skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually the display I'm talking about wasn't a 3d display it was a wearable holographic HUD I saw at a DARPA demo day. The use-case for these kinds of displays is pretty much to ensure a graphic on the display stays in focus no matter where your eyes focus, or where they are relative to the display by producing a hologram of the display.

It's subtly different from similar see-through HUDs because you don't have to keep changing your focus back and forth to the HUD.

The DARPA guy I was talking to wasn't working on the display but on some other bits of the HUD and didn't know all the details about how it worked sadly. Looking for it later I think it was a holographic waveguide technology.

http://www.dodsbir.net/sitis/archives_display_topic.asp?Book...
One thing that you can't do without being logged in on Twitter is retweet, which has apparently been a powerful tool in coordinating these account bombings. This is why the block feature being changed to ignore had such a backlash -- not just because it turned the name into a lie, but because blocking was a somewhat useful tool for preventing the amplification of these attacks.

Blocking and ignoring are different, and both useful.
> A huge, naked pile of nuclear waste has sat beneath Oklo for billions of years; why not put a bit more under the Nevada desert, in shielded canisters no less?

I think this is a bad case of survivorship bias.
"Hey look, it's possible to misuse design patterns! Don't they suck, amirite guys?"

Online forums are generally filled with programmers who have never written anything large and complex.
1 hour, 28 points and it's on the second page. Is this story flagged or penalized? If so, such a shame.
Can't blame you. I have to admit I thought several times to modify a few things that bother me (e.g. to have a mobile-friendly version), but just the thought it's PHP pushed me away ...
Flux: An Application Architecture for React
I'm genuinely interested to hear you say that, why do you cringe? Because it doesn't affect you and you don't perceive there to be a problem?

This is clearly a technology story, and I'm interested to hear more from anyone at Twitter how their release process works in this regard. I saw Kent Beck talk at facebook a while back and he spoke about how when working on a site like FB, you literally do have peoples lives in your hands. Releasing that software is a very hard problem. The example he gave was if they accidentally allowed public access to someones private mail- it could literally lead to deaths.
Wow, so much bad advice in one blog post.
"Missing or unclear descriptions"
I'll add a description to my github repos now: "Don't take it as my resume"
I really have very little sympathy for him. Plenty of people have issues at home, and they don't go on a spree, taking up valuable time from emergency services and causing grief to innocent people.
Without equity? Not a single day.
As mentioned, PyCharm supports this – I found it very useful when writing large amounts of code, saves time when trying to remember what type which variable should be (sometimes it's not evident from the input variable names).

And this looks a tad easier to find and understand than the standard docstring variable types description.
Instead of being angry about how websites store your password, why not use a different password on every website? You should be doing this anyway, as due to the way the web is designed you have to trust their server at least momentarily with your password anyway, and it would be downright stupid to send them a password you use on another website.
Ha! That's funny...I don't know him at all, and have no idea whether he is actually well-known or well-regarded, given that he's not a social-media-celebrity or whatnot...but I stumbled upon his blog years ago while searching for various scraping techniques, and even as an engineer, reading his blog was a revelation for me that scientifically-minded, rigorously-logical people may yet still have a blind spot towards process.
Or allow users to give your reaction on tweets and have a simple machine learning algorithm block, filter and hide tweets for you based on that.

The real issue here though is that these trolls know that there will be no legal consequences for their actions. That needs to change for anything to change and Twitter does have a key role to play in that... they're just understandably reluctant to do so.

Given that there are real costs attached to addressing the issue (not just legal but also in terms of engagement statistics) as a rational business they will probably delay addressing the issue until the costs of ignoring it (in terms of bad publicity) exceed the benefits.
Python Machine Learning Reading List
From three days ago, this submission has a few comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7722415

These do not:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7711512 (one comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728974 (no comments)
Autocompleting language searches
That's silly. I don't even have a GitHub account.

All my professional life ( 20+) I've been writing code or building solutions for private companies, all the cool stuff I programmed lies in a private repository.

And for the reference, I am always sending nicely PDF-formatted, very relevant, but succinct, CV and not a "poorly formatted, badly designed Microsoft Word template filled with irrelevant information you’ve carefully curated to make you look like the best programmer ever".

What's wrong with this guy??
Works fine for me on Chrome. Neat idea! :)
Ask for a leave of absence?
Sorry if I came off as snarky, but the attributes that have been assigned to the Rift are getting kind of out of control.

It's just a pair of high DPI displays with nice low latency head tracking tech and better than average API support. Other than using photons, the Rift fulfills almost zero of the criteria for holography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography
Again, you're being down voted because you're dishonestly redefining those terms – HN crowd leans heavily capitalist, as you'd expect in a community started by people going to invest or found successful companies.

You weren't advocating for free markets, you are pretending monopolies don't exist except where created by the government. That's simply ahistorical nonsense. Calling people Marxist for quoting Adam Smith would be an amusing troll if you didn't sound like you actually believe it.
No, I don't agree, as I am not in the wrong here. I know you are the admin. You should see all my messages. Also you must investigate, if a single hostile user downvoted me from mutiple accounts earlier. I made one mistake of calling him "idiot downvoter" (for which I expressed my regret), perhaps it made him angry. And that comment of mine was rightly downvoted. But in all the other comments I have been perfectly civil, in fact couple of replies have been insulting.

I want this account to be deleted. I know this feature is not there yet. But please do it, as and when you add the delete feature. Or manually if possible.
Humans can only handle so much complexity. With a lot of scientific code the underlying concepts are complex and this results in "simple" code. This is not a bad thing in the main as the people who understand the concepts (scientist) can understand the code - if you show some biologist elegant code they end up spending all their time trying to understand what the code is rather than what the codes is trying to do.
Urgent vs. Important
It's too bad for all of the corporate programmers who aren't able to share the code they've written without violating an NDA or other agreement. Some companies even take ownership of code written outside of company time, via the employment agreement, so even developing things on personal time is a no-go.
I only use bitbucket and all my repos are private. Am I not allowed to have a job?
> Fuligo Septica already shows some capacity for problem-solving behavior.

Someday soon, we might finally realize that intelligence comes in all sorts of forms. Humans may one day become enlightened enough to recognize even the intelligence in common plants. How a living thing experiences the universe, and assigning a value to that based on "how much like a human" seems wrong headed to me.
Which is quite interesting to see.

Actually the posts about GitHub being or not being your resume are playing the devil's advocates and they will be more or less closer to the truth depending on your potential employer profile.

I keep receiving recruiter emails for "J2EE, Hibernate, JBoss, Struts" developer positions "that might fit me". None of those keywords apply to me and that kind of recruiter will certainly not know about GitHub.

In the end your resume is whatever preferred avenue to know you a recruiter might choose. That could for instance include LinkedIn, or the infamous "CV as a Word document" that a lot of companies keep asking for.
Remove all projects over a year old that you haven't touched? Such bad advice. I've fixed up some old projects of mine that are 2+ years old. Was a great way to see what I was doing wrong back then and apply new knowledge.

I don't think this is satire, but it's definitely misguided.
I agree, cross-site referrer headers are harmful for our privacy, but same-host referrer headers can be legitimately useful.
Thank you @collyw!
Still too much guidelines to post... The idea is to have different solutions for every writing convention in any programming language.
Hi Dwight,

As I said on the tweet, I should have pinged you on the headsup that I was using your tweet for the "against" argument. Sorry again about that, poor judgement call on my part, but thanks for the positive words about the whole idea at the time and again now that I've blogged it all up.

You make a great point, and something I really wish I'd done at the time, in terms of the "trick" article actually having something else of value. Perhaps a list of some of the best (genuine) article headline crafting guides, some posts about real pitch decks, some actual sleep/life hacking posts.. etc.

Looking back I think that would have made the 'testing' phase much better experience for our followers, and just better all around and had a +ve brand impact instead of the minor hit our accounts took.
Well, I don't think these embedded SQLish languages are created because they're better than SQL. It's because working with strings is problematic, especially if you want to dynamically build up queries. Having a data structure that represents your query makes it much easier to safely and sanely compose various bits of query to build a new query at runtime.
i did this 8 years ago. for us it went a bit beyond. 9-5 by day & startup otherwise (including weekends). It definitely gets very tiring & exhaustive.

Some of the things we practiced were:
a. keep aggressive but realistic goals for every week.
b. utilize weekends to achieve 70% of the goals
c. in our 9-5 day, we had atleast an hour or two of opportunity where we could have done some additional work to meet our weekly goals. for eg - talking to freelancers & reviewing their work just after lunch, talking to prospective clients during some coffee breaks, etc.
d. do give yourself a couple of lighter days to relax & look forward to the thrill of your excitement.

Cheers buddy & good luck.
Rep Onboarding: The First 30 Days
The same companies that treat 100m-1b sized acquisitions as a cheap alternative to R&D?

They are showing in practice that they are willing to pay huge amounts of money for "outsourced" R&D; sure, a prototype stage is worth less than an implmenetd product, but $1m or more seems to be a reasonable and affordable ballpark for such offers from the "buyer" perspective.

The remaining question is if ~$1m is an appropriate amount for the inventor, given the effort required - but that seems very subjective and depends on each individual inventor and their location; in many countries you could fund a whole research laboratory of a good university for $1m.
I've found so many projects that haven't been maintained but have useful bits of code in them that I can learn from.

Deleting old projects is a disservice to the open source community.
Just because the RTS genre is small doesn't mean that it makes sense to consider things that are very different part of the genre -- having construction/replenishment, strategic movement, etc., outside of the realtime game and part of the turn-based game makes Total War very different structurally from an RTS, and very different in its appeal.
Another problem in many research settings is compensation. Labs/centers often cannot compete with industry on pay. They then assume that experienced professionals are willing to take a substantial pay cut to "do science".

In reality, the opposite is true. You are asking someone to forego like-minded software people at Large Software Corp. and instead work with peers who largely view software as plebian and inferior to their science (see the last 2 paragraphs of the article!).

These under-paying research labs end up with bad engineers, or young engineers who now have zero mentorship opportunities (just as bad as a bad engineer).

The take-away is that scientific labs should expect to pay slightly more than the going rate for mid-career software engineers.
They might be storing only those shown letters in plain text, with the actual password being hashed.
While I agree that Github is a part of your resume, I don't think it's the whole thing. If I was providing a link to my account when applying for a job, I would probably link to some specific projects and provide some narrative around them, rather than just saying "here's 20 projects I've worked on, go nuts". If the recruiter wants to look through everything else then fine, but they shouldn't expect perfection from everything.

Some other thoughts I had on the article:

"Too many forked repositories": You just need to click on Sources[1] to see the user's actual repos.

"Missing or unclear descriptions": If repos are just simple little side-projects, they don't necessarily need descriptions - I know what they are, I know what they do, they aren't there for anyone but me, I don't expect them to be starred or forked.

"Old repositories": So because I wrote something a year ago, I can never go back to it? What's wrong with having a record of achievement? A display of progress.

"Mediocre code": If we were only allowed to store perfect code, there would never be any code on Github.

[1] https://github.com/danielsamuels?tab=repositories
> "According to the FBI, each swatting incident costs emergency responders approximately $10,000." (from the article)

So $10k each, and 30+ times: Make him pay that $300k back.
This describes almost every published application I have ever tried to get running. It ends up being impossible to get the application working on anything other than the authors workstation.
I've waded through a lot of legacy and current scientific code (and still do that sometimes).

The worst part (not taking into account the coding style per se) for me was the (sometimes) inability to reuse the code I've encountered or adapt it to other cases.

I think scientific advisors should make a point which goes something like "If you're serious about your work, you might find one day that someone else wants to use parts of your code, so take that into account when planning your program". In my experience, a lot of programs are written as quick-hack solutions, and then there is no time to rewrite them, they grow bigger and it just snowballs from there.

The way CS was taught to us (and we're a big university) was pretty bad. No coding style, no experience with CVS, nothing concerning planning before writing new code. In the end, a lot of people got the bare minimum amount of knowledge needed to code, and started doing research using that knowledge.
Very cool and addictive. Reminds me of "z-type" which already killes hundreds of my working hours. :-)
I assume he wants to validate the amount of hours he has carefully put into maintaining his public image on github.

I get that as an employer checking github and seeing the odd pull request or repo might be a signal that this person at least understands version control and the benefits of open source software - but i'm sure as hell still gonna read his resume and do a coding exercise/interview together.
Ask HN: For solving which problem would you pay?
I am considering creating tools for programmers. Assume that I am able to create a near-optimal solution for any technical problem - don't limit your imagination. For solving which problem would you pay?
To be fair, there are no text links in that article (except "Pedro Amado", which, indeed, has no visual indication that there's anything special with it).
From the first paragraph:

> A 16-year-old male from Ottawa, Canada has been arrested for allegedly making at least 30 fraudulent calls to emergency services across North America over the past few months.

Emphasis mine.

I would agree with you were the "allegedly" missing, and if instead of "arrested for", it said "convicted of".
Currently in the US when you turn 18 you end up "losing" your juvenile criminal record. A proposal I read that made sense was keeping the juvenile record hidden unless you end up committing a serious crime after 18. Once that happens your juvenile record is opened up again. At least that's an incentive to play it safe after turning 18.
He is a funny character, but quite serious. I know he had lots of problem dealing with all the biologists in my old department.
Can this or any of the other similar renderers be hosted on github as a project page?
Why Twitter's Newest Tweetstorm Trend Must Be Stopped
ux != ui
WordPress or BlogSpot as Blogging Platform?
You HATED Mozilla's ads-in-Firefox tab so much it'll try again
Where's the line between "the media" and "people personally involved"?

For example, if a 14 year old comes up to me on the street and commits a crime (e.g. he mugs me) and I know his name, would I not be allowed to tweet "just got mugged by <his name>"?
I work in R&D for a large science services company. And, I'm often responsible to turn nifty research projects into marketable products. Because of this, I often take over a lot of code from scientists and academics. And, it's usually (e.g. always) pretty bad.

'Software engineers' get a bad rap for over-engineering code. And, I understand that. But, the opposite is so, so much worse. I see what you're describing every time I take over a project.

The worst characteristic though is lack of version control. Usually these teams will have used email to exchange source files. They usually have a directories full of 'version_X' sub-directories of different code. And, usually each member of the team will have different versions of the code.

The second worst characteristic I find is code that doesn't actually work unless it is placed exactly in the right directory of a now non-existent server. They send me code (in a zip file, of course), no instructions, no configuration. And, then I spend several days or even weeks just trying to get it to work the way that they said it worked back at their research 'demo' a year ago. 'It worked last year', they say. And, then imply that I'm some sort of hack because I can't understand what they're doing.
From my earlier reading on this site, essentially the other dating sites bid up ads quite highly, presumably because the lifetime value of a dating customer is quite high for a paid site.

It was a lesson I'll always remember - if you're going to build an ad-revenue-based site, then do so in a field where there are major players throwing around big money on adsense or similar. You get to effectively monetize their users by providing an advertising channel.
Whether he is a nice kid or an asshole has nothing to do with how laws against revealing his identity apply.
This made me laugh.

I'm imagining someone with massive open source projects pouring hours into open source tools and software that benefits thousand and storing it all in bitbucket while his recruiter is tossing his resume in the bin when he sees that on github he has only starred 1 repo "EugeneKay/git-jokes". lol.
I'm either really bad at this or the game is too fast.. i fail after 4-5 events. its flappy bird all over again.

nice game though. i like the graphics.
Americans Just Don't Want to Buy Things With Their iPhones
Indeed. Spoilers here.

http://www.larryniven.net/stories/downinflames.shtml
My first animation: The voice gone wrong
There aren't many truly seasonal events,
but a few stand out. There are regular
summer voyages from Scotland to Hudson's
Bay, and from Holland up towards Spitsbergen,
for example: both these appear as huge
convoys moving in sync. (What were those about?)

The yearly trips from the Netherlands up to the North are most likely whalers going out to hunt and coming back with their catch.
Hard Drive Temperature – Does It Matter?
1000 users upload 700kB pic/sec.How many machines do I need to handle the load?
Just as a sidenote, LTE can also use beamforming, over rather large distances. How well implemented this is in current gear , I don't know.
When I've taken this thought to its extreme, Chuck Moore's ideology around Forth makes total sense:

If a problem is only going to be solved in a complex, Byzantine fashion, it's the wrong problem. Walk away from it. Solve a different one. Quit the job. Reconsider your lifestyle.

And most people aren't going to be able to consider it seriously on that level. The monstrous systems are there because everyone involved has collectively agreed that whatever is justifying the problem is so important that it's OK to let the resulting system grow monster-sized and swallow everyone up. On that basis the only thing anyone can hope for is a painkiller to make the monster a little less soul-crushing.
Do we really need to hide the URL?
New Russian bill requires bloggers to register, posts to be approved.
Yes this is so true. Please leave your old code up even if you think it is crap.
We're in the email space too (in Europe).

While I agree with the user need, convincing corporation managers (aka CIOs) to use "fancy" email tools is extremely hard and probably the main reason Outlook sticks around.

Unless you want to sell the tools directly to end users, but then you're seen as "evil" by the CIO.
A Song of DOS and WordStar
Well, if they are not crazy they won't be startup's.
I don't use GitHub to show off, and most of the points in the post are very bold.

"The work you did a year or more ago couldn’t possibly still be relevant today." - yeah I should delete all my work because it is not fresh enough, although there is nothing I have to do.

"Don’t waste your time building unimportant things." - Important for whom? You? Me? Public?

"GitHub is your portfolio." - No, it is a place to share projects and contribute to others. If you want to use it as a portfolio, It shows your most starred projects anyway.

You take the GitHub as a personal promotional page, rather than collobarative environment.
Debugging Web Sites
I agree on almost all points.

However, I think that the author has a point with the 'mediocre code'. If you're hand-picking a project to highlight, you should probably be sure that the code is at least a little bit polished.

It might just be personal preference, but I've seen so many great projects that have absolutely abysmal code standards. Some even mixed tabs and spaces! shudder
9 Overlooked Technologies That Could Transform The World
Yes, this is what I was angling for. I think it's a pre-occupation of many of the species in IMBs Culture series if I remember correctly. Where those species that went the long way round (mostly water dwellers) hold species like us in something like contempt.

Apologies to 'jacquesm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7721134
(Not the best name maybe, there's a long established OSS project named Scuttle already)