skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heartbleed did the world a favor: it reminded us that you can't throw encryption on top of something and call it secure. Mail Oilot devs didn't seem to learn that. From their support docs at https://mailpilot.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1315088-... :

> Currently, Mail Pilot only supports normal password authentication.

> A future update (currently in development) will include support for: CRAM-MD5, DIGEST-MD5, Kerberos 4, GSSAPI, NTLM, as well as Secure Remote Password.

So while they claim to value security, the app still requires you to send your password in cleartext. There's no way my IT department would enable cleartext auth on our mail servers, and I'd be too embarrassed to ask them to.
Possibly. But if so, they do that for a simple reason: "Upselling" past donors will in most situations have substantially higher conversion rates than obtaining new donors. It may not have been cost-effective in his specific case, but it's likely a cost-effective use of their resources on average.
Not even Neuromancer? Snow Crash?
Oh please, every week there's at least one post that reaches the top 10 about women in tech. HN is filled with plenty of bright individuals who are quite capable of perpetuating equality.
Mailmate has a trial version that works fine for 30 days. I actually did try it, though I ended up going for AirMail instead... and then went back to Mail.app!

I don't mind paying $20 or more for a great email client - I mind paying that for a shitty email client that fails at even basic stuff like, you know, receiving emails.
Another new player that looks promising is Pelias (http://mapzen.com/pelias/). Early days but it's open source (https://github.com/mapzen/pelias) and it seems to be improving at a good clip.
It seems to me that the article ultimately addresses a straw man... I don't see anyone saying "Scientists would be better off if they adopted best practices that a first-year student would think are a good idea without any understanding" or "Scientists would be better off if they got terrible software engineers to help them". Most, if not all, of what's in the article is bad software engineering.

In fact, we are well aware that bad programming is not confined to scientists, and at the risk of being tautological, better programming practices lead to better programming outcomes than worse ones, regardless of science or not. (And note my careful confinement to "programming outcomes"... I won't promise that better programming practices lead to better final outcomes unconditionally, though I'd be willing to state there are times and places where it is called for.)

There are a lot of cargo-culting "software engineers" who blindly apply principles in stupid manners, but that's hardly what people are calling for here.
The main difference that jumps to mind in your example of a guy building a bomb, is that arresting him is a feasible option.
Take a project that you've built using a framework you're already familiar with and replicate it with a new framework.

This way, you're focused on learning the framework and how something is achieved within that framework without bothering to think about architecture, features, etc.

This is how I learned Symfony (I came from Zend) and it served me well!
Countering upworthy headlines: https://github.com/snipe/downworthy

(Not guaranteed to work on all headlines; feel free to contribute filters)
I really like this analogy, and I'm going to steal it. It really drives the point home.

I do have to be a pedant though and point out that "fatwa" just means "legal opinion" - in common parlance, we use it to mean "death sentence" because we think of people like Salman Rushdie (whom Khomeini sentenced to death under a fatwa in 1989).

If anything, this makes it worse - at least Khomeini had to provide some legal justification for his decision[0], whereas Obama has refused to do even that.

[0] A legal justification under Islamic law, which many would agree is itself arbitrary, but that's still marginally better than "trust me, it's legal, but I'm not going to tell you why".
The Universe Never Stop to Surprising Us: Pulsar Lives in Triple System
Not sure if this is why Square required you to sign, but rates for covering fraud are affected by whether you have customers sign or not for credit cards.
Who's printing?
I got it going on a box for evaluation purposes by following this guide.
http://docs.openstack.org/icehouse/install-guide/install/apt...

It took a few hours of following the instructions to the letter but everything worked first time and it's fairly par for the course in terms of installing a complex bit of software.
Knotable fixes the email headache
How to apologize to a customer
I find them most often (and useful, it turns out) in really out of the way places. I live in a town of 800 people in Montana -- 2 of our 4 food establishments use Square (a BBQ joint + a Pizza place). I've also purchased Lobster Rolls on remote, tiny Maine islands with Square.
Having clients in the driver's seat is a stronger solution. If lawyers had to solicit clients, and settlements had to be approved by them, would cy pres or coupon settlements ever happen? Would the case we are discussing right now have been settled for such a small amount per plaintiff?

It's true that some other cases, where the harm to each individual is tiny, won't be brought at all, but I tend to think such harms are better suited to be ameliorated by regulators rather than through the misuse of the tort system.
> Show us the legal case for executing __a United States citizen__ without a trial.

It kind of says it is OK to kill non-citizen untermensch. I find this attitude very common and highly disturbing.

Russian army managed to takeover Crimea with only handful of deaths. If you count death toll, US army looks like bunch of happy-trigger-amateur-cowboys.
If the name was chosen deliberately, and not randomly by a computer, then it was probably chosen with the mythical beast in mind, not the comics. Hydras were snakes with many heads, and the problem with decentralized terrorist organizations has often been compared to the problem of killing a hydra; every time you cut off a head there seems to be another.
If that's a real concern, then that should be even more reason to join or donate, as it would indicate the situation in the US is vastly worse than most assume.
What relation do the positions from one another have?

Seems like Yellow is China, Blue is America, Red is Russia, etc. I don't understand the position of the dots to one another though.
> there's a metric ton of political capital at stake

I'm not disagreeing but killing American citizens without due process goes 100% against the fabric of our Constitution. Every special forces member I have met has a fervent desire to support and uphold the document that makes this country great. If we have enough intelligence to target this person with a drone, in my opinion, we probably have enough to send in a team to grab him.

> The decision to send in warm bodies is not taken lightly, in large part because failures can be catastrophic and quite public.

I think this statement holds true for both a drone assassination and sending in US personnel to capture an enemy combatant. Neither should be taken lightly.
Russian Bloggers v.s. Vladimir Putin
I found, in terms of learning a language quickly, that taking a course in programming language concepts where you have to learn a variety of different languages, covering functional, procedural, OO, symbolic, static and dynamically typed, etc, makes picking up new languages easier.

Most programming languages use ideas that already exist in other languages, so the more languages you learn, provided they cover the breadth of the major paradigms, the easier it is to pick up new ones. Alternatively, if you can't take a course or don't want to, make the effort to become competent in a number of languages that cover the spectrum described above. C++ developer? Learn python for the dynamic \ functional aspects. Then learn Haskel to force you to think pure functional. Or OCaml. Learning js, due to the way it implements objects, also taught me a lot about object oriented programming, as you are forced to use closures to get private variables, and it's object model is primitive so learning to work with that can be educational.
I disagree. This is covered by the article:

In battle, combatants engaged in war against America get no due process and may lawfully be killed. But citizens not in a battlefield, however despicable, are guaranteed a trial by our Constitution.

It's frustrating that, after reading all the other comments here and at the NY Times website, it seems like at least half of the people disagreeing with this article are doing so because they didn't read that passage.
My point exactly...you missed:

> For more information on inflection points, have a __read here__

If I hadn't seen that sentence, and thought, "what's here?", I wouldn't have even guessed that there were any links in the article.
Two harmful mistakes every developer should avoid
TL;DR don't conflate emotions with instinctive response.

Emotions are orthogonal to rationality, that's why you can devise rational plans to minimize or maximize your likelihood of feeling an emotion. In other words it's perfectly rational to act in such a way to prevent sadness or pain, if that's the value you want to optimize for.

You can imagine a creature (natural or artificial it doesn't matter) that feels emotions and nevertheless it doesn't start acting irrationally just whenever the emotion is strong enough.

I could argue that human beings are in many cases such creatures; even apparently irrational behaviour caused by emotional response usually is not a bad strategy in the original environment where that instinctive reaction was selected for.

I'm not sure it would be a good idea to create AI that simulate humans in all aspects, including unpredictability, just for the sake of it. But I understand some might be tempted to explore that area in order to research creativity, assuming it had something to do with unpredictability.

Perhaps we are just fooling ourselves into thinking that our very failures are what enables us to be so $special (put whatever aspect you prefer in $special). Unfortunately we don't have much means to compare us with something else.
The answer to America's power needs: Solar roads
What do you all do when they require it to be in Word, then? While I could just have a resume on at my personal site, about 99.9999999% of every job I've ever applied for, through a recruiter or not, has required my resume in Word format.

Also, I have several resumes, depending on the role of the job I'm applying/striving for.

But I appreciate the sentiment of using GitHub for a document version manager.
Indeed - what's funny (or would be funny if it wasn't so depressing) is how the NSA spokespeople try to spin it as such.

"Oh, we're not monitoring your calls, that would be bad! Just simple meta-data, nothing to worry about at all..."
The hardest part is to get started. Start with hello world and build up from there. Trying, failing, asking, succeeding is what you need to do first. Since you're already experienced. You won't have to learn concepts like pointers which can be hard to grasp at first.
Isn't the death penalty legal and quite widely supported in America? Seems to me citizens have no problem with the government killing other citizens. The question is what paperwork needs to be filled out first.
The concern being that we don't know is what makes this matter such a grave concern. Something of this nature, if decided as legal, needs to be enshrined in law so there can be no question of its use, lest we find ourselves facing the death penalty for traffic tickets.
I start with a book and/or the language/framework's online reference to gain basic familiarity, then build some breakable toys (say a calculator app or CRUD website) to test my newly gained knowledge/assumptions, and finally read forum threads about it to gain insight from people with more experience.
It's really depressing that people are citing studies to justify reading novels.

That's a story for the ages...
First of all, let me share that what Remi achieved with bots is incredible for Go players. When I was 16, the best bots out there were 6kyu, 5 ranks below the median rank for Go players.

Now, CrazyStone and Zen achieved 5d consistently on Go Servers, thats 5 ranks above the median. I have played Zen once, and I was utterly impressed by the quality of its play.

However, my game with the bot confirmed to me how bots WILL NOT beat professionals in a LONG LONG time. The bot excelled at tactical situations, and endgame. Maybe almost professional level. But the strategy is so weak, that the game turns into taking advantage in the first stage of the game, and then not losing it in the rest of it.

Until the computational power is strong enough to develop new openings, computers will always lag behind professionals in Go.
Real time emoji use on Twitter
This is a parody of hipsterdom, right? I think the artisanal toast is just off camera by an inch, right next to the pickles.
I have never had this need, but if I did I would just create a wildcard under my own domain:

; localhost
* .local.example.com A 127.0.0.1
; e.g. if dev server is 10.0.0.1
*.dev.example.com A 10.0.0.1

Hence, no 3rd party dependencies.
I would not be surprised if you can construct contrived examples of how Python 3 can be broken. In my experience, writing real life code, I ship more stable software writing in Python 3 than Python 2.

I mostly work with subprocesses or directly reading data from socket connections, and I run all of my bytes through strict mode. If something doesn't decode properly, an error is returned. Currently I am working on an interactive way (inside of Sublime Text) to present to the user a way to see text in different encodings so they can help debug the issue on their own.

So, yes, you need to write helper functions and have an interface to deal with properly handling encodings. This has been my experience in every language I've ever worked in. I can't imagine there is a way around it. Is this a reason Python 3 sucks compared to 2? Not in my experience. I had far more issues in Python 2 with encodings and not being sure what other libraries and packages had done in regards to handling unicode data. Hmm, so ftplib accepts unicode for filenames. Does it encode it? What encoding does it use? Oh, look at that, it has just been coercing to ascii because it can.

So yeah, writing a simple little toy command line app needs more boiler-plate to deal with unicode. Any real app is going to need that and a ton more. And you are going to have to decide how to error with encodings, and how to let users identify encodings. And you are going to need to write a global exception handler for Python to capture unexpected exceptions and log them to a file so users can send crash reports. Yay, sys.excepthook!

But anyway, I think it all comes back to the fact that I know what I am dealing with far more quickly with Python 3 than with 2. Again, maybe because I don't write apps that deal with local file paths (expect abstracted through a subprocess).

Unfortunately, most of the code where I deal with crappy encodings from FTP servers and SVN is closed source. The open source stuff is at https://github.com/wbond.
I have a single story, three bedroom home. Currently I have a cheap programmable thermostat, and it does next to nothing for me.

Some weekends I'm away, some weekends I'm at home. Most days I'm gone between specific times because of work, but sometimes I'll fire up the laptop and work from home.

That lack of awareness in my cheap programmable thermostat means any schedule I program into it would be wrong almost as often as it is right, which makes it only as good as any other simple thermostat with an up and a down button. Since it is wrong so much, that means I'm often wasting money heating or cooling a house that I'm not in.

Or I could just install a Nest, which not only would know whether or not I'm at home but which I could remotely control with my phone to let it know when I'm headed home or when I'll be gone all weekend.

Edit: The downvotes are most likely because you took something which is an obvious step up from conventional home heating and air controlling systems and has provable benefits, then called it a marketing scam based on vague anecdotal evidence, with a rather hostile "if you disagree then you're an idiot that believes in magic and fairies" tone, to boot.
You got it on your edit. The inbox is generated dynamically from multiple outboxes. The time series data, however, is not able to fit in one server's memory; it's sharded over multiple non-communicating Redis instances, collectively known as a pool. And multiple pools (complete replica sets) constitute the system.
Bokeh isn't just reduced depth of field. Bokeh is the quality of the out-of-focus areas. Shallow depth of field makes the bokeh more apparent, but the two are somewhat orthogonal.

Looking at Lytro's examples, e.g. [1], I would say that the Illum demonstrates poor quality bokeh as a result of the sensor limitations. The bokeh is quite noisy and pixelated (which is a strange thing to say about bokeh, but it's the result of the microlens sampling the Lytro sensor does).

The technology is very interesting, but looking at Lytro's pictures has convinced me that their camera will not suit my needs any time soon.

[1] https://pictures.lytro.com/lytro/albums/149429/embed?token=6...
Interesting- for me, Tiberian Sun was a huge disappointment. Maybe I was alone in this.
I wonder if there has been work on Bayesian spam filtering but for upworthy-style clickbait headlines. Phrase substitution is fun, but I'd love to see some sort of machine learning that could pick up on the clickbaityness of headlines.

For example, I can't remember the last time a headline with "This/These" or "You" wasn't clickbait.
Site in general is NSFW, this specific comic has some swearing.

Disclamer aside, I always thought this was a pretty hilarious alternative to real automation, in the spirit of the xkcd security wrench.

http://media.oglaf.com/comic/theautomaton.jpg
A noble intention but doesn't mesh perfectly with the reality of my lifestyle, ie feeding my kids.
A startup without face. The reasons why I’m hiding.
Perhaps you misunderstood. My point is that a single thermostat can only go so far in optimizing cooling in an installation much larger than a studio apartment. A $30 programmable thermostat can probably bring you within 90% of the maximum achievable optimization for all other dwellings. And, depending on where you live, a cheap fan can quite literally bring your cooling bill from hundreds of dollars per month to $10 per month. I've done exactly that for two years as I experimented with various ideas for a renovation that is under way now.
Generation 2 introduced the more exotic pokeballs through that whole apricot side event stuff. Generation 3 introduced several new balls including the Nest and Net balls that you were mentioning http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9_Ball#Introd...
I put them on my list of people I dontate to sometime last year, but I had the same experience as you. They utterly hassle you to the point of harassment once your "membership" begins to expire.

A reminder email or letter, fine. Maybe even a courtesy phone call, I can see that.

I've received no less than 7 or 8 letters from them, two or three phone calls, and I'm not sure how many emails because Google helpfully began filing them away as spam.

At least NPR takes the hint. Once your membership lapses, you get a single email/letter from them.
> Wow, how did I not know that?

To keep track of the fascinating and rapidly evolving Markdown ecosystem, I maintain an inventory¹ of Markdown dialects, editors, parsers, stylesheets, various tools, etc.

Kudos on Mkdown.com! It’s been added to the list.²

¹ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources
² https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/m...
This is run by 37signals, so should be pretty legit.
From the article: "I don’t doubt that Mr. Awlaki committed treason and deserved the most severe punishment."

Why does the author not doubt it? I doubt it until I have seen evidence.

It is my understanding that Awlaki called for the murder of American civilians, but I do not believe that meets the legal standard of treason. The Obama administration has said that Awlaki was involved "operationally" in planning attacks on Americans, but the national security state has said all manner of speech constitutes operational involvement in terrorism, including Javed Iqbal's broadcast of Al Manar, a Hezbollah-controlled television channel, and the Humanitarian Law Project's attempts to teach peaceful conflict resolution strategies to a terrorist group.
Re-building an app you've already done in another language is good..."Todo app" is kind of a "Hello world" for more experienced evs...

However...sometimes I'll just copy an example...the manual typing-out of code, for whatever psychological thing in my brain, really stimulates an extra sense of observation in me...I think part of it is that when I just read code, my brain is thinking "OK OK, get on to the point!"...but when I slow myself down enough to type out the code, my brain thinks "OK, while we're waiting for the typing to finish, let's think about this code".

If that's too easy for me, sometimes I'll make the exercise tricky for myself by coding in a different style. This can involve rewriting the original thing, even altering the functional design and interface...or, with JavaScript, re-writing a JS-framework-example in CoffeeScript (which kills too learning-birds with one exercise)
How Napoleon’s surgeon saved us all
How collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps are structured
One question: why do we have a judicial system and public laws and all that at all? Could the same kind of people that can be relied upon to only put people on those kill lists that are a clear threat not also take care of determining all other punishments and stuff? I fail to see what all of that complexity is needed for in other cases when it's apparently unnecessary for putting people on kill lists!?
If I understand the Wikipedia article correctly (and of course, if the article itself is correct) then the situation is actually the opposite: it's Cuban soil but under American jurisdiction.

As far as I can tell (and the whole situation is bizarre and confusing, so it's hard to be sure of anything), the prisoners there are under US civil jurisdiction, and the ongoing troubles they have with basic rights are due to the fact that they're "enemy combatants" than the fact that they're in Cuba. Being in another country seems to be more about making it in practice harder for US civil courts to exercise their jurisdiction, but not shut them out altogether. There have been quite a few relevant rulings by civil courts.
Well, in the case we're discussing, saying mean things about America and Obama on YouTube was the guys major claim to fame. There may have been credible intelligence that he was going to start putting al-Qaeda associated .gifs on Tumblr but of course something that sensitive is still Top Secret.
It's prior knowledge and then doing small projects or demos that enable you to learn the things you don't know. Take you time. Going from a desktop or web programming area to mobile is a bigger leap than you think. Especially because it sounds like it will involve learning the elegant and interesting objective-c.

For mobile programming I recommend watching the Google I/O and WWDC videos. They are verbose but it is the real deal.

Otherwise I like to do small tech demos or do tutorials from books.

Learn the IDEs better right away too. option-click stuff in Xcode and learn whatever Android Studio is supposed to do(I kid).