skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I take this sentiment a bit further - unless it's throwaway-cheap, the reviews and word of mouth are stellar (they're usually not for any but the biggest hits), or the concept immediately clicks for me, I will pirate the game to try it out. If I like the pirated version, I _usually_ purchase the full game (but not always). Not having reasonable demos just increases game piracy.
Virtually every major bank has let hackers steal their customer's data. You lose, chump, now fuck off.
That is really good to know, thank you. I've been thinking of getting a console, but I have limited bandwidth via a satellite connection. Constant updates as you described would eat my allowance up really fast.
How to shuffle lists and run a lottery using just a pen and paper
Cool. I will try this app.
> look and sound like it has powered off while the updates are still installing

What happens if the user unplugs in this state?
More realistically, this title should say "intern / data scientist who enters the data into the model appointed board director"
headsmack yes, of course.
Oh bullshit. That's like saying capitalism is preventing me from enjoying my Ferrari because I don't have enough money to buy one. Why do you start from a false premise of being entitled to watch anything you feel like at the price of your choice? Just because the marginal cost of copying is low does not create an entitlement on your part, nor does it reflect the fact that the fixed costs of production are often terribly high and have to be recouped by selling a large number of copies.

Of course, a Ferrari is a physical thing. But every Ferrar sitting in a showroom is one that nobody has been willing to pay for yet. Does that mean you should be able to take it for a ride when the dealership closes at night as long as you have it back there by opening time the following day (ignoring depreciation)?
You know, I've recently started thikning - why do we even need explicit imports? Isn't the compiler/etc smart enough to figure out the right import 99% of the time?

Every file in a large project starts with dozens of redundant import lines. Why don't we have imports go the way of the inferred type?
> I would rather program in such a way that I do not need (say) to examine the entire state of my code.

But if you could examine the entire state, why wouldn't you? People build correct intuitions by comparing their mental model to reality. If you don't ever show see reality, or only peek at it through sprinkled print statements, then it becomes harder to build an accurate mental model. This applies whether we are talking about a beginner trying to understand how pointers work or an expert grappling with a complex system.

Programming is always limited by our ability to comprehend complexity. So enabling simpler systems is a win, sure, but so is getting better at understanding things.
I don't know if the parent was talking about that, but it's what I was trying to get at in the post.
>>> How much longer will we all have physical offices to work

Probably for a very long time. Nothing is like actual human contact.

>>> At what point do business completely stop accepting physical forms of payment?

Depends on the business. Some already did - Amazon doesn't accept cash as far as I can see. Some - like your local grocery store - probably never will, because sizable part of its clientele will still have cash.
Okay, fine, but what's up with the "click to encronosentate"? That word -- along with the somewhat more common "encronosenate" -- seems to appear only in captions to these pictures, copies of them, and tweets based on them.

"Cronos" refers to Saturn, I guess. But how does "saturnify" (roughly speaking) mean "enlarge image".

Perhaps this is a way to track how the pictures get shared?
Any picture of the Earth should have a giant fucking question mark right in the middle of it. That scientists and publishers egotistically declare their theories as truth actually drives any sense of wonder out of children contemplating a life of discovery. It's sick and irresponsible.
I used to love playing Amidar. I can still sing the tune.

(The guy who is playing in the attached video is an awesome player!)
> What’s needed now, of course, is a test of this idea. There are certainly social networks that allow up voting but not down voting (Medium being one of them).

The prototypical example of this type of system is Facebook. And there's a reason that people continually clamor for a Dislike button: not all content is good, in terms of either quality and sentiment, and allowing only upvotes reinforces a hive mind mentality, which is a bad thing in the long run.

(Fun Facebook Fact: Reporting a Facebook post actually decreases the number of Likes by 1.)
> I want to just type 'email' and see a list of functions and libraries relating to email.

Do people even remember what life was like before Google?

I type 'email python' and get back a link to an email module. Am I being closed-minded in thinking that can't get much easier?

Yeah, I need to understand a bit as to how email works, smtp and imap/pop and what not, and how to send vs receive email, but some level of understanding is just necessary.
I studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham (England, not Alabama) and we were taught the Pop-11 programming language[0] – whilst it's not extensively used in industry it might introduce some concepts that are otherwise missed during a Computer Science degree.

[0] http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/primer/
How is the domain openmined?
Hello everyone I am working on a project that is a Web Application on Online Education and I recently bought the domain openmined.com and spreadidea.com I would like to hear your HN readers' ideas for these domains which one should I use or neither ? I couldn't find anything catchy like twitter, flickr etc... What do you think ?
The "pixels" are misleading. It isn't pixels of an image of a planet, it's pixels of the point spread function of the diffraction limited smear of the planet. Increasing the resolution of that image isn't going to result in being able to resolve the planet itself, it'll just show a smudgy smeary point of light in greater detail. In order to actually resolve the planet into real pixels we'll need much larger telescopes, likely outside of Earth's atmosphere. And we're a long way off from that.
Nothing of a "different take" out there. And even if there would have been, it's only natural to speak praisingly about somebody you introduce.
Hello, author here. As I said, mostly stressed in the first post, I'm doing things the hard way as a learning exercise, building a bunch of infrastructure myself. I would use a better radio transceiver and a chip with actual USB and UARTs, etc. if it wasn't a self-study project. :)
Placeholders in form fields are harmful
You don't need Google fiber to send email or browse basic text site. Much better idea would be to force government sites that provide bill payments and other essential services (which 100% of them btw can be still paid by old fashioned phone call as far as I know) to have low bandwidth requirements and low compatibility reqs (i.e. no flash, no Java applets, no excessive graphics, etc.). This would also ensure better accessibility, but also would mean you never need 100M channel to just pay your bill.
Regardless of the meaning of the underlying domain, I believe it to be important to watch for easy typos or possibly lost meaning.

Personally, but that may be just me, I feel as though "openmined.com" is easily confused or typoed with "openminded.com". That alone is a risk of lost traffic.
I would argue that Google's job now includes executing javascript and evaluating dynamically loaded content.

Break the web.
I decided against software USB because the receiver is already spending much of its time trying to meet the real-time limits from the radio decoding, and the USB would be its own big undertaking.

As I stressed in the preceding post (http://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/05/16/radio-system-from-sc...), I'm intentionally doing these things the hard way, so I can learn how more of these things work at a deeper level than "use built-in functionality, configure to run at this baud rate, done". Otherwise, yeah, I'd use a 32-bit ARM chip and a better SMD transceiver. :)
I thought this project was about improving the programming experience for programmers, not students (or interns) who will in all likelihood never excell as programmers.

Edit: after downvotes I decided to read the whole thing afterall, but remain unswayed. This guy has an important opportunity and I sincerely dislike seeing it squandered.
I am wanting to use it for my site's difficulty predictor.

I would be making about 3 API calls per chain every 10 minutes to suffice for my needs.

That's about 12,960 api requests in a 30 day month.

I wouldn't be willing to spend any more than $5 on those 12,960 requests... because if that's what it cost, I could just setup a digital ocean vps and run the namecoin blockchain for $5/mo.

So somewhere in the order of $5/13,000 requests or about $0.40 per 1,000 requests sounds fair to me.
Robbery Suspect Tracked by GPS and Killed
"Openness," or open-mindedness, is an example of a cultural trait that does not need to change through adaptation.
Amongst Google's web server's special sauce is the QUIC protocol.
Now let me educate you a little, mummy.

When you say, "I find X disturbing", that means you are saying "X is not the norm; and I find that deviation upsetting". I am saying that _every_ major political party has that norm in India; otherwise, the 100+ years old laws against homosexuality would not have survived. If you find BJP's stance against homosexuality 'disturbing', then you must be having apoplectic fits at the Congress Party, which has governed India for 50+ years. If they were for gay rights, why didn't _they_ do something?

"I think Gandhi was a shit. I think Modi is a shit." ... LOL. Instead of bleating like a goat about the problems, offer a solution. The main reason people support Modi is that he can govern; and he has shown that in Gujarat. However low the bar may be, he is the only one of the current crop of "leaders" who has cleared it.

People want good governance, not platitudes. And sure as hell they don't want weed-smoking pseudo-intellectuals who couldn't survive a day doing real field work.
The lie about Edward Snowden that just won't die
I'm a huge Python fan (90% of my code is Python, work and private), but I don't think any more it's still the language to push. I have not much experience but it seems Go, Ruby, and Scratch seem to be the one's people should be heading towards (which one depends on the level of skill required). But it's really just my feeling, I have no data to proof it.
An Important Update About LifeLock Wallet
Catching an iPhone mugger without iCloud
Last week I got mugged, and lost my iPhone as a result. iCloud was not enabled, so "find my iPhone" wouldn't work (phone's GPS was water damaged anyway; it'd always think I was in Union Square even though that's not where it got water damaged).

I called my provider to add the phone to the stolen registry, disable calling, all the usual stuff.

To my surprise, a group text a friend of mine sent out got a response; apparently iMessage was still working and the genius in possession of the phone decided to respond to the group text with a "who's this".

I'm thinking of having someone else send an iMessage with a hyperlink, and attaching a script to get their IP (since they must be connecting via wi-fi) and send it to the authorities. Normally I'd consider it unlikely to work but this person has already shown they're not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

My question is: if you were in unlawful possession of somebody else's iPhone and not bright enough to wipe the device or get rid of it, what's an example of a text message you would be most likely to tap a hyperlink through?
I don't see why Verizon has any obligations to do business on the conditions which Comcast sets. It may very well be that the internet service is a loss leader for their TV service for them (I don't know that for the fact but sounds plausible from your description). They won't change their whole business strategy just because Comcast bribed some superintendent. I'd say in this case it's either the tenants find a way to get out of the vendor lockup, or they get no FiOS. It's not Verizon's fault.
Let me teach you Photoshop for free – Lesson number 2
Interesting examples you mentioned.

Go, I can understand. But why Ruby? It is just as old as Python, behaves very similarly, and its ecosystem for non-web related tasks pales in comparison. And why Scratch? I really enjoy it (I've taught many workshops to kids 6-14 yo with it) but I would absolutely not use it in anything else but introductory classes.
Oh electricity, such a wild beast. If we only could find a way to turn it off again after we've let it go.
Very small number of people are rich enough to build their own roads (with all rights of way issues, etc.). And each road would only connect very small number of points. Helicopter probably would be way, way cheaper at this point.

Paid roads with less traffic, etc. or paid lanes are a commonplace, OTOH, but one doesn't have to be exactly rich to use them.
> But if you could examine the entire state, why wouldn't you?

Well, I would, of course. As I said, I think his debugger ideas are good ones.

OTOH, there is a limited amount of effort available for improving programming, and I would prefer that such effort be directed toward other ends.

Part of the problem is that, in my experience, debuggers tend to encourage sloppy thinking. And the better the debugger is, the sloppier is the result. Using a debugger, together with thinking hard about a problem, can be a powerful combination. But all too often, I see debuggers used as substitutes for thinking hard; the way debuggers are designed seems to encourage this.

To put it in the terms you used, constructing a mental model and comparing it with what the debugger shows, is a great idea. But in practice, I'm faced with a choice: work on my mental model now or fire up the debugger now. The latter is less taxing, and is often chosen; this is likely harmful in the long run.
Most people are not aware of the attack vector (spoofing the phone number to reach the voice mail).
Andrew himself confirmed this: http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message...
It's sad, but there's no fact or even research behind Galdwell's "10000 hour" thing. Like most of his books, it's just made up bs.
The Power of Crowd Crawling. Collaborative,Distribuited Data Scrapping
Pushing for Python by comparing it to Java is a first step. But if you really want to do the right choice for all those students, you'd better compare it to other good languages. For instance I'm thinking of Haskell.

Imagine that post being about PHP vs. assembly and thus pushing PHP, or about Java vs assembly and thus pushing Java, or...
Personally, I think this is an extremely important topic, we need to change the way we program. It isn't the 70's anymore, why do we still program like it is.

Why does it take teams of developers to create and manage applications which do really simple tasks in the grand scheme of things (and I realize the amount of complexity in building applications is staggering, but large portions of it could be better automated). Where are the auto generated GUIs, where is the ability to ship execution control to arbitrary devices, where is a hypermedia layer with independent view and presentation code?

I'm approaching this from a different angle than the light table guys appear to be (I agree with everything they are saying). My angle is an attempt to build a cross platform module system (where platform includes runtime and programming language as well operating system and architecture): https://github.com/OffByOneStudios/massive-dangerzone

My argument is: before we can build the next generation of useful tools, we need a framework for managing both generations. massive-dangerzone is an attempt at bringing next generation usage (like that described in the article) to existing tools. It's still a big work in progress though, and is barely useful at the moment.
Tortoise Git is a pretty good tool, though it still has some UX hints from its predecessor, TorstoiseSVN. They're both very compelling tools in the Windows ecosystem, and certain things are actually less annoying with a proper GUI than the CLI equivalent--history viewing, for instance.

It's a pretty good addition to your toolbox in Windows, and I find it much less cumbersome than the Github client.
I'd have to agree, Go is suited to more intermediate level students and Scratch for extreme beginners and younger children, but Ruby? Ruby is like a harder to read, slower, less used python. Once rails falls(and it is falling) ruby will become a niche language.
Which is preceisly why publishers seek to impose deterrent penalties for copyright infringers, so as to increase the perceived risk.

some mythical starving artist grubbing away at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain

There are quite a lot of people, including myself, who make their living around the bottom of the Hollywood food chain. Attitudes like yours have made it incresingly difficult to launch small-budget projects of the sort that were designed to go direct to video, because ubiquitous low-cost piracy means that high-budget movies tend to crowd out low budget ones. Many world class directors, eg Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, got their start by doing low-budget exploitation pics that could be produced cheaply and sold cheaply. That market has been shrinking almost to nothing because piracy undermines not just cost structures but release windows, so in many ways it has become more difficult to bootstrap a film career than it used to be. Technology has made the process of shooting and editing a film a lot cheaper, but not across the board. Many economic inputs (like the cost of hiring locations or of feeding the cast and crew during production) cost as much or more as they always have, but it's a lot harder to raise a budget if you can't identify a predictable revenue stream.
It would be a good idea for the government at least to set the standard for their essential websites to not have 2MB+ footprint. As for the commercial ones, that would be for them to decide if they want larger audience or not.
See also http://cryptosphere.org
does moore's law apply to astrophysics or optics ?
I have a similar experience with Go in my spare time projects (very refreshing coming from a FORTRAN/C++ day job) which is a boon, but falls short of what the article describes. The way I interpreted it, even having to do the search in the first place is a problem to be solved. Being able to start typing "email" and have a context menu with functions available from a list of third-party libraries relating to email would be the goal. That way when you select "SendEmail()" in your code, it automatically pulls the library, installs the binary where it needs to be located (or pulls source and builds) without interrupting your workflow.

With package management systems standardized within a language (such as Go) the problem domain is reduced, but extending the solution across multiple languages sounds like another third-party tool than a language feature.
I think it's great that the named and unnamed people know we appreciate
their efforts, but me getting karma for it just feels kinda wrong.

A long time ago in pg's "Stave Off The Decline" submission, tptacek
suggested a "sincere flag" for submissions/comments that you could set
so you get no karma for the post. At the moment, I wish it existed.

Edit: Add reference
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404027
Great innovation. That invasive carp is crap for ecosystems.
Of course they could turn it off, but then the army of carp just waiting outside the parasitic barrier would take its chance and colonise the lake. Hence, no turn-off, at least not for both barriers at the same time.
"allowing only upvotes reinforces a hive mind mentality"

And allowing downvotes fixes this?

The best forum I take part in doesn't have upvotes. Chronology and individual filters only.
> "It seemingly goes against all a rescuer’s training"

Perhaps, but only if you don't have any training as a rescuer... Rescuer safety is always the first priority. A rescuer becoming another victim is just about the worst case scenario in any operation. It dramatically increases the resources needed, and does nothing to benefit the original victim.

My safety (and my crew's safety) first, _then_ the victim. We don't do them any good if we're dead or injured.

That's not to say you don't take calculated risks to effect rescues... That's the nature of the game. It's all about risk vs. reward. Entering electrified water to recover someone who is very likely already dead is an extremely high risk for a very low reward.

Source: Firefighter/Paramedic
I know little about the subject, but I'm sure there are differences between the limits of human height and the limits of biped primate height. If the giant of Castelnau were, as claimed, part of a "race of giants," it is not unreasonable to think this group explored the limits of biped height more profoundly, as a group, given that they could eliminate some (but not all) of the problems that height suggested.

On the latter point:

"There is no way a bronze age man with access to bronze age medical care was able to live long enough to grow nearly 3 feet taller than Wadlow."

You don't know that. Even in antiquity, with Iron Age medical care, men commonly lived to 100 years, with the absolute limit, as placed by the Etruscans, at 110 years, thus defining the Etruscan century at this number. Now, perhaps if the man in question was a giant there would be intrinsic difficulties in being gigantic, but natural selection within his tall genetic group could, as a group, overcome many of them. This is a very different situation that Robert Wadlow's, who did not come from exceptionally tall parents. If a group has selective pressure to become tall, it's an entirely different matter from an individual accidentally becoming tall.

Keep in mind there have been around 60 billion Homo Sapiens Sapiens, most of them outside historical record, and in prehistory, very isolated. This can commonly lead to vast phenotype differences. I would have to see stronger evidence to rule out that an adapted giant biped cannot reach 15 feet.
Not confident of their methodology, but it's clear to me that the 'sting' of downvotes introduces problems along with whatever other moderation benefits they might provide.

The problem gets worse when simple disagreement gets overloaded into the same downvoting that's meant to control destructive behavior. That sends the message that disagreement is punishable. Further, with the fading/de-ranking/hiding that's applied to low-scoring posts on HN and similar sites, it even sends the message that unpopular views should be censored.

My theory – which I've not yet convinced a social site to try – is that two separate axes of voting could help. The first is whether a post is valuable or destructive; the second is whether the reader agrees or disagrees.

In that way, the natural tendency to want to express an opinion with a single click, or 'win' a poll of popularity, can be captured and channeled into the agree/disagree measure, without the morale- and behavior-spoiling implications that come with the visibility-penalty/muzzling of "that's destructive" downvotes.
Again: drugs. Is taking marijuana less socially acceptable now after x decades of prohibition? No. It's completely bloody normal. And laws are slowly adjusting to the facts on the ground.

You missed the point he was making; it's still not acceptable to mug old ladies (or anyone else) to get money for drugs. Indeed, I predict that over time we'll see more and more drug use legalized, but any crimes committed under the influence of or in connection with drugs will involve substantially increased penalties, because the larger number of responsible drug consumers don't want to carry the can for people who can't or won't control their drug use and behavior.