skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This also goes way beyond scraping, in the sense of small start-ups doing all kinds of hacks or clever manips to stay within the bounds of a free trial service.

As someone who sees both sides… I don't know what to say. I'm running test landing pages on Heroku with New Relic that pings the sites every minute to ensure the dynes keep spinning and my users don't experience downtime. While I'm careful to stay within fair use, this is at best obnoxious, because if everyone did this, Heroku would certainly need to redefine what's free. From my POV though, I am a bootstrapped entrepreneur and supporting 5 landing pages. I simply don't have resources to pay for a dyno and test everything I have in my head, especially not combined with the many other resources I'd need to start paying for as well.

Or consider the kid in Florida who used Parse' free account for hundreds of thousands of users. [1] (The article was on HN a few weeks ago, this was not it's central point, just something I took away relevant to this comment.)

Part of the cause I think is that we live in a world where we're so used to having things be free, it becomes an entitlement. Another is that all these examples of start-up hacks and hustle stories, we kind of laud, don't we? Everyone talks about how Airbnb scraped Craigslist and got a huge boon that way, but few in critical tones. Should we? Or is that how competition and new products get created (i.e., if the scraping hadn't happened, perhaps Airbnb and the whole sharing economy would be less successful today).

These are philosophical questions, and I don't really have a solution, but they are things to think about.

[1] http://pando.com/2014/04/30/how-a-florida-kids-stupid-app-sa...
> What it sounds like you're saying is that programming languages should not require expertise.

No, I think he says that C++ is overly complex and unsafe without a real need for that complexity and unsafety. And it seems that what you define as "expertise" translates to "the developer learned to make up for the language flaws". Expertise should mean having the necessary knowledge to make software quickly and efficiently, not avoiding the language pitfalls. When you have to read so much text in order to use a language correctly, then there probably is some problem in it.

Take a look at Rust, it's aiming for the same niche as C++ while being less complex and giving safety guarantees. And they seem to be having success at that. It's doable.

I recommend you the post that I link below. It tries to explain to a C++ programmer why he should learn Rust. It has modules, generics, green threads and concurrency built in. There's much to love.
http://featherweightmusings.blogspot.com.ar/2014/04/rust-for...
PDF.js is really nice and awesome, but for me it doesn't work for documents with a file size of 11MB. It was a catalogue and to finally get the thing to render faster I used pdf2htmlEX (html5) which slimmed the 11MB file down to about 2MB with no visible quality loss and text would still be perfectly selectable, even in old and crappy browsers like IE7. I'm happily using both on a customers site. The 11MB file rendered good enough on my Client's new PC, but they have an i7 ;) My own box is really slow :/ (saving for a macbook pro)

Currently I was about to write a service to autoconvert PDF documents uploaded via ownCloud into the said HTML5 document, but it seems that even though I've ssh, this server is managed and doesn't come with make and also has no poppler or fontforge libraries available. Meh :(

I'm thinking about compiling the binary with --prefix=~/.local/lib and copy the dependencies I've found to that directory on the server. Hope that works, otherwise I'll need to write an API for pdf2htmlEX on a server where I've root and upload modified & new pdf files to it, then wait for it to finish the html5 conversion and download the files to the right directory using curl. That'd be much more work than just dropping the binary onto the server and executing the service as cronjob for modfied or new files.

Any ideas on howto solve this cleverly?
This is an open secret in the healthcare profession; people really don't like to talk about it, but doctors definitely will allow the administration of a lethal dose of morphine to a suffering patient because there is quite literally no better alternative.

There's even a safety interlock on the infusion machine that the doctor has to provide the override codes for to go beyond the safe dose.
Your first comment drew me a picture and your second colored it in :).
So basically, (at least some) states that created their own exchanges made a big mistake in doing so.
For the record, I don't think this is a good way to judge value (at this point, certainly). But it does seem more odd to argue the program had a good ROI based on such a cost.
I would highly recommend Harvard CS50. Everything is available on the course website, https://cs50.harvard.edu/ . There is a linux appliance with a console utility that allows you to submit problem set solutions for automated testing/grading.

The moment I knew it was a good choice for me was after I completed a problem set that required us to write sorting algorithms.

My prior experience was with Ruby and JS, so .sort() => done, no idea how this mysterious .sort() was returning my ordered set. After the lecture and writing the algorithms, I didn't just have the code as you would following a tutorial. I had a better understanding behind "the magic". I understood how to evaluate the performance of these algorithms using Big O notation and why my Google killing search engine won't do much Google killing if I use bubble-sort.

Give it a try. You'll get a good introduction to CS and write some cool programs, including a program that can recover "deleted" images from a memory card.
You're missing the part where he's in the game industry, and they don't care to do things the right way.

Go read the archives; the quality of management in publishing is rather crap.
I'm glad someone took the time to write this, it's actually a very nice resource to get new coworkers up to speed. Shouldn't be tought as dogma of course (e.g. Gradle vs. Maven).

Also, thanks for mentioning Packr even though noone has used it in production yet. It's only a week old.

Assuming OP is the original author: are you by any chance following JGO? I see Quasar is actually using Matthias Mann's green thread lib which i don't think was advertised anywhere outside JGO.
Call of Duty PC: the graph that says it's in trouble and what Activision can do
The should I am shoulding on the article is that it ought to account for the facts on the ground. The question of whether computer science curricula in the abstract ought to include calculus is a different question than should something which purports to be equivalent to a computer science curriculum include it - particularly when four of the five reference degrees include calculus and the sort of person who might pursue this track is subject to Dunning Kruger effects.

Now my personal opinion is inclined toward calculus being part of a computer science curriculum in the absence of compelling evidence that it should not. My reasons are:

+ Calculus is where algebraic skills really get practised to the point of competence because there they are tool rather than an end in themselves.

+ One of the longer edges at the edge of computer science as a science encompasses signal processing and that entails calculus directly or indirectly via statistics.

+ If computer science is a branch of mathematics, constructing an argument is left as an exercise for the reader.

Against calculus the primary argument is vocational. But as with any science curriculum these days, the product is graduates not scientists. We with half of all graduates below average.
I would really like to see larger corporations like google, facebook, reddit, 4chan, etc. do this to anyone connection from a government end point for a day or two.

Just make them see how bad removing net neutrality would be.
I too feel that the market has spoken on this: see http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meetro and many others that failed.
How about "the internet tollway". If you want to get fast speeds between locations, you'll have to pay the toll(s). Otherwise, you'll be taking side streets to your destination.
Solving a mystery of thermoelectrics
That's great information. I assume though that healthy people wouldn't be euthanizing themselves just for laughs. They'd normally be sick to begin with.

This ride would be great for fraternity hazing. The frat would get some yuks as the pledges went round and round, and the school would have plausible deniability - "the University understood that they were simply enjoying a day at the amusement park".
This would be my preferred resolution if we assume that decreasing defects is actually a priority for this organization. We have one pretty persuasive piece of evidence to the contrary: their anti-defect strategy is paying college kids $9 an hour to play video games. The company might have come to the conclusion that bugs don't move the bottom line as much as e.g. box art. This counsels either a) getting into box art or b) getting the heck out of dodge.
Honestly? I only have 2x1.3GHz, but it loads damn fast for files <= 5MB. How large are the files that you open that make your browser inresponsive?
I like the overview given to JVM tooling, many developers are fully unaware of what JVMs (not only the official one from Oracle) offer in terms of monitoring.

If you want to go really low level, a few of them even show the generated assembly code by the JIT.
>>Lesson learned: this situation isn't cause for bitching and moaning, it's an opportunity to cut throats.

What if one is not a cut-throat, but simply a competent person who wants to be surrounded by people of equal or greater skill so that he or she can learn from them?
"Needless to say, I had a meeting with management that did not end well. I did not mean to come off condescending and egotistical." - Who is to say this wasn't exactly the script that was used in this meeting? It could have been an attempt to be constructive or it could have been bitching and moaning about how crappy the other testers were. Unfortunately we can only speculate.
Open Internet Investors Letter
Although it looks pretty, the $20 price tag is going to keep me away.

I'm using Postman and REST Easy in my browser for current HTTP/REST API testing, although I would love a real cross-platform desktop client.
Ways to Drive SaaS Growth By Focusing On Customer Success
Does nobody else find Foursquare maps API really, really sucks at finding things? I put in "Baltimore" and the first 20 results are outside maryland. I put "Baltimore, MD and there's a couple completely random odd things in maryland, as well as a ton of out of state listings. Uber uses the Foursquare API, and their location also totally sucks for finding simple things like an address. Maybe there's some way to search "the right way", but it's totally unintuitive to me.
Lessons learned from Google+, by Google+ designer
I find it depressing that someone puts into the work to make a cool library and 2/3rds of the comments are whining about the author using the "wrong" number of newlines and other stylistic issues.
A Map of Global Income Inequality
That number seems ridiculously high, but shouldn't CPA be calculated from the money spent on "acquiring" the user, not the entire cost of starting the business?
extremely complex software such as what the F-35 runs on, is all C++

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628746
I agree with the "long tail of details". The big wins are championed while seemingly infinite little gotchas are glossed over. Native development appears to be linear and straightforward because there is one language and one API - "one thing" to reason about. Contrast that to all the context switching involved in a hybrid app. Portions are written in Obj-C, portions are dynamically built using data, portions are written in JS, CSS, HTML, and Rails. What about additional tools like SASS, jQuery, JS MVC of choice, etc, etc? A lot of moving parts can be hard to juggle, and slow development as app complexity/entropy sets in.
I use it, and love it. It just works, and great support
"Qt" and "Lightweight" do not go together.
It also violates my desire to not know it's coming if we've had to arrange for me to be still and the shooter to be at a specific distance and frame of mind.

So, $7 for the round plus the going rate of a professional hitman.

I suddenly have a very macabre desire to crunch the numbers on that vs. a traditional open-casket funeral these days. ;)
Have got to agree. "Follow the money". If something is a priority it will be invested in. Always sucks when your priorities as an employee don't align with the priorities of your employer. Hopefully the author can find a position which aligns better.
Most of the ones that have more than 10 pages, specially CS papers.
Why is the Java community so enamored with creating Java-only solutions when general-purpose solutions work just as well (and often better)?

There's no need to bundle everything up into an executable jar or war. It's much easier to write a Chef recipe to copy all the right files to the right places. And it's even easier to create a Docker container with the exploded war in its correct place. Both of those solutions don't rely on the clunky put-everything-inside-a-jar and the resulting need to write your own ClassLoader.
You should probably report this. Most of the test cases that they used where PDF.js is too slow, involves files so large that even Adobe Reader can't render quickly, or files that are heavily damaged.
Simulation shows that dark energy and matter can reproduce the Universe
$200 Desktop CNC Router
Check out our $200 desktop CNC Router.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makesmithcnc/makesmith-cnc-the-most-affordable-desktop-cnc-rout
Mathematical Model Implies Human Consciousness Is Noncomputable
Sefnit, Rotbrow and Brantall: The bundled malware trio ravaging Windows
The wins on confining the content to the browser sandbox as well as integrating .pdf viewing into the browser experience greatly outweigh the current limitations for large file sizes. I hope ongoing work will fix the latter. Pdf.js is an awesome improvement that makes me breathe easier every time I click on a pdf link.
Ask HN: Pitching Your Big Vision or Not
I've recently read the article on Larry Page's growth through Google's History (http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4)

Being an ambitious entrepreneur myself, does anyone else ever struggle with pitching this large , grandiose vision of how you're going to change the world vs. what small steps you're taking right now to get there.

I've gotten advice to stick to pitching the current execution as the grandiose vision is too ambitious and low chance of success.

Currently we're building a mobile analytics platform (https://ramen.is/projects/get-vue-analytics), but I want to use this as a stepping stone to creating a Wolfram Alpha as a BI tool (or even AI one day). First one - Doable; Second one - pretty crazy but I think it's quite possible.

Thoughts on pitching one vs the other?
Google buys Stackdriver in cloud developer land grab
The citizen hearing on disclosure (2013)
If that were genuinely the company strategy then why would they bother to hire testers _at all?_

It smacks more of "we know that software must be tested, and this looks like testing so this is what we must do" - a recognition of a requirement, but not one which has been adequately implemented and fulfilled. There may have genuinely been nobody there who knew any better.
That would be a wasted effort then, given that OpenTripPlanner does the same. But maybe there are performance restrictions or similar.
FPDF FTW!
I definitely agree with this. I dropped out of college and went full-time at the place I had been working and was making something like $12/hour (I think it was bumped up to $16) then turned into a salary. I didn't really question it. Luckily I have a more than fair boss who understands the value I bring to the table and gave me extreme raises twice in the first year. Had he not done that I wouldn't have realized how much I bring to the table with my skills and would think a low salary is perfectly normal for me.
Fuzzy logic is a vary useful non boolean logic system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic In practice it's somewhat like neural net's but in a far more human readable format and vary useful for things like washing machines that have lot's of flakey sensors and little processing power. But the basic idea is statements truth is percentage based. For example "this statement is true" would be 50% true and there is no contradiction.

PS: Yet another 1960's discovery that keeps being renamed and rediscovered.
That is not accurate enough though. The statement as you made it is not accurate in that it is entirely possible to put water below 0°C and still have it maintain a stable liquid. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8xusY3GTM

And that is exactly the problem with Tyson's statement. It is not accurate enough to be in itself a fact and invites blind belief where questioning should happen.
also: architecture implies that you had a variety of solutions to choose from, and that you made a choice from one of the possible solutions and are able to reason and talk about that choice, the pros and cons, etc.

If you can't list the pros and cons relative to the other choices, I don't really consider that architecture - that's just doing what's familiar.
No, it's not unique to science.

For instance, with history, whether or not you believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated doesn't change the fact that he either was (for which the evidence is overwhelming) or wasn't (if, by some amazing chance, the YouTube conspiracy videos are true).

But you bring up a point worth expanding upon. You mention testing. With history, and many other subjects, we can't directly evaluate things in the way that we test things with science. That is to say, we can't go back in time and take a snapshot of a historical moment and say, "There! That did actually happen!"

Some people have (mistakenly, in my mind) concluded that because we can't test a philosophical conjecture the way we can test a scientific conjecture, it's therefore not worth spending time pursuing philosophical truth. I think they just get so hung up on the scientific method that they try to apply it to things that are totally outside its domain.
Really? Qt used to be quite a bit snappier than GTK+. Is this no longer the case?
Good changes. One more issue (I believe recently introduced): LEGB ends with "Built-in", not with "Module". It's also good to note in the blog post that it's been updated.
The Citizen Hearing on Disclosure (April 29 - May 3, 2013) brought 40+ researchers and government/agency witnesses to Washington DC to testify before six former members of the U.S. Congress on events and evidence supporting the truth of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race and a government policy to embargo that truth.

Also the videos from the event

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRQnM0SxvBY&list=PL3ukNWu0GE...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_juuWhUho
Yeah, over here : https://hn.algolia.com/
The internet has flourished because of a lack of regulation, not despite a lack of regulation. Let the companies duke it out and keep the government out of it.

If I were in netflix's shoes I'd just charge each comcast customer enough extra to cover the surcharge and mark it clearly on their bill. Let comcast deal with the deluge of complaints to their call centers.
I think CS really needs to be split into two paths; software engineering and (for lack of a better term) software development. I use math on a daily basis. Today it's statistics, yesterday it was calculus (motion control tuning), tomorrow it may be trig.

What I do is very different than what a web developer may do. Not better or worse, just different, and it requires a very different skill set. The fact that we not get roughly the same education is ludicrous.
Do people still talk about nth-generation languages outside explaining why Forth is called Forth? I thought it was mostly history by now.
Microsoft's upcoming Surface Mini: A killer at the right price?
Google, Twilio, Matasano, Optimizely, Basecamp, and Fog Creek are all hiring, and all pay well enough such that one would be able to afford to play video games after coming home from work. (This is a non-exhaustive list of companies where I've been particularly impressed about ambient levels of competence.)
Thanks, glad you like Ionic :)

I personally think you can do 100% of the nav in the web. The problem is there legitimately weren't native-style navigation tools in web until recently.

Unfortunately, the standard linear history doesn't work for apps that run in a native container. You'll often be managing three or more concurrent navigation stacks (for a 3 tabbed app, for example), and the concept of a browser back button just doesn't make sense in an app like that.

So we've built a lot of that with Ionic. Perhaps at the expense of the mobile web browser app experience.
this looks cool and super easy to add bidirectional HTML <> markdown support similar to the demo i did for redactor-js here: http://leeoniya.github.io/redactor-js/

using https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js and https://github.com/chjj/marked

may just have to do this after work today if no one gets to it first.
I don't get why these companies just don't charge the cable companies for the right to carry their content. TV stations charge cable companies, cable company has a choice to not carry it but risk losing customers because they lack content. Content is king in this war .
There are more than a few interesting points in here but this is funny to me coming from someone who is seemingly well versed in python:
Mistake #5

numbers = [n for n in range(10)]

this should be:
range(10)
First life with 'alien' DNA
The Most Concise Investor Pitch You Can Write
Cartwheeling Spider Robots Conquer Sand Dunes
This makes me not want to use this product: "One day VIM was replaced by TextMate and Sublime."

Really?
Would love to look at your code...
Eastern Christianity is more than just Orthodox (and, in fact, overlaps with Roman Catholicism, in that the non-Latin Rite -- "Uniate" -- Churches in communion with Rome are both Roman Catholic and Eastern, the latter particularly where it comes to broad philosophical traditions while the former applies to the particular points of theology and authority at the center of the Great Schism.)
Randall Munroe of XKCD: Comics That Ask "What If?"
Is it easy to do that?
Is the war for talent really this bad?
I actually really like the netflix idea but I still think net neutrality is too important to not be regulated, I wish netflix or someone similar would say "this is what we are going to do, here is comcasts customer support number, here is the FCC complaints department/whatever and here is a petition" in advance of the bill and actually mobilize some more people to do things and complain.
> The problem with grep was that opening and scanning lots of small files apparently wasn't something that Windows was optimized for.

It's something hard disk drives were not optimized for.
Maybe it would be better to make it the whole federal government rather than just the FCC? That would at least get more people complaining (especially if more than just this site would do it).
Are you referring to the various databinding frameworks? So far, I've been somewhat skeptical of those--I worry they make too many assumptions and take away too much fine-grained control.