skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you really sure the French helped to start the Iraq War?

More seriously, I think it is reasonable to prefer that tech companies stay away from political figures. Suppose Rice was appointed by Google or Facebook instead of Dropbox. Or maybe George W. Bush himself. Wouldn't you feel unconfortable?

I would. Not because of Bush or Rice are right or left, did this or that, but just because they are politicians, belonging to another world. We, hackers of the tech industry, should not let them in. It is bringing the wolf to the sheepfold. A rotten fruit in the plate.

Not to say that our industry is clean: it already has enough of politics and guys with blood on their hands. We should just avoid getting more of them.

I would certainly prefer an ex-drug dealer or an ex-pimp to become member of the board of some cherished tech company than even the most seemingly innocuous politician.

Maybe I am a bit extreme, but it is probably expressing what some other people feel. So, even if Rice had a cleaner record, it would still be not ok to join Dropbox' Board.
One upvote is not enough to get to the front page, so I'm not exactly sure what you're expecting, nor how the current situation differs from your expectation. Perhaps you could be a little clearer and say exactly what you're doing, exactly what you expect, and specifically how these things are different from each other.

Certainly, as someone else has commented[0], clicking the up arrow does not always change the score you see until you refresh the page. Also, as someone else has commented[1], the system has "voting ring" detection systems, and sometimes it thinks votes are part of a voting ring and then doesn't count the vote at all, and might even apply a penalty to the item's ranking.

So you need to be more specific. Also, you can ask about specific incongruities by emailing hn@ycominator.com.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747941

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747977
It seems that's the tool used by BBC.

http://shorthand.com/
Can it be used from ClojureScript?
A lot of people include Apple when talking about how the big companies are pushing EME, but Safari is now the only browser that hasn't announced support for it. I assume they'll eventually do it, but it's worth noting that Firefox wasn't the last browser to announce support.
And Blender too.
It probably will be once DRM/EME is available in every browser. At least the chances are increasing, and that's exactly why making DRM ubiquituous and easily accessible is such a bad idea.

The problem is not that Mozilla implementing EME removes leverage to force Netflix into abandoning DRM (this won't happen anyway anytime soon), the problem is that once DRM is readily available without a large technological investment and without losing too many users, virtually everyone will use it for virtually everything, simply because there is little to none incentive not to do it, from a publisher's perspective.
I'll give an example of a situation where I recently had to write a throttle function that works in the same way as this library.

We have a TCP connection down which we need to send (soft) real-time updates about a large data set. However, the thread sending out the updates has a fixed sized buffer per client that's shared between every part of the system communicating with that particular client. If the buffer gets full, it disconnects the client (incorrectly reasoning the fault was the client was requesting too much data).

In certain, not particularly uncommon circumstances, it was possible to end up needing to send out a large number of updates which would blow the buffer and disconnect the client. We considered various fixes that would give feedback about the size of the buffer, but the only feedback that would reliably not blow the buffer would be the block the producer when the buffer got full. This obviously has a huge rippling effect throughout the rest of the system, some of which have firmer real-time requirements, and was too big a task to fix at that time.

Looking at the updates, we observed there were two types of data patterns: frequent short bursts and these (comparatively) rare long sequence of updates. By rate limiting them to a maximum of n messages in any given window of a second the frequent short bursts would get sent immediately and unimpeded, while the long sequences would be broken up, giving the previous messages time to be dequeued from the buffer and sent down the TCP connection before the next batch arrived.

It's crude, but so far it's worked and given us time to work out a better system-wide solution to the problem.
I wasn't meaning to criticise the library. The point, if any, was just jabbing at how he is constantly gifting us with ingenious demos, but markets in such a way that people tend to think "D3 is a great library because it lets you do this" rather than "Mike Bostock is a genius for coming up with this."
Thanks @jaredsohn . I wonder how I can get in touch with them.

I have been trying to preview it, but the it get stuck after Enter keywords.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jr3kkq1x4p6wf3q/Screenshot%202014-...
Not quite. It appeared about the same time as git and Hg already lost its battle against git for becoming The VCS Of The Choice[tm].

Even then, Mercurial works in about the same operation model as git.
It isn't healthy to have one organisation become the gate keeper for all the 3rd party software.
They haven't just lost this one battle though - they've set themselves up to lose a thousand further battles in the future. This puts Mozilla in a very bad strategic position; once DRM in the form of EME is relied on by a large chunk of the web, they have no way of resisting demands from content providers and their EME module provider to make it more invasive in an attempt to make it more robust. If sites like Youtube start relying on EME, something they will not do without widespread browser support initially, Mozilla will hardly be able to risk losing support for them.
I can't manage to type the star. FF29, Win, German keyboard.
Four billion years of evolution? Professor Russell Foster from Oxford University has no clue, evoluton learned us to sleep polyphasic, like babies, where you need far less sleep than the 8 recommended hours. I'm sure even Thomas Edison took regular naps.
Many people love them, but I never got the hang of pushd and popd. These days, I use a CDPATH and z[1]. I also use zsh, which supports handy little things such as cd - (cd to previous directory).

If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend z. It's impossible to Google for, but it's oh-so-convenient.

1. https://github.com/rupa/z
Now that you mention it, building a static site generator would make a great learning exercise for a new programmer. Since they are a fairly common personal project, there are a lot of examples from which to examine.
Haswell Transactional Memory
Americans, Canadians, British, French, German, Australian, etc, etc, etc all helped to start the Iraq War. Americans are especially guilty.

This is a sweeping and completely unfair generalization. Plenty of Americans opposed the war, as the hundreds of thousands of protesters in major cities (300-400k just in NYC) at the time showed. The polls didn't show an overwhelming majority support for the war either.
Although this technically works, in some cases it may lead to strange bits of misbehavior. (Depending on where you do it, the app may end up in the wrong audit session or mach namespace, and it may also be missing some environment variables that it was expecting).

The open command does allow you to specify command-line arguments to pass to the application (via --args), which is generally a safer way to do things.
I use multiple POSIX environments (OS X at work, Linux Mint and Xubuntu at home), and I find it handy to create common aliases for differently implemented commands to keep the environments consistent.

For example, I set the letter 'o' as an alias for 'open' on OS X, and to "thunar" on Xubuntu and "nemo" on Linux Mint.
I made one last weekend with nodejs and express, at least it's a good exercise for stretching your muscles in a new programming language.
I don't know...if Mozilla is still having problem with tab animations by now, why not just scrap it all together until their multi-process gain some ground.

All this fancy animations they've added into Australis are non-essentials and impacting their already super busy single threaded model.
Some cold water: Square Wallet was discontinued 2 days after this article was published.

If that doesn’t convince you to take these puffy “payments revolution” pieces with a huge grain of salt I don’t know what will. They tend to be big on exciting futuristic hype and pretty poorly reasoned when it comes to actual analysis.

For example, it just blasts on through the “PayPal accepted at major retailer!” opening without even touching on whether there’s a reason for consumers to use it. Hint: not much. Credit cards offer rewards and don't require entering your phone number, plus have well established consumer protections.

We now know that Simple was incredibly overhyped. It wasn’t a revolutionary un-bank, it was a regular banking UI layer with maybe a couple more budgeting features and a more modern design. It was acquired by a bank -- not exactly a monopoly killer.

M-PESA is cool but it is not the “end of a monopoly”. It is a practical solution for an underserved market. The article even notes that fewer people even use banks in the first place. Ergo, not ending a monopoly.

Bitcoin, too early to tell what niches it may find (maybe international transfers). But none of its coverage AFAIK has made a compelling argument for why ordinary consumers would generally choose it over cards. Hard to see how that would break that monopoly.
Just mucking around, came up with this:

wc -l < /usr/share/dict/words | xargs -I {} jot -r {} 100000 | paste -d " " - /usr/share/dict/words | sort | awk '{print $2 "! "}' | say
'cd -' is implemented by the cd command using the OLDPWD environment variable. It works in all shells.
Show HN: Mailin – Artisanal inbound emails for every web app
X/0.0 is safe, and will always return NaN, no matter the language -- as long as 0.0 is a representation of an IEEE754 floating-point value, and as long as the expression "X/0.0" is interpreted as coercing X into a floating-point value in order to do fpdiv(X, 0.0) -- then safely returning Infinity here (or NaN in the case of 0/0.0) is required of the FPU in order for it to be considered IEEE754-compliant.

On the other hand, X/0 (integer division-by-zero, where X is not a floating-point value either) usually does cause an exception. In fact, in bare-metal ASM without a trap-handler interrupt set up, it halts the processor entirely.
A subscription to The Economist is well worth the money, in my opinion.
The beauty of constraints
Show HN: cool project that I built (0 comments, 0 points)

Show HN: cool project that I built with Go and Node.js (23442 comments, 63563234 points)

(Not that I'm bitter about lack of exposure due to not being a clickbaiter or anything... And no, it's not that people looked at the link and just didn't think it was interesting -- according to web server logs, I didn't get a single click at all :P )
Except that the first one is supported by TAB-completion.
>I'm not going to say everybody needs the same amount of sleep.

I am going to go one step further and claim that anyone who says they work 10+ hour days regularly and are still productive is full of shit. I have seen too many of those people either burn up or not actually be able to keep up with me when crunch time comes and a two day caffeine and less legal binge is the only way to do what you know needs to get done to ship.

What I have seen for people who supposedly work ridiculous hours is a largely useless body warming a chair and keeping middle management happy by being easily visible and "manageable".
Talking of "surprising internal SD cards" - the Kobo eReaders use an internal MicroSD card. This makes hacking and tinkering really easy.

They bizarre and frustrating Kobo set up procedure (connect the Kobo to a computer; connect the computer and the Kobo to the Internet; download software update for the Kobo and software for the PC; set up accounts) can be avoided with a simple bit of SQL. This and other tinkering is mentioned here: http://uscoffings.net/clc/tech/embedded/kobo-touch/
HaLVM: Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine
The article doesn't mention the fun you can have with ssh + say.

My co-workers and I used to ssh into the iMacs of non-technical users in our office and have a good laugh from a nearby room.
Now that's an interesting site.

It would be cool if the free tier included one private project, so you could test it without making a public project full of typical test blathering. (I see the Discover page lists a few projects that are clearly only testing.)

The git import/export is very nice but looks a bit magicky -- am I right in thinking text files called anything other than document.txt will be silently ignored? I was looking at this with a view to working out how to import existing documents, ideally with history: what's the best workflow for that?

A serif font option in the editor/preview would be welcome.

Looking forward to trying this for something more substantial, though. Nice.
WordPress statistics for top 500k sites
It's hard to beat

cmd+space safari
I had a book called "Keys to Infinity" which was a kind of odd pop maths book.

It had some code in it.
What happens if I don't have any bitcoins to pay with?
I didn't know about `screencapture`. That's a fun one.

The Linux equivalent of `open` is `xdg-open`. I usually alias it to `op`, since `/bin/open` exists.

Another bit of terminal-sugar for OS X users:

alias lock='/System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend'

And most Linux users:

alias lock='gnome-screensaver-command -l'

If you find yourself accidentally triggering hot corners, the lock command is your savior.

I've sorta-documented this stuff over the years, but only for my own memory. https://gist.github.com/ggreer/3251885 contains some of my notes for what I do with a clean install of OS X. Some of the utility links are dated, but fixing the animation times really improves my quality of life.
I tend to use "cd -" instead, which goes to the previous directory. Coupled with searching the command line history (C-r in the default emacs-like mode of bash, ESC-/ if you have set vi-like mode with "set -o vi") you can move around quite fast and with little thought.
Another thing you can do to improve speed is learn the keybindings for readline. They are the same keybindings as emacs, and lots of other things use readline too like python shell, sqlite, etc. A very useful set of keys to have in your muscle memory. See the readline manual: http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#SEC3
presumably, you're out of luck. I don't think this particular monetizing model is very viable these days, except for really high-quality content/websites, which probably have better deals already, anyway.
>Patented technology

Did you patent paywalls?
My impression is that people who spend 10+ hour day in work tend to spend a lot of time socializing, on facebook or otherwise wasting.

The problem often is that their needs to socialize and relax are not lower. Without realizing it, they started to use time spend in work to fulfill those needs. It slows down everybody, but looks good to management.
It'a regarding the summarization algorithm and not a paywall.
> How is Lua's performance compared to NodeJS, or compiled languages such as Java or Go

This might help: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

> Does it make sense to stuck everything into a (used to be ) reverse proxy server ?

Just like putting stuff into Apache or whatever other webserver you like.
A nice formulation of the first part of yout post is Goodhart's Law: If you use a correlated metric to measure something qualitative, people will optimize toward the metric, and it'll stop correlating.

Some reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/
I've been wondering, with so many static site generators, isn't there one geared toward the "brochureware" market? I'm thinking of something that is very easy to use and maybe imposes rigid assumptions for non-technical people.
A related trick is to use parentheses to create a subshell, in the case where you have a fixed command sequence you want to execute in another directory but you don't want to stay there:

$ pwd
/tmp
$ mkdir -p a/b/c
$ ( cd a/b/c ; pwd )
/tmp/a/b/c
$ pwd
/tmp
Why *not* parse `ls`?
One command I can't live without: textutil.

Basically it's a command-line front end to Apple's TextKit file import/export library. Works with a bunch of rich text/word processor formats, including OpenDoc, RTF, HTML 5, and MS Word. Critically, the HTML it emits is vastly better than the bloated crap that comes out of Microsoft Word or LibreOffice when you save as HTML ...

Install pandoc and multimarkdown as well and you've got the three pillars of a powerful, easy-to-use multiformat text processing system.
Related google tech talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8

Somewhere in the middle he describes experiments they made with sleep. Essentially, they took a person, made them sleep a lot and then measured performance difference. Performance went up.

Sleep a lot meant sleep enough to recover from sleep dept and then around 8 hours every night.
8th grade programming course at school in the 80s. They taught us Basic back then.
We aren't horses or cows, which do exactly as you say and nearly never sleep.

Our species has evolved for at least 50 million years to sleep on tree tops in nests for the full night within a colony, viz all higher primates and many lesser ones all the way down to Lemurs. The homo genus, where we have evidence, has shown exactly the same patterns of sleep as modern humans. And add to that the last 400,000 after the invention of fire where any modern camper wouldn't have felt out of place inside any group of proto-humans.
Yeah, that may sound misleading without context. Its the algo we are in the process of patenting.
Ways for Firefox to fight DRM: don't implement DRM.

Doing this has put Firefox in a really awful strategic position for fighting DRM on the Web in future. Once large swathes of content starts being DRMed - which is only feasible if all major web browsers support it - Mozilla will not be in a position to fight future encroachment, such as demands from their DRM provider for access outside the sandbox to verify the decrypted data isn't being siphoned off. They won't be able to do anything to stop being pictures being DRMed either, should their DRM provider decide to support it. It's not clear they'd even be able to fight DRM on entire HTML pages since doing so may risk losing video DRM support and access to vast swathes of the Web.

To be honest, Apple are more likely to pose an obstacle to web DRM than Mozilla at this point. While they plan to support EME too I suspect their financial terms for using it may well go beyond what content providers are willing to pay.
With the right zsh plugin, either of them will tab complete properly. (I think "osx" from oh-my-zsh is the one that does it on mine)

Edit: looks like this is actually built into zsh. Slightly surprised, but just goes to show I know almost nothing about the shell I use every day.
I want "remote pbcopy"! I'd like to be able to log in to any remote host (usually Linux in my case), then tack something onto the command line I'm typing to copy it into the pastebuffer.

ssh somehost
cd /some/dir
grep -lr foo . | remote_pbcopy

I guess something like this is possible with GNU Screen or with Tmux, and perhaps the Tmux/iTerm interaction helps, but I've never figured it out.
Ask HN: Entrepreneurs/hackers with children 
How does having a family affect your value structure?

Does it replace your other baby (start-up, open source project) or just inspire you to do better?
I did some digging and it turns out I had autopushd set. No wonder I didn't understand the usefulness of pushd/popd; I was already using them.

Also, by "cd -" I meant cd -[tab], cd -1, cd -2, etc.
FreeBSD 11 plans and goals
Well, we can replace the payment system with any other kinds. Facebook likes, tweets as a payment are as valid :)
I've always just relied on zsh to deal with my pushd stack automatically. I don't frequently need to pushd (thanks to tmux's vertical splits), but when I do, it's inevitably something I don't think about until after I've swapped directories.
Sleep is not a luxury; it is an absolute necessity for our mammalian brains to function properly. It is a stretch to call it subjective. While it may be loosely thought of as subjective in the sense that we are capable of staying awake for varying periods of time, it is not something that we are capable of healthily carrying on without. The times of day/night that we need to sleep are pretty consistently and inherently set in our brain, and the amount that is optimal has been extensively studied.

The simple fact is that our brain does a lot of work throughout a day, and, in its standard operation, waste materials build up that, in large enough quantities, cause dysfunction or, when pushed to extremes, damage of the brain. During sleep, the space around our neurons and glial cells expands, and, as I understand it, the postulated function of this is to permit better flow of cerebrospinal fluid through our brains and thus flush them of waste material. I had mammalian sleep explained to me this way by an Anatomy and Physiology teacher - quite simply, sleep is not something that our brains can go without, and a properly functional brain (that is properly producing melatonin) sets and enforces a pretty strict circadian rhythm wherein we are awake during the day and asleep during the night. That is not to say that we are not capable of flexibility in this regard, but pushing our limits in regards to sleep is not a healthy practice.

Natural selection tends towards favoring the individuals in a population that display traits that make them superior survivors and reproducers within the population's environment - while you say that it would tend towards individuals who were capable of maintaining proper function without sleep, I would argue that sleep is a sort of built-in necessity of our complex and highly developed brains and that proper function of our brains can not be maintained without it. I would hypothesize that any individuals that were born with genetic traits that incapacitated or limited their ability to sleep (i.e., genetically induced insomnia) would be at a pretty extreme disadvantage compared to other members in the population. Although there are many nocturnal predators, none have been enough of a threat to our species that it has limited us in any significant or tangible way, and nor have any of them become so well adapted that they regularly threaten or prey upon us while we sleep.

Natural selection does not do much in the way of acting on neutral traits - neutral genetic traits tend to remain relatively consistent in a population as long as the environment remains relatively consistent such that, relative to the environment, those traits do not become particularly advantageous or disadvantageous. While there are exceptions wherein extremes are favored, it seems clear that any disadvantages posed by sleeping at night (in regards both to our modern species and our ancestors) are far outweighed by the advantages of being fully alert and functioning during our regular operational hours.
Wow. I never knew about those commands. I've been getting by with just plain cd, and "cd -" if I need to go back.
Not too sure about that, I do think that pay wall tech has stalled for sometime now.

How does one charge for consuming content on the internet? We think that consumers can potentially see the goods(in this case the summary) before acquiring or buying it whole.

The high quality sites pretty much run on trust, the other long tail of sites that want to monetize have to cram in ads. Time to change that?