skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would it be that difficult to add in an 'Abusive Off' feature? You can just flick it off and any tweets containing blacklisted words vanish.

Would be extremely valuable for people who come under attack, I imagine. A lot of people who are obscenity averse might like to enable it too. Heck, I might even enable it myself when reading the activity on some hashtags.
Linux is my choice (more specifically ubuntu). I dont need the eye candy and prefer minimalism when working.

Ubuntu also gives me a powerful set of commands. Easy installations and I dont need to keep reaching for my mouse. Meaning I can keep over the keyboard to complete all the tasks I need to.
While we are on the topic of FB - they don't delete data/pictures even when you delete them.
showing the articles inside inline frames is so annoying
I've been faced with this countless times too and I think the problem is a culture that equates complex and abstract solutions to elegance, when we should really have one that equates simplicity and conciseness to elegance.

By simplicity I also mean considering the solution as a whole, not the false simplicity of refactoring everything into one-statement-methods.
I think I'll forgo the pleasure of paying for an email client who's makers believe that in the real world there is such a thing as a 'compliant IMAP implementation'.
So, Oracle could GPL their copy of DTrace then? Simples.
No: this is from 2006; it was last modified in 2010, but the changes were negligible (a wording tweak), and earlier changes were even less important (updating hyperlinks).
The author exposes a problem of ideological practice in software engineering. We're trained to organize code for extensibility and high availability, among other goals. We should probably learn to evaluate situations in which those goals are not helpful and adapt to the situation. After all, a surgeon probably doesn't follow surgical best practices when removing a splinter from his child's finger. SE's should probably recognize when a simple, non-abstracted approach works sufficiently for a situation and leave it at that.
Bhagvat gita in eighteen tweets
Rethinking DOM Traversal
My previous response was about finding meaning from interpersonal dependence, I totally get not wanting to develop a dependence on "things." However renting a home means you're paying someone else's "taxman" for them and paying for the privilege for doing so. If you've done really well financially, you get to the point where you pay off the bank and it's only the taxman you owe to keep a roof over your head.

You're already saving, that's good, for the time many years in the future when you can no longer work. Also think about saving for a time when you'll feel differently about owning things and/or having kids.
So because github is now our cv's we should stop using it as the dev tool that it is?
TL;DR Software Engineers complexify the code because they have nothing to do and scientists do all the real work.

I was left with the impression that the author lacks a broad view over the software development landscapes and thus tends to generalise badly.
> Biologist have long noted the similarities between the eyes of an octopus and the eyes of a human.

> Scientists are currently debating whether we and octopuses evolved eyes separately, or whether a common ancestor had the makings of the eye.

This is not under debate. This is one of the classical examples of convergent evolution.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution#Eyes

> One of the most well-known examples of convergent evolution is the camera eye of cephalopods (e.g., squid), vertebrates (e.g., mammals) and cnidaria (e.g., box jellies).[22] Their last common ancestor had at most a very simple photoreceptive spot, but a range of processes led to the progressive refinement of this structure to the advanced camera eye — with one subtle difference: The cephalopod eye is "wired" in the opposite direction, with blood and nerve vessels entering from the back of the retina, rather than the front as in vertebrates.[8] The similarity of the structures in other respects, despite the complex nature of the organ, illustrates how there are some biological challenges (e.g. vision) that have an optimal solution.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_eye
Many of those tweets contain direct threats of violence. They need to be reported to law enforcement, not flagged for Twitter to deal with.

Also, it seems unusual to hold Twitter responsible for their users' speech. UI tweaks may reduce the amount of hatred seen, but they are not going to solve this problem.

Lastly, I spent some time perusing other posts on this blog. They are not furthering any discussion, to put it mildly. Likewise, I doubt the comments here will generate much light. It's a sad situation, but I don't think HN has much to contribute.
This is true in finance and in other data-heavy fields as well. I've been shocked at the kinds of Excel sheets that, with a mess of spaghetti VB code written by someone long gone, factors into trades worth millions...sure, it "works"...but besides the very minor question of code elegance, who knows what optimization of returns could be made if the code wasn't such a fright that a knowledgable partner could tweak and experiment with it? Or that it was abstracted enough to be applied to the other kinds of trades that the firm is making (but hell what do I know, I'm not as rich as my hedge fund friends)?

What's particularly annoying is working with analysts who have a system of pasting SQL scripts from a (hand-labeled-versioned) text file to perform the necessary data-munging/pivoting for in-house use...their SQL work is, to be fair, so much of a leap forward from however such bulk data work was being done previously that they take offense when I offer to help them automate the work...as if their system of hand-pasting/executing scripts, then eyeballing the results for an hour to spot-check it, was inherently more reliable than a batch script with well-defined automated test parameters...What they fail to see is that it's not just about faster/better error-checking, but it's about more flexible analysis and output. Once the process has been abstracted, instead of producing one "clean" giant database that is faceted along one dimension (time, perhaps), the script can loop through and spit out a variety of useful permutaitons, which would be impossible/insanity if you stick with the hand-tweaked process.

That's the problem I see with the OP...A scientist can recognize when something seems to work, when it comes to the domain of programming and structure, but "what works" may simply be "what seems to work better than what I did last time"...which is not a foolproof standard of evaluation
High-Performance Computing with C++ [free JetBrains webinar]
Hey, could we just all agree in advance to not discuss the unnecessarily misleading statements, and probably turn a blind eye to the rest of the somewhat over-the-top stuff too?

I'm not clear from this post if there was any contact with Twitter to discuss why the feature in question had been removed. That would always seem like a first step to take. In addition, it seems pretty clear that it's twitter "bug" (https://twitter.com/safety/status/465797191869554688) — realistically, probably a change that nobody thought about or noticed, rather than an actual bug.
Okay, here's my attempt to distill things a bit. Now, I'm not very old, but my time putzing about this field has taught me that there are two components to carrying on successfully: experience, and communication.

Right now I run a company where we do science. To do our science, we have to write a ton of code. Web stuff, server deployments, numerical analysis, machine learning, hardware description, USB drivers, data visualization, you name it. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at picking the right level of abstraction for the job, and it's served me very well. The key is to have foresight about your situation, and foresight only gets better with experience. When I see one of the less experienced engineers at work doing something dubious, it's usually very easy to steer them away from danger. That's the experience bit; somebody has to know better, and has to act on it.

But knowing better isn't enough. If you want your academic lab to use better coding practices, you knowing better and flatly telling them to change their ways will never work. You have to convince them that they want to do it. If you can't come up with an argument for the use of your other language, or design paradigm, or SCM software that is both factually solid and contextually relevant enough, then 9 times out of 10 you are probably not hitting on the right solution. That doesn't meant that your lab director who is refusing to change is correct in his refusal, but I'll bet you if you pitched upon a solution that was right for the situation, and put some thought into your explanation, you would get a much better reception. The same principle applies when you're pitching a new methodology out in non-academic land, it's just that more often than not both parties' expectations are already closer to being in alignment.

Why does it work? Because most people in these types of environments, such as academic coding circles, are really quite smart. If something is sensible and sufficiently low friction, they will probably go for it. So, no, bad scientific code doesn't beat 'best practices'. But a good solution beats a bad solution every.fucking.time. If you can't show people that it's a good solution, it's probably not the right thing to do. Even if your idea is the better one, if you haven't convinced the people who are going to have to deal with it of this fact, they won't understand it, they will misuse it, mess it up, screw up their research and they will blame the software engineer. And they'd be at least partially correct in doing so, because you only painted half the house.

I'd end by saying 'It's really not rocket science', but... it really might be. ;-)
I don't think, it is good idea to think about language and framework first than domain.

If it is prototype or just proof of concept then it is better to use good framework that helps to build quick prototype. May be Django or RoR is best choice if you already know it. But if you have some problem with exiting system like improve system performance or scalability issue then you could think about something else.

In the end, to me need to understand problem first then framework or language but not vice versa.
I don't really see this as a problem. The kind of language makes me think of those that wear tinfoil-hats.

I always ask myself, who cares? Worst case scenario, Google will sell this data to a government and I'll go to jail. The effort required to secure email at this point isn't worth the time or effort it'd take to maintain.
You must not have been in science or you'd have encountered the 200K LOC program, written in five programming languages (two of them obscure), which can only be compiled on the author's computer. Oh, and add 50K of C code from ancient versions of other projects (which could've been used as libraries) for undocumented reasons.

Though, I have also had colleagues who were also brilliant programmers.
Show HN: HappyFunTimes. Party games using smartphones as controllers
This comment made me go back and play hunt-the-link :( Not a fun game, totally agree what an awful design. I don't like the strikethrough on hover either!
Yeah, if only the HTML5 canvas was "designed by comittee" (it was not, it was an Apple design) and it was in any way useless (huh? what's the problem with it?)
No, it is not my CV. I share and star everything I find interesting. I push any code I want without worrying if it is cool or not. I am a programmer, not a pop star.
High Court slams HMRC for concealing information around export of spyware
10 Must Have Firefox Plugins For Web Developer and Designers
Google Is Testing A Radical Gmail Redesign
Isn't it about time we dropped the HTTP referer header? If we lived in a World where that header didn't exist, and somebody came along today and proposed that we add it to Firefox, Chrome or IE, there would be absolute outrage. If the proponents then argued: "Yeah, but it will make tracking users easier, and we might be able to target advertising better to make more money", people would not accept that as a valid argument.
There's a catch though - once you start using numpy/scipy, there's no longer one-way-to-do-it and code becomes pretty messy.
Finland - Unlimited voice & SMS/MMS + uncapped data at 2MBit/s: 35 USD/month, but that's without a contract. If you're ok sticking with the same provider for two years, you can get the same with 50MBit/s uncapped data. On the other hand, if you're fine with 256 kbit/s uncapped data and paying 0.10 USD per minute or SMS, it's just 4 USD/month.

Our population density is on average half that of the USA (16 people/km2 rather than 32 people/km2), and we're just as dispersed. The coverage of the above-quoted provider you can see here: http://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/

Explaining the high cost of US mobile comms in terms of the situation in Canada & Australia doesn't work, all you're really pointing out is that it's far too expensive there as well. In other words, your friends are also being fleeced.
Thanks for this! I have been looking for something similar.

I find it easy enough to pick up the syntax of a new language, but this will allow me to go that step further and do things properly.
Seconded. (And Patio11, I've been stalking you...)

Another highlight, showing how POF early on was all about surprising and obvious innovations (presumably at the expense of polish, as noted elsewhere in the thread). If you're bootstrapping, polish is not your friend. Risky innovations are.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/10-years-since-...

I particularly love that the blog is still using the default Wordpress theme from years ago. :)
I think the post is more about older ships logs.

For shipping there are rules in place on who are allowed to turn of tracking and under what circumstances.

Also even if "security by obscurity" etc is heavily used it doesn't mean it is a good strategy : )
Keyword matching doesn't work, never did without way too much collateral damage. Being able to filter "I will rape you tonight" based on the word "rape" is of no use at all to someone that actually wants to discuss the subject of rape, but doesn't want to be threatened by it.

This is a social problem without a technical solution, even not permitting blocked people of following and retweet like she'd like to is of litle use when it takes seconds to create a new account...

On the bright side, I don't think there is much in the way of following up on those threats in meatspace, cowards will be cowards...
Show HN: Live Cube Maps Reflections in Your Three.js Game
more opinionated advice: ElasticSearch and the entire "ELK" stack (Logstash+ElasticSearch+Kibana)is awesome; but don't use it as a primary data store. It's not meant for that even though some of us are using it as such.
Neat visualization of the internet. It would be great if there was an option for automatically closing each popup when you click on another site (I ended up having lots of open popups). Probably a subjective preference to be honest.
I went to a talk from a NASA engineer at my school once, and the thing that struck the me the most is the relative speed of objects in space. They design the space station to shield against small objects traveling at 20km/sec.

In Gravity they see the the debris heading in their direction for dramatic effect, but in reality everything is traveling about 10 times faster than a typical bullet. It only takes a small chunk of aluminum to hurt very badly at that speed.
This is very easy to happen

For example, if you do a simulation with random numbers, and you're doing random()%NUM where NUM > MAX_RAND

The trick is that MAX_RAND varies between platforms cough Visual C cough
I get really tired of people thinking web === internet.
How does a backend developer can get rid of disgust for CSS?
Again, this is only true on very short time intervals. If you're an AT&T user throttled after 2GB per month you simply aren't going to be using 4G speed for more than a single coffee break per month.

In the real world, of course, people rarely download data endlessly and so the main difference is that a 4G user will use data at a higher rate for a shorter period of time since they're downloading the same YouTube video as the 3G user.

Since 4G takes considerably less time to establish connections than 3G, this trend is even more favorable to network operators since more phones can go from passive to active and back in any given time interval.
I am still on the fence. I like it generally and it's easy to tag quickly with shortcuts. It's Mail.app that bothers me, because its shortcuts are annoying (even with GMailinator) and IMO it's slow (even on SSDs).

Now that there is a great mutt version that supports notmuch (mutt-kz) I might abandon Mail.app. But for now, MailTags keeps it bearable :).
Twisted 14.0.0 Released
Reminds me of a time I had to call a company about an order of hardware parts and they wanted my credit card details over the phone. Having worked in telecoms in the past (on carrier server software), this isn't something I like doing, so instead I gave them a URL to a https page containing the details they needed. It also self destructed so you could only view it once.

A general purpose email version of this (both with and without self destruct (which should have options such as timer, N views etc)) would be awesome, especially if it automatically intercepted emails and moved them there. Would have to be something I can host myself, of course.
Tobacco class actions offer some examples about what happens when sections of the class disagree (at least settle early): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agree...
Many of those tweets contain direct threats of violence. They need to be reported to law enforcement, not flagged for Twitter to deal with.

They're not mutually exclusive. Twitter should still take all reasonable steps to prevent abuse.

I don't think HN has much to contribute.

I completely agree; I cringe every time something vaguely related to feminism or gender equality is posted here. I'm not sure if I should flag it or not, though.
Here's the problem

Programmers (and I see an example almost every day here on HN) don't know the math and equations (or the concepts) of even basic scientific calculations. Let alone some more complicated stuff.

Scientists on the other hand, most don't know the basic best practices of today, or the most modern techniques. We even have to be thankful they're not using Fortran (not that it's bad, but...)

But guess what, "wins" who can produce some results. In this case, the scientists with ugly code.
I read this as a satire, and laughed thoroughly.

I do agree that GitHub provides a good look into a coder's abilities, though, and many companies agree. It's disappointing that, 2 years after this article came out, you still can't select which repos you want to display on your profile. <sigh>
Visualising Data with Google Fusion Tables
Ask HN: Best way to monetize adult list traffic? (900k+ U/V, 3M+ P/V Monthly)
I run a site similar to tblop.com - basically a top list of adult sites. Pushes 900K+ uniques per month at over 3m+ p/v. 70% USA - direct/organic.

Does anyone have experience monetizing this sort of traffic? The site right now makes approx. $3-4 daily thru a single 728x90. I might have to consider direct sales (where would I even start?) or just sell the website to someone that knows better?
Why could we not contribute? At it's core this is about the needs of a very small but important group of users not being addressed.

It only took me a few minutes to think of various things we could do to aid them ranging from a UI more optimized for blocking and reporting; services to offer pre-filtering of comments.

The one concrete thing that Twitter could do (and should do in my opinion) is helping actual criminal charges to be filed for hate speech (inciting to violence.)

I'm still convinced that the only reason this persists is because the perpetrators believe, and so far they're right, that they will not be meaningfully punished for behaviour like this.
I think that the 'raw coding' style the author sees in scientists is desirable because that's essentially the base level of programming that even software engineers think in. But then software engineers jump one level higher and try to organize and abstract things. Not everyone can effectively write complex code on that level, and it's also an area where everyone has their own opinion on best practices or style.

Personally I often tend to write messy and 'not best practice' code until I know what direction I'm headed in. Then I refactor. I recently turned a few hundred lines of if-statements into a sensibly organized piece of code.

But I think the problem here is bad software engineers. And I don't think we should be apologists for poor coders (scientists or otherwise). If an organization accepts mediocre code from non software engineers, that's fine and more power to them. But I don't think it's good to encourage poor programming anymore than it is to tell kids grammar and spelling don't matter because it's better to read short slang phrases than long sentences no one will understand anyway.
> Guess it's best to setup Master to Master replication..

Master-Master has issues of its own, if you use shoddy applications that assume next-id=max(id)+1.

In the worst case situation you can find data on one master, and not the other, and vice-versa. So be prepared to reconcile things if you get into a split-brain scenario.
Now turn it into 3D (spheres), add an Oculus Rift and get William Gibson's cyberspace (aka Neal Stepenson's metaverse)
I was I the same department as Neil when he gave this presentation - it is an amazingly small world at times.
we use teamgum.com in our startup where me & my 2 colleagues are very much regular on HN. We end up sharing a lot of interesting links. This makes curation of content far more better & time saving for us.

Just to answer your question - a good 30 mins additional on HN platform works very well for me to check on things that we may have missed out.
We’re Still Traveling Like It’s 1996
Movie plots, literally.
Ask HN: How long would you go unpaid on a startup?
Suppose you are working for a startup, how long would you go unpaid and give credit to the company? (With and without equity)
This would be great to have some subset of Cython[1] become valid Python code so it could be executed as normal Python code. The syntax is different, but function annotations could provide the necessary info.

[1] http://cython.org/
> prove

something something pot kettle something
http://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/command-and-...
I don't think the locations are random. I checked zerohedge.com and all around it were "buy gold" and other end of the world finance sites. Seemed like too much of a coincidence if the sites were randomly mapped out.
It's interesting to see him named in the article - since he is under 18 in Canada he will be protected by the young offenders act and cannot be identified in the media. I suppose that is only applicable for Canadian media outlets.
These sites work on network effect, pretty similar to social networks, I guess. It helps to get a reasonable product quickly out there that does not compromise too much on the user experience and privacy.

In India there is a job site called naukri.com that has horrible user experience, but is still the number one job site. But it works and does the bare minimum without much issues. It would be tough for anyone to crack that market without non-trivial capital.