right now, it probably won't be balanced in the future. And it probably will leave a mark on the bond between you, your spouse and your children. Realize that you can never get back the time watching your children grow up.

We're in the same situation. I'm also in my mid-30's, two kids, a job and a mortgage. I spend my commuting time on my startup, and all the time I can get when everyone's asleep. It was hard at first, but now I have developed a routine that works for me. I may not be able to work as many hours on my startup as someone with less obligations, but the hours I do have I spend incredibly productive and efficient. I love working on my startup, but until it makes enough money for me to quit my job, it's family first, startup second.