skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I read that paragraph 3 times and I think all it says is "readers have interests that are not (necessarily) identical to those of authors".

Well, specifically, its that "readers interest in gathering technical information is distinct and often at odds with the promotional purpose that publishing information serves for authors/publishers" -- there are other (also potentially conflicting, in some cases) interests each might have, but I was specifically focussing on one interest of readers and one interest of authors/publishers.

> Meanwhile, you continue to refer to technical writing that lacks a dateline as an "ad"

No, I don't. I refer to advertising for the author as a role which technical writing may have for which omitting the date may be useful even when it is counterproductive to the utility of the piece in its role as a source of technical information for the reader.

> technical writing does not become an advertisement merely by dint of lacking a dateline.

Nor have I, even once, said that it did. So I'm not sure why you feel the need to keep denying this claim that was never advanced.
Wouldn't be surprised if some sort of content distribution is next. They did buy a digital marketing company recently.
You'd still need some sort of pilothouse in that situation, which would tend to negate some of the clear-deck design benefits.

There's also the question of who's going to deploy (and untangle) the boarding ladder that pilots use to get aboard vessels. As well as the prospects of hacking that subsystem in order to divert the vessel.

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=bcSCNFJDy6Y

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=UT05TYaQV8w
I used to interview people for Google, and "I don't know but here's how I would go about finding out" almost never counted against candidates. What would count against a candidate is if they made a wrong assumption and then blindly proceeded as if that assumption was correct.
I imagine Google is on that. There's not a huge difference between a self-driving car and a self-driving truck.

A self driving ship on the open sea sounds like an easier engineering problem than a car/truck, simply because there is more space with less players. Getting into port may be much tougher to solve, although I'd imagine that a properly calibrated computer could compensate better for the action-reaction lag than humans.
The text [now updated] says it was solved at around 23:00 CET, after an hours outage.
Good point. I would amend that to "large events and tournaments with subscriber-only chats are poisoning their own hype."
Interested in this stuff? Get a computer engineering degree. This is precisely what we studied in my first-year programming classes. I have fond memories of lecture halls with blackboards on every wall, divided into right and left columns, showing simplified x86 assembly on the left, and C code on the right.

Another interesting topic in this area is calling conventions: the expectations of your compiler/platform on how the stack is arranged, to facilitate "linkage" between callers and callees. The "calling convention" dictates where the return value goes, where the processor registers get saved (so they can be restored when control transfers back from the called function to the caller), and the location of the return address. Also, it varies based on whether you're calling code in your own program or into the operating system -- OS calls always have to scrub all the registers, to avoid leaking protected state back to userspace.

Nice article.
Skydiver with 3 GoPros in the family. I started with the 1, got my wife a 2, and then I upgraded to a 3. The V1 is still alive and kicking, but the image quality was so much better on the 3 that I felt like I had to upgrade.

Also, we see new jumpers every year, and the first thing they want to do is start jumping with a GoPro (even if we don't want them to for safety reasons).

I think they're doing a good enough job with new features that people like me will keep upgrading for a while.
OT: your username is making me chuckle at this comment
Russia starting a cyber-war?
The hard part for me was that managing engineers takes a lot of time and energy, it's not possible to be a full time engineer and a full time manager.

Over time your understanding of the technical details of the work your team is doing will atrophy and where once you may have been an expert on all aspects of the system you must now rely on the judgement of the senior members of your team when making decisions. This is hard for a lot of people, to know that you don't know enough to make a decision and then to trust your team enough to help you make the right one.

Building that trust is important, because without it you'll make bad (or at least uninformed) technical decisions. it's easier if you moved up into a managerial role from a team you worked on instead of being hired to manage a team you just met.
I suppose it's better than "Bro"...
Yeah, I agree with all of that. Dim comments, tint strings and preprocessor/template/macro stuff, and we're good. Everything else is pointless at best and annoying when it inevitably screws up (color standard library functions differently? oh look, you missed one, and now it's going to bother me every time I use it. color built-in types differently? argh, now I'm going to want to use uint8_t instead of uint8 or U8...)
Now THIS is a good idea!
A Pythonic interface for Amazon's DynamoDB that supports Python 2 and 3
I've seen a lot of groupthink on MeFi.

I mean, there's groupthink on every site small enough to have recognizable usernames and associated reputations. But the groupthink eventually became too much for me and I left. The actively (and silently) wielded delete button only needed be used a couple of times.
This will be interesting if it happens. The big issue with SoundCloud is that, so long as they have been a gutsy startup acting as a promotional platform for music, rights-holders have stood back and let them exist. I would imagine that an acquisition by a company like Twitter would bring down all sorts of legal complexity - as with YouTube's acquisition by Google. If rights holders pushed for a backdated payment against copyright music on SoundCloud it could be hugely expensive, unless they've quietly managed to put something in place to get around this.
Setting n=12 for mass/springs shows some pretty nice dynamics in animated d3 graph. Loving the new in-code links, too.
new kind of piracy - cyber-piracy. Hijacking ship without getting up from couch. The Somali pirates will also need to adapt as after getting the ship boarded they would need to find control room and the actual connector to connect to to change the ship's direction, speed ...
Neat idea for very small, quick and dirty sites.

Pros:

* No build process (yet), source == build & no need for dev server
* Easy to integrate client specific code (e.g. browser compatibility)

Cons:

* How to transpile to CSS/JS?
* Apples-to-apples, slower than static sites with "build" process
* SEO?

TBD:

* Client processing speed
You can buy a plane ticket for someone else. You just can't fly using someone else's ticket.

Why would that not work for concert tickets?

The only issue I can think of is giving two (or more) tickets to someone as a gift so they, and the friend(s) of their choice, can go to a concert together.

This could be handled by selling "friend" tickets that are only valid if the person named on the primary ticket is accompanying them. There would probably need to be a limit on the number of "friend" tickets that could be purchased along with each primary ticket.

For a scalper to sell these tickets, they would need to accompany their buyers through the doors. Scalpers wouldn't be able to resell their primary ticket, which would increase the costs for scalpers but not anyone else. Each scalper would only be able to sell a small number of tickets due to the friend limit.
To add to that, for comparison, they'd need $6 CPM worth of ads on all their pageviews to make the same amount just from ads.
Volvo Trucks is doing a lot of work on that. There are various "tricks" like going along a fixed route, or several automatic trucks following a leader truck with a driver.
In 99.9999999% of all cases, an animated background is a bad idea. I'll echo the sentiment that there's far too much animation on the page, nearly reminiscent of GeoCities websites. Intro animations are fine, but speed them up and start with something on the page.
Think: NPR-loving, female-friendly left-leaning cozy-fest discussing this that and the other.
The most plausible explanation is avalanche:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident#Theories
Actually I don't accept your premise that a wordy, English-like language is easier to read. Code must be both comfortable to read & write (i.e., elegant). If we assume our reader knows both language A & B, then 1 line in language A is definitely easier to read than the equivalent 10 lines in language B. Just because language B looks more familiar does not mean the precise semantics come across better. A small set of keywords is easier to fit in your head. Furthermore, in the more verbose language you are forced to spend energy that could also be spent in thinking about whether the code is correct.

Regular expressions can be properly documented in a multiline style with comments etc. For a non-trivial regular expression, the previous example holds: converting the regular expression to a sequence of if-else statements would easily take 10x the number of lines. On top of that, regular expressions are implemented efficiently. That said, I do believe comments are necessary and don't think Perl is a good language to use.

The argument about static typing and verbosity is moot, because static typing does not have to be manifest typing, since type inference can provide the advantages of static typing without the verbosity.

Regarding taking programming seriously, I don't believe that has very much to do with the language, but rather with the software engineering process, cf. http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
So this is the famous "losing hearts and minds".
Given that that new polar region would get way less sun than either of the existing poles, the icebergs below it might grow a lot higher than they do at the (ant)arctic.

Of course, there are way too many unknowns here. Icebergs will collapse under their own weight at some height, but gravity from the moon would somewhat counteract that. I also wonder what weather patterns would look like, whether stalactites could form on the moon, etc.

Maybe, we could get ice to connect earth and moon before the moon fell down to earth.
> I threw one in it's case, out of a car going 90mph

On purpose?
Clearly a test for who can withstand network partition...
Large container ships actually go too fast for pirates to catch. It is usually smaller ships that are in danger.
Check this out for primary sources:

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs
I use dsh for this:
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/dsh.html.en

It's command line, but you can set up groups of servers and execute commands against all of the machines in a group at once.
+1

confd + haproxy would be a better choice.

I have plans do roll the cocktail out, but running the HA prox y on each machine, much like the airbnb smartstack: http://nerds.airbnb.com/smartstack-service-discovery-cloud/
That's absolutely fascinating. Do you have a source for further reading on those optimizations? I haven't been able to find anything with a bit of googling.
A technology company going public isn't?
Waze has nothing to do with OpenStreetMap
It looks really nice, but I don't think I could justify putting my keys into a third-party's hands. The focus on security is commendable, but at the end of the day, I'm responsible for the security of my company's infrastructure, and if something were to happen, telling the higher-ups that "yeah, we got 0wned because we gave root to a third party that we don't have any control over" is a fast way to be out of a job.

Leaving the keys to the kingdom in the hands of a third party who you can't directly audit or patch is an enormous liability.
Current state in climate change. Are things THAT bad?
The Hex-Rays Decompiler attempts to do this for analysis purposes (that is, the resulting code is intended to be human-readable, but not necessarily compiled): https://www.hex-rays.com/products/decompiler

Unfortunately, I've not sprung for a license, so I can't comment on its efficacy.
Pirates usually do not have capacity to offload ship - they use small fishing boats and speedboats that won't hold even one container. Cargo in most containers is not very valuable (who need container of t-shirts 600 miles away from closest shore?). Finding container with valuables (IPhones/etc) is difficult as there is no accessible manifest on the ship and opening containers is time-consuming.

I also assume that boat will automatically inform authorities and navy/security will be able to reach ship in a matter of hours. With no hostages on container ship, security can just blow up fishing boat/speed boat pirates used and then wait until they run out of food/water on a container ship. Pirates won't be able to control engine/rudder so there is not much they can do other than to surrender.
welcome to low/mid-level management. You get squeezed from the top and bottom. Everybody will hate you, so you just try and hit deadlines.

It also sounds like a typical story where the larger organization was trying to keep management lean, without realizing that it really did take multiple people to do the job.

One place I worked at ground through three managers in 6 months (with 120 people under them) before finally getting the clue and hiring a proper team of 7 to do the job.

It's not uncommon at all and it really is the upper management's responsibility to properly staff their low/mid management teams.
Does Your Business Need a Selfie?
This is rough back of the envelope calculations, but we only have 62k paid users, only about 12k come back every day, so subscriptions would need something like 25%-50% of the daily userbase paying, not just 2%.
It seems like a number of newer, growing startups are making sure there are individual contributor paths for growth. What would you like to see as a solution?

Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?
Unfortunately, most of the papers I found by googling are behind paywalls :(
Nice post. Another one I find useful is to define your own log function, e.g.,

function log(x) {console.log(x);};

You'd use log instead of console.log for debugging your code. Then, to turn off logging, you set

function log(x) {};

or have a boolean switch in log function to do a similar thing.
You could even use this approach to define debug levels to enable/disable.
Right, but all you're arguing for is a shift of legal responsibility on a project that's unlikely to be bothered legally, which will in-turn add another meta layer of development for the people involved(let's build a patcher).

It's illegal, yes.

It's also :
1) a massive PR blow to sue fans who have taken an interest
2) a legal money-sink on decades old property that isn't producing less profit as a result.

For all you know, this github could have generated revenue for Nintendo through the revitalization of interest in the franchise using nostalgia against current day software developers...
VMware Hybrid Cloud Service reddit_ama
Meet some of the people behind the new VMware cloud infrastructure service (vCHS)
Uber drivers form association similar to union
It happened – Baja Blast in stores...
With Mefi, one could always quote someone in reply to make things clear. Some of the best discussions online happen over at Metafilter. (I find HN interesting due to it's SV audience, but it functionally feels like an old version of reddit.)
Thanks Jerry, I appreciate it. I wont let this post prevent me from self motivating to write the next post (and I have time now since I just finished my talk on WebGL (wow graphics is exciting))! I learned of the term from Dan, who reviewed my last post.
It's not bad form to post a link to someone else's content. On the contrary, on Reddit, posting only self-promotional links is considered spammy, though I'm not sure what people would say about it here.
just let your imagination run wild and you'll hit it pretty much all.
I would not be surprised that you can make engine so reliable that it basically never breaks and just need routine maintenance in ports. Also if you have two independent engines and one breaks, you can just use second engine to get to the closest port.
You know, if you offered me a way to subscribe, I would :)

Heck, I just saw donations can be recurring, so let's do that instead. If you made this a bit more prominent, I'm sure quite a few people would love to chip in.
I have no idea. I'd probably pick Ensure as well, I think it's cheaper per can and less hassle.

Actually, I have lived off of Ensure before. When I had my wisdom teeth yanked, they had to break my lower jaw to get them out (it was a big deal with a specialist and general anesthesia and everything). I could open my jaw for about 3 months and lived off of a diet of only Ensure for the entire time. I actually put on a few pounds believe it or not during this time.
Yes... but for a SW engineer with no hardware experience. It will get him to a working prototype and help him understand some of the system groups involved. Hiring a HW guy is a waste of time unless you have plenty of $$ and the GO signal from the consumer. The guys behind the "Pebble" watch prototyped on Ardunio
I'm a naturally competitive individual and I like to out-compete my peers at work - in other words, to win. I don't think this part of human nature will ever lessen no matter how far technology advances.
I think it's fear. How do you measure that a manager is doing a good job?

If you only judge by the team shipping on time or hitting their number, then a dictator/slave driver looks pretty good early on.

If you judge by employee morale, someone that misses numbers but doesn't overstress their team can look good.

Unfortunately, things like employee churn are lagging indicators, so if a manager wants to look good, the temptation will always be there to take credit for themselves out of self-preservation, even if it's all in their head that they're in any danger of losing their job.
It might work "best" on mobile devices, but I'm afraid that "best" is still pretty awful. In Chrome on a Moto G the frontpage gets maybe 5fps when scrolling. And not even consistently, but with seemingly random intervals between refreshes. The effect is physically nauseating, a bit like bad VR. On the same phone with Firefox it's even worse. The touch response is just so badly off that I can't even come up with a mental model of what's happening.

I'm sure you guys are proud of launching, and receiving criticism is never fun. But honestly there's no way this thing is usable at all on a midrange Android phone. If you as a company think otherwise, there must be some kind of collective self-delusion going on that you need to work out.

(If instead you had to launch now for some reason, even if you knew that the system isn't really production quality yet on most platforms... Well, too bad. But maybe you could benefit from stating up front on the page the environments where you expect it to work well, before all the launch goodwill is squandered by people not viewing the page on exactly the right platform.)
I don't have a personal site, but I've built a couple gratis for friends. Joomla is the goto CMS for that case since its powerful enough that I can quickly setup menus, contact page, etc and simple enough that they can manage it without needing to call me up for most changes.
So why haven't they already done that and eliminated a 3rd of the on-board crew requirements?
Beautiful, fast interactive graphics. Would be good to have link to source on the page.
Apart from the slow pace at which the page scrolls back, the fact when it's doing so you cannot scroll up anymore (or down when you're at the bottom of the page) annoys me even more.

What Apple did, making scrolling behave like a sheet of paper confirmed using a rubber band, seems more natural than what this "3d layout engine" is doing. Giving it even more thought, it makes sense that even on a non-scrollable page scrolling (giving some form of input) should at least cause a confirmation that it recognised the action you preformed.
aha - should have read your comment more closely - Whatever they are doing it's not likely any civilian project will want the space shuttle to stay up there for a year.

Ok - now I am intrigued as to what they are doing.
Got an iPhone 5 and a daughter? Buy this robot.
> Assuming 10% of the uniques are registered users

MeFi has way fewer than 600k active registered users. There are a little over 200k user IDs, but those are allocated at the beginning of the signup process and a lot of people bail out before paying the $5.

I took a quick random sample of 100 userids, and only 30 of them had completed the signup process. Of those, 7 were visibly active (posting, commenting or marking something as "favorite") in the last 12 months.

So the number of registered unique visitors is at most about 60,000, and probably closer to 10,000.

EDIT: This comment is superfluous since matthaughey chimed in while I was posting, but I'm a bit pleased that my estimate was so close.
I believe this is a big loss.

Exactly for the reasons you stated.

Funny, isn't it?
American Design and Master-Craft Initiative
Considering busybox (statically-linked ls, etc.) is 2MB, 1MB is pretty impressive.
What do you think will be the valuation of the company?
The way I manage this part of my work is the following setup:

* iPad mini retina

* Adonit Jot Pro (stylus)

* Adonit Jot Tote (A protective case, fitting with the smart cover, and holds the stylus)

* UPad for iPad (note taking app)

It's a setup small and light enough that I'm not worried about 'bulking' the small profile of the mini, but also solid enough I can throw it into my bag and haul it around without worrying about protecting it.

The note taking app allows for handwriting into a box that is then represented on the page (so I can write big and have it appear small and readable on-page).

I've been using this since each of the products was released and it would be extremely difficult to replace any part for me.

This product might be cheaper, but I would say the number one advantage of my setup is that at any time I can just use it 'as an ipad' and not a notetaking business device.
It's called an idiom, and when interpreted literally or historically they are offensive, like "busting our balls" for example, many many of them are offensive if you put on your HR hat. That said, they are commonly used and in that context are not offensive.
I for one would still appreciate a link - I think those of us on academic networks should be able to see most papers behind paywalls
Trains do that.

It's ludicrous that there are so many long haul trucks on the interstates. The containers ought to be on trains, and trucks used for the 'last mile'. This would save on labor, fuel, maintenance, and roads. (Most road damage is from heavy trucks.)

The reason this doesn't happen is because of the tax and subsidy structure that heavily favors trucking over rail.
A Generalization of Secure Distributed Hash Tables
Why are the rocks in the centre "fused together"? Gravity. What other force is there that makes the Moon spherical and holds it together?

The point you make about the tidally-locked orbit doesn't hold. Tidal forces are there whether or not the object is tidally locked. The tidal forces would be high enough to rip the Moon apart if it's as close to the Earth as in this article.

The Roche limit can be derived for rigid bodies (like the Moon) or liquid bodies. The one for rigid bodies is closer to the central body than the one for liquid bodies.