skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use ctypes with numpy.ctypeslib. The end results aren't as robust as 'real' python extensions (you have keep track of types yourself and write your own python wrappers), but it is much quicker and easier to get started. You don't have to learn anything about the python API, your C code remains 'pure' since it doesn't have to know anything about python and there is almost no boilerplate.
For simple one off bindings to C functions it's great, especially if the data you're passing back and forth are numpy arrays.

There is also CFFI, which I haven't really used, but lots of people seem to like it.
Creative Node.js : The Presentation
Dr – A simple tool to maintain your own Debian repo
Thanks.

Hanging my head in shame for the omitted link.

Sorry for the oversight, since it's a really interesting read.
FCC chairman revises net neutrality proposal after public outcry
most people at my job want to leave ms outlook for Mac and mail.app but alas no exchange support on their favorite clients.
let's hope pirates don't have computers.
OSX - Expose is my favorite feature; throw the curser into my top left corner, pick the window I want, rinse, repeat.

I'll flip between code, photoshop and browsers like this 100s of times a day.

Though, you can't talk about the OS without the software that runs on it.

Transmit (ftp) is hands down the best (S)Ftp program I've ever used and I've become a fan of Sublime Text.

At home I keep a few Windows PCs around for IE testing and at work I run Parallels
Exactly. This is the kind of technical debt I'm referring to when it comes to code written for science. Not something that can be used as a platform/library, but also not code having references to a single config file hard-coded in 5 places.
You can pay it based on revenue: launch and get users.

The fear of putting something out in the world isn't only an inevitable part of creation but also a necessary one.

http://blog.redbubble.com/2014/04/daily-inspiration-agnes-ma...

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/31/agnes-mart...
that a big relief
Thing is, computers were build to handle scientific problems. And it shows in numerical programs, a especially egregious example was a simulation program with ~1k LOC main. However it is possible to work with that since it has a lot of structure, that main routine looked something like

main(){
initMatrix(reasonableName);//Repeat this block
loadData(reasonableName);// 100 times.

for(){
someBookkeeping(reasonableName);
//Another 100 lines
for(){
numericalStuff(reasonableName);
//Again repeat 100 times
}
}
cleanUpAndOutput(reasonableName);
//Again repeat 100 times
return 0;
}

So that is of course horrible code, but at least it is horrible in a consistent way. I got really burned by code where the high level architecture was build by a software engineer and the details were filled in by a physicist. Then you get atrocities like should be separated classes that spread their functionality over multiple levels of inheritance. ( Along with several pages of a constructor...)
There is a place for businesses like POF, but there also is a place for businesses with huge VC investments, fancy offices and many employees. Totally opposing strategies though, the first being pretty risk averse and starting out slowly and climbing a long way to the top, the other being all-in from day one with huge expectations and potential in a short timeframe. Both mostly don't work out, but as i personally already went through the latter and failed (no VC, just a 2 year accelerator adventure with some moderate funding), i'll not do it that way again.
A lesson from Batman for entrepreneurs
Sigh

The biggest limiting factor of wireless is the lack of frequency in which to put you're data. Not interference.

pCell only works for small areas, what it does is essentially beamform a signal directly to the consumer (basically cupping your hands around your mouth when you shout at someone) I assume the "magic" comes from some sort of noise cancelling (yes just like the ear phones)

However in practice I assume they just use more than one beam former to create more than one beam.

It cannot be used for wide area systems, as the only reason this works is because its local. it provides bandwidth for one small area using the same frequency that the wider area is using.
Visual annotated feedback via screenshots for web projects
One use case: improved JITer performance.
This is one (sad) illustration of how Twitter is so unique a communication service, because of its particular access-control details. The fact that it's so hard to block/stop abusers is a consequence of the way Twitter leaves communications "open" and loose...with Facebook, you can't stalk/directly-abuse someone without them giving you some access (or revoking Facebook's default access). With email, you can target an address, but you can't read what's sent from it unless you're an addressee...Twitter is an open river for people to sample, and piss into. One of the things that the OP rips Twitter on is actually kind of a nuanced issue, IIRC. Twitter removed the "block" because "blocking" someone gave the blocker a false sense of security...you can never hide your activity from a stalker who simply logs out and views your public timeline.

"Block" effectively does nothing...what Twitter should've done is label the button something like "Ignore"...which would allow you to never be notified when that user sends a direct reply or mentions you...but would not have the same connotation as actively blocking that person in the way that a restraining order "blocks" someone.

As much as Twitter is seen as a superficial surface, nothing more than a dumbed-down micro version of blogging...the technicalities that underly its open nature is something that is hard to grok until you actively use it. I remember the "aha" moment for me was reading the report of when Demi Moore, an early Twitter celebrity, responded to a random person's suicide threat...just sending someone famous such a message would be impossible on Facebook, and pretty difficult on email (even if you knew the address, people/spam-systems are trained to filter such random messages out)...but in Twitter's early days, you had a decent chance of your crazy message being seen by just about anybody. That's the magic/insanity of Twitter for you.
It is nicely integrated with type checking in the pycharm IDE. This feature is one of the reasons I would personally like to write pure py3 code.
With New Food App Square Order, Square Wants Bigger Bite Of Restaurant Industry
Space junk threatens real-life Gravity incident
I've been doing this for 15 years and it sucks more and more. Now we have complex as hell client-side frameworks like Angular. A framework on top of my framework, great! More and more screen sizes/devices/browsers, but not a freaking way of handling any of this information because, for some stupid reason, the User-Agent header is useless. CSS media queries are useless. JavaScript window.size is useless.

The problem is: HTML is not made for applications, it's made for documents, linked documents. The day someone put a form in HTML hell broke loose and even after 20 years, the web is seriously broken and things are just getting worst. For example, date input fields; supported by Chrome and Safari, but not by Firefox. You want to localize it? IT SUCKS! I thought Java's Calendar was crap, but JavaScript's Date is pure mayhem... And I could go on and on about why HTML/CSS/JS is all a bunch of crap which, instead of evolving, are making things harder.

And now they want to add Future/Promise to JavaScript... HAHAHAHA!!!
Who bullies the bullies?
I don't know about programmers-vs-scientists-vs-engineers-vs-… and all that stuff (basically, these are just some words and I can question the fact they mean something at all), but I agree with the main point of the article. Or the way I interpreted it, anyway. That is "road to hell is paved with good intentions". I have to deal with it on daily basis. There is some legacy code in the project considered to be bad and always referred to as that. And, well, yeah, it is bad. But when I have to deal with some new architectural marvel of some my colleagues, who are considered to be good and actually are pretty bright adequate people, then I often think that that "legacy code" was actually easier to deal with before "refactoring". Exactly for the same reasons author mentioned.

I mean, some god object with multi-screen functions with 9000 ifs and non-escaped SQL is ugly and horrible, but in fact pretty simple to debug, comparatively easy to understand and often even easy to clean up a little bit without breaking anything. But some metaprogramming-reflection-abstract-class-GenericBuseinessObjectManagerProviderFactory-10-levels-of-inheritance is not. It even might be not ugly, it's often clever and somewhat elegant. If you know how that works. But if you don't (and for starters you always don't, unless you are author of that elegant solution) it takes you hours of pain and bloody tears before you can understand what happened here and finally make changes you wanted to.

I actually believe that this is a problem, because it isn't something that some person does, because he is dumb. He's not! It's the culture, that overly praises clever techniques and "elegant" solutions, while spreading the myth that "not sophisticated enough" means "bad". It's not! "Hard to understand" is "bad". Nobody really needs "cleverness" and "elegance", in the end of the day, they need something that works and is easy to understand and develop further. And the truth is that something "not sophisticated enough" (even if it's goto, copy-paste, mutable variable, global object, whatever) is often easier to understand than something sophisticated one.
You need a paid license to use ActiveSync, which is why there is so little support.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/IP...
Hidden Cameras to Spy on Berlin for 100 Years
Just ask Eric

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf_BR1StMxQ
One presumes they still need to know the location of those flights to deal with them descending into the range of altitudes used by commercial aircraft.
But if the code you have is the same as the code millions of other people have, it's safer to give it the benefit of the doubt than a single server than only a handful of people have access to.
Yet in reality, I work on chip architecture and hardware accelerators and have never written VB macros in MS Excel. Go figure.

(I did write one VB macro in VS 6 though, I think. Perhaps it was that incident that distorted my worldview.)
It was likely part of the caretaker's operations. The reactor was during the Great Oxidation event, when the yeast was first oxidizing the air and before the whitebeasts were introduced.
"Made-up straw man"? Rather harsh, not to mention totally missing the point.

There's a bit of a difference between spilling it on oneself and being spilled on by someone else. That's not a straw man argument at all. It's a tangential anecdote. Yes, indeed, had she caused me $10,000 in medical harm, it's possible and likely I would have sought compensation from her employer. But had I spilled the decanter on myself, which is the point of the Liebeck case, that would be a different thing entirely.
The point the GP is making, from the books that he mentions, is that being an underwater species precludes the discovery of fire, which is the basis for many technological innovations. It is possible that there are other technological routes around this, but the barrier to entry is much higher.
I'm not sure if being one of the named plaintiffs matters once it is certified as a class. He can probably opt out of the class though, just like any other member.
I agree - 'intelligence', defined most broadly as 'ability to sense the environment, build a mental model of it, and use said model to achieve one's goals'^, seems like a very common adaptation.

^ This isn't just my definition, it's a rough approximation of AIXI, "a mathematical formalism for a hypothetical (super)intelligent agent". (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/AIXI)

The difference between the intelligence of different creatures is one of degree, and it's interesting to speculate why some animals did end up so much more intelligent than others.

Another interesting evolutionary tidbit is that it for a while after the Cambrian explosion there was a vast diversity of different animal phyla in the oceans. Supposedly for some time there was an arms race of different invertebrate species (octopodes being one surviving example) evolving competitive strategies and counter-strategies, and thereby growing more intelligent.

But then fish evolved, and it turns out the fish design is highly efficient (think sharks) and fish could dominate the oceans - and later their descendant vertebrates could dominate the land - without needing as much intelligence. Again, it's interesting to speculate whether, in an alternative history where fish did not evolve, advanced invertebrate civilisations could have arisen long before dinosaurs appeared in our timeline.
Will Apple’s effort to buy cool backfire?
I am the author of https://emailprivacytester.com/ - But I don't have any Apple devices, so I'm unable to test this client. Would somebody please give it a test and report back here.
> Microsoft was publicly beaten up a bit, and then changed their policy to say they will no longer do that.

What? No.

They saw the PR pouncing they were taking, so they hired a former judge to rubber stamp such things in the future, and had the gall to call it a "judicial process" (even though the guy is just a microsoft employee at this point).
Yes, some tasks can be done very simply, and decent programmers know this. I've written lots of Twitter-accessing code to do data analysis, but I love using the ruby-t gem, which lets me in a single line of UNIX (with pipes) do something like unfollow every user I currently follow who tweets more than 50 times/day and doesn't follow me back.

The OP is railing against dumb programmers...OK, that's fine. But just because I've heard of Josef Mengele doesn't mean that it's a good use of time to continually rant about the dangers of science.

Speaking of bioinformatics, one of my favorite programming blogs is from bioinformatics scientist Neil Saunders, who writes about scripts, complex and short, that he uses to data munge and efficiently run experiments. The title of his blog was inspired by an encounter he had with a fellow scientist who did not see the value of programming:

http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/about-2/about/

> You may be wondering about the title of this blog.

Early in my bioinformatics career, I gave a talk to my department. It was fairly basic stuff – how to identify genes in a genome sequence, standalone BLAST, annotation, data munging with Perl and so on. Come question time, a member of the audience raised her hand and said:

“It strikes me that what you’re doing is rather desperate. Wouldn’t you be better off doing some experiments?”*

It was one of the few times in my life when my jaw literally dropped and swung uselessly on its hinges. Perhaps I should have realised there and then that I was in the wrong department and made a run for it. Instead, I persisted for years, surrounded by people who either couldn’t or wouldn’t “get it”.

Ultimately though, her breathtakingly-stupid question did make a great blog title.
I've added a type checking decorator for function annotations to my assertions helper library, https://github.com/kislyuk/ensure:

from ensure import ensure_annotations

@ensure_annotations
def f(x: int, y: float) -> float:
return x+y

f(1, 2.3)
>>> 3.3
f(1, 2)
>>> ensure.EnsureError: Argument y to <function f at 0x109b7c710> does not match annotation type <class 'float'>

It's useful sometimes.
In my lucid dreams I can very much control the world around me.
I'm probably totally old-fashioned and crazy, but I personally think the SQL code is much more readable and understandable than the arel code that's generated.

Why does everybody hate SQL so much that they have to invent their own query language which will eventually evolve to have the same capabilities as SQL but which will look differently, and will be specific to a host language?

Sure. There's the issue of SQL injections, but libraries have gotten good enough for these not to happen any more, to the point that writing straight SQL only has advantages: It works in any host language/framework, everybody understands it even if they are new to a language/framework and everybody can use the same language in their database GUI that they use while programming.
You don't have to use Active Sync. You can also use Exchange Web Services. I believe Apple Mail and modern Outlook clients use EWS to talk to Exchange. Not aware of any others though.
> have complete freedom from everything

Well there's your problem. I'm not speaking from experience but it seems a lot of people find meaning in the sense of others counting on you, if not depending on you. Having a spouse/life partner/whatever brings meaning and having children is the most obvious and common form but there are lots of other ways.
Nice way of putting it. In some sense Twitter is only really exposing how crazy people in the world actually are. Being able to ignore/block/report offensive tweets is part of their responsibility, but more generally getting people to act in a civil manner to each other is probably not really.

"Germaine Greer once wrote that women have no idea how much men hate them. Thanks to the internet, now we do." https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/361043650970529792
I like “quadrupole” best. It's prove that startup people are dyslexic.
> I bought the apps even though the iOS one couldn't even work with my (Linux-based, dovecot) IMAP server.

I have a colleague who analysed the Mail Pilot IMAP conversation and managed to hand-craft his Dovecot IMAP folders just right so that the app worked with his VPS. IIRC it was a problem with the app being really picky about IMAP namespaces.

The same problem meant that the app didn't work with Fastmail, but despite having been informed of the bug the Mail Pilot team blamed Fastmail and 'non-compliant IMAP implementations'.

The Fastmail response was a classic: show us where the bug is in our implementation and we'll fix it in a week. There was no response.
Ask HN mods: can we get an updated list of auto-killed domains?
I tried to submit the latest post from The Last Psychiatrist, and it was auto-killed. Second time it happens. The most recent list of domains that are verboten here seemed to be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044.

An aside, I get that the author is controversial and that commenters might get into flame wars, but is this enough justification for killing the domain?
Copying a file takes the same time, regardless of it's capsule of chef that is copying the file. Once capsule has cached the file, you can cut a VM image, and no copying will occur later.

> making your Maven repository a dependency of your production environment
It becomes a dependency of your deployment process, which probably already depends on a maven repo. And a maven repo can be just a NAS drive, which is often reliable enough for use in production.
The fact that relatively high intelligence has arisen from many architectures multiple times on this planet bodes well for the frequency of intelligent life on exoplanets.

As I remember from the book "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life" [1], the bottleneck may be not the evolution of the intelligence, and not even of life itself, but specifically multicellular life. There are reasons to believe it only happened once, and for about 1bn years before that life already existed in single-cellular form, which gives an idea on how improbable the step from single to multiple cell organisms is. I am vague on specifics though, but can wholeheartedly recommend a book to anyone interested in evolution and origins of life.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-Meaning...
Dictionaries are a great example. They are a useful general-purpose abstraction. Often times programmers will develop a hierarchy of classes that once you get to the root of is just a dictionary with some window dressing to hide the fact that it's just a dictionary. Sometimes it's easier to expose the dictionary directly and code the special cases directly. The programmer may fret about tight coupling but if you know you're never going to replace the dictionary-based implementation, it can be a lot easier to understand, especially if it's one-off code. And when dictionaries are provided by your language/libraries, you don't have to unit test them at all; you assume they work.
Bad scientific code is bad, and bad programming code is bad.

Every time you do a clever thing, you have to do three things:

1-Document your smart idea on your code.

2-Document your smart idea, preferably on drawing.

3-Document your smart idea, preferably on audio-video.

People forget their smart ideas after 6 months or so. So basically if you have to debug the code later you have to spend at least the same amount of time you spent developing the smart idea in the first place each time you have to debug.

In my opinion, smart ideas are great tough, if you follow the three principles above solving a bug becomes fast.

Most people don't know about psychology so they believe that because they know it today, they will know it on six month time. Or worse, they fear that if they document their work they could be fired(this is the mentality of weak programmers that know they are weak, hopefully you wont work with these people, if you do quit as fast as possible).
Can you elaborate why it wouldn't work in a wide area setting? In a demonstration, they had a lot of cellphones on a desk, but not a matching number of pCell antennas, so it seems they can support many devices with a single (or at least much less) antenna.

Or do you mean to say that the beam forming is not going to work over large distances, so phones must be in close proximity to the antennas?
This is true, and several of the world's biggest companies run that way. Several-hundred-megabyte spreadsheets, with VBA interfaces copy & pasted between them; can't change it because the unknown cost of breaking it is potentially greater than the known cost of hiring an entire department of people to do one database server's job :(
Pretty dramatic results. Especially since Estonia has been using e-voting since 2005. Begs the question: what was the auditing like 10 years ago when the system was developed, and in the intervening years?
This is what happened with us at Fortis Memorial Hospital, India.
Don't pay for the iOS version. I was one of those people who ignored the reviews and went and splashed out on it after a while using the OSX version (Which works perfectly fine). Emails would come in hours, sometimes days after they where sent, others wouldn't show at all.

I noticed on their website they are advising to wait for version 2.
Getting "a list of customers sorted by last name" in hibernate does not require xml or anything like that. It is one java method with annotation containing order by query.

It is considerably shorter then traditional non-hibernate version.
Are small nuclear reactors the answer?
It's pretty cliché, but an abundance of cheese during the day has occasionally resulted in lucid experiences for me, or at least vivid dreams I remain strongly aware of the next day.

That aside, the most reliable and intense series of lucid dreams occurred in my teens while experimenting with psylocybin -- unlike the parent comment, sometimes also affecting the dream's setting or the behaviour of people in it.

My favourite (and probably the simplest) experience from that period was repeatedly exhaling steam on a frosty day, marvelling at how the steam and everything else I could sense was a figment of my mind, before waking up giggling and in a wonderful mood.
Teen Arrested for 30+ Swattings, Bomb Threats
I think it's because some people are finally considering making pure python3 projects.