skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a developer myself, I've seen first hand this new trend of scroll-jacking, parallax, animated, full-screen sections come in quicker than a rain storm. I am just glad the whole horizontal layout thing isn't a thing any more, horizontal sites were way worse in my opinion than this new trend of turning websites into Powerpoint presentations.

I do like the aesthetic this new trend has, but accessibility wise, it's a no-go. I feel bad for anyone with eyesight problems in particular who comes across this site and has to read text on rainbow coloured backgrounds. These kinds of sites are not very well accommodating to colour blind visitors and that's no way to run a business.

Then there are screen height issues with the design. People on net-books and iPad's in landscape orientation are probably not going to enjoy this site very much as nothing really fits on the screen properly. The result is undeniably beautiful though, and from an investor/board member perspective, I can definitely feel the enthusiasm from here. This is the kind of site that gets everyone on board, except the developers who have to build it (in most cases).
With 64MB RAM, this could have been a superior alternative to the TL-WR703n [1]. Still even with 32MB it's nice to see more devices and boards in this area.

[1] - http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n
Rails Legacy Applications – Q&A Michael Feathers, Adam Hawkins, Andrzej Krzywda
Surely that would disrupt the industry. Social, mobile, local!
Well yes, but libraries are really just an advanced form of copy/pasting and you can still do damage by using the library incorrectly, so you often end up using sections of examples by the people who wrote the library or who are otherwise experts in its use on how to implement the library correctly.
> If I'd started off believing in good-god then it would be a burden.

I disagree on that point. Even a good-god would have rules that are probably either complicated or vague, so trying to fulfill those will actually be a burden on your everyday life.

We are not talking about uncertainty here. Quite the contrary: we are talking about the clear certainty that there just is no true or false in these questions, not that we can’t determine them.

At least for me, once I realized that, I stopped wondering about an afterlife and just assumed the most probable version: nothing. And It doesn’t bother me in any way.

For morals it also helped me a lot, as I realized that is no universal good/bad. We (and especially I) create these notions ourselves and only by ourselves. That means if am faced with moral questions, I can freely think about what _I_ think is right or wrong and I don’t have to wonder about those omnipresent values that kind of seem to be there.

But you referenced “most people” and I agree that they probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these thinks. But that obviously doesn’t change my perspective on the world.

But to give you more practical example: I guess everybody in the western world is at least in some way faced with the question of how they are going to handle the fact that their comfort and well-being is in a considerable degree made possible by the suffering of others. This of course not a situation that we created with our own hands, but we life in and by our everyday life support a system that works like this. I would say that if you believe in absolute morals, you either have to dedicate a significant part of your life to do something about that or you are probably a hypocrite.

The mentioned realization allows you to avoid this dilemma.
You assume that all libraries are bug-free and documented accurately! I assure you that few are.
Republic, Lost, Lost (#SuperNotCool, Amazon)
Diamond camera lenses?
SQL Injection on eBay.com.au subdomain
You can run plenty of low-power microcontrollers on that kind of current if (a) you're happy to write in C and (b) you're not driving anything that needs more power like radios or networking.
I found this through /r/mildlyinteresting, and it just made me thing why exactly I find that subreddit, and these kinds of things, so interesting. Perhaps it's that it makes you think about mundane things that you normally don't give a second thought, or even notice?
Anyone know how much power this thing would draw? In my experience wifi is one of the more power-consuming components of a lightweight computer.
I'll confess that I have only recently just heard about this book and I recently bought it after reading it for free online because of how much I liked it. Honestly, I wish this had been a required textbook in my com sci classes.

I've only recently started to force myself to stay in the bash prompt...whenever I saw my coworkers type out scripts in this mode, I had roughly the same reaction as I did when seeing my mom's printouts of COBOL code: look at those old people with their old tricks.

The Art of Unix Programming, and the too few books similar to it, have been profoundly helpful in helping me understand that UNIX is a steadfast way of doing things...and even if much of the code and utilities are decades old, concepts like "Programs should do one thing well" and "Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines" are in, retrospect, part of contemporary object-oriented thought...but there's something significantly more tangible to how they're implemented in UNIX.

Of course, it's more than just a happy coincidence that UNIX tools are decades old and are yet still some of the best tools for the job...you can't ignore that the "UNIX Way" has something to do with that longevity. But given the practical usefulness of UNIX tools, combined with their educational value...I wish UNIX shell work was a core component of my college classes. Unfortunately, we immediately started working in Visual C++ and Eclipse...both of which are nice...but if you never use them again as a professional, the work of learning to navigate them was wasted...whereas the few things I learned in UNIX will seem to be around for a very long time.
Is that MIT article real? It's almost too good to be true.
Switching between article and comments and display of nested comments are great.
"Life Lessons From Navy SEAL Training"
The future is moving towards hypersonic platforms to deliver extremely-rapid strikes that rely on speed to penetrate highly defended targets. This is the direction that the U.S. military is taking with programs such as Prompt Global Strike [1].

See DARPA Falcon Project [2], Boeing X-51 [3] and Lockheed SR-72 [4].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike
[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project
[3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-51
[4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72
Same. I'm actually a little shocked HNers think regularly coping and pasting code snippets off the web is ok. That's, kind of crazy.

This is bad especially for young developers (such as myself). Not to mention jeopardizing the security and integrity of your software project.

I hear 'don't reinvent the wheel' often written in blogs etc. That is not good. The lazy developer would read that and go, 'oh, I dont need to know how these things work, it's already been done for me. I'll just slap A to B, no need to reinvent anything'

Imo how it should read instead is, 'keep reinventing the dam wheel till you understand how it was made, only then you're free from reinventing it'.
Drop the definitions of 'good vs evil' - decide on your own. What is your best guess as to the nature of the universe, how it works.

Your best guess is as equally right/wrong as everyone else's, but it will be something you can truly get behind. You don't have to search through only other people's ideas, to find something you like. You can simply create your own, if we didn't do that - humanity would have no definitions to play with. Why is yours any worse than some dude who died 800 years ago? It's not.

Shitty definitions will hurt you, better ones will be useful to you.

Are religious definitions the only definitions in existence, of COURSE NOT! - So choose outside of that paradigm if that suits you, mix and match from everyone's ideas and your own. The world will open up if you do that, you'll make mistakes, you'll learn stuff, you'll create stuff..

Anyway, that's my two cents.

This whole way of thinking, the idea that no-one knows shit - 'it's all just a best guess' is extremely liberating. At least for me. That's why.
>A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point?

If I may extend the previous metaphor: society already produces fanfiction.net, so I think we'll survive this too.
This sounds like something out of the onion. I think this is how you become irrelevant. Didn't yahoo do something similar?
EvoSuite springs to mind for that one [1]. Java only though, but their publications describe how it works well enough to port the ideas from what I can tell.

[1]: http://www.evosuite.org
I live in flyover country and I'd argue it's easier to form and maintain a team of engineers in another country than here. In other countries, the talent can't get to better locales for immigration reasons, leaving them stuck on whatever team they're on. In flyover country, there's a constant lure of your hard-trained talent to the tech hubs.
I believe there's an afterlife, because the system we live in is insanely complex. I won't discount that we may be simply living a temporary instance of a 'experience'. I won't discount that I may be completely wrong, and will vanish into a puff of nothingness. Either way I'm good.

However, regardless - I WISH there were more people like you on the planet, things would get a whole lot better if we just started discussions as thinking folk.
reminds me of the light hearted fights between theoretical physicists
Arrgh! This is the third time I've run into this "story" in the last 24 hours - let it go, internet!
'The Design of Rijndael', plus errata, is available in Joan Daemen's page [1]. As an addition, 'The Block Cipher Companion' [2] is a more recent, less AES-centric, overview on block ciphers.

As for elliptic curves, I'm a fan of Washington's 'Elliptic Curves: Number Theory and Cryptography' [3], which contains a lot of detail while remaining readable. But it might not the best introductory material.

[1] http://jda.noekeon.org/

[2] https://www.springer.com/computer/security+and+cryptology/bo...

[3] http://www2.math.umd.edu/~lcw/ellipticcurves.html
How emoji conquered the world – the inventor's story
I completely agree, but is "getting it rigt the first time" really THAT important?
The fact remains that in terms of military technology Iran is decades behind the western world. Their monthly demonstrations of "the best [aircraft|ship|submarine|drone] in the world" which then turn out to be fiberglass models of non-existing things, or photoshopped images, doesn't help to improve their image much either.

If it was that simple for them "to enlist the methods of science" to develop something worthwhile, they would have done it long ago. In fact Iran seems to have serious problems with military and defense R&D.
I haven't seen a linux computer on a potato battery but here's an msp430 running on a couple grapes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db6TWl5FSGw
...back, and to the left.

...back, and to the left.

...back, and to the left.
There is an enormous difference between writing in English and writing like Shakespeare, Hitchens, Rushdie, or Stephen King. When it comes to coding most people confuse learning syntax with writing great software.
Sure, you can argue that library use is copy-pasting, if those snippets you're pasting come with regression tests and have been code-reviewed by multiple people.

I'm going to go ahead and suggest that a tremendous number of encryption mistakes are made specifically because people copy-paste library invocations without understanding what they're invoking and why. When you just sling a chunk of code into a project without understanding what you're doing and why, the potential for bugs goes through the roof.
The GET part of the fastmail link in this blog post suggests this is a fastmail sponsored ad rather than honest opinions of an unbiased user:
http://www.fastmail.net/?STKI=12089553

Also, I don't see how "Getting my data back under control" is achieved by shifting from a free service to a paid service; if you're serious about this, you should rather setup your own mail server on a spareable machine (Raspberry Pi etc. + an ordinary desktop mail client + Roundcube etc).

And unless you use something like GPG, your email data is as secure as your corresponding mailbox.
Caching in Rails 4 Applications
Growing up before the Internet was broadly available, the telephone network had a real magic to it and exploring it was really kind of addictive. These days most of us take communication completely for granted and are constantly communicating with people all over the world via SMS, IM, email, etc. often with no thought for how amazing it really is.

I read Exploding The Phone[1] last summer and I couldn't put it down. The first couple chapters are great for putting in perspective how amazing and novel this new network was to people vs. the way they communicated before. The rest of the book catalogs some great profiles of different (and some pretty famous) people who were drawn to tinkering with the system for various reasons. Some are outright criminals and some of them are like many of those in the HN crowd, just without such overwhelmingly accessible general computing, networking, and open-source software to build with.

I grew up just on the tail end of any sort of telephone hacking and exploration that was still going on and watched as BBSes were eventually made obsolete by the Internet. Reading the book was a really nostalgic experience and put me in touch with a lot of great memories while also allowing me to be thankful for the new opportunities to tinker and hack that are available to us these days, really at a much higher level.

[1] http://explodingthephone.com
>yet, that is what most csv code does.

Not an excuse, and not really true if we're talking about libraries. Naive one-off implementations of readers maybe.

>heck, ms excell did that until a few versions ago

Nope, Excell, even from 14 years ago has an extensive panel for configuring how (encoding, terminator, etc) your csv file is, and can also handle newlines inside items just fine.
Let's just say that your retort, "well I would have helped if only you didn't make such a big deal about it", is awfully convenient as an excuse to do nothing (and is very nearly the same as the 'tone argument'). Because, of course, if no one makes a big deal about something, that also provides an excuse.
Reinhart & Rogoff are just technocrats that will be forgotten in two or three years.
You can see a scanned version of The Tech from November 20, 1963 in the paper's archives at http://tech.mit.edu/V83/PDF/V83-N24.pdf.
Howto: Publish to Wordpress with Emacs 24 and org2blog
eyeFI cards and their ilk already exist. They don't usually expose their ARM processor, but I've seen a few articles about how to hack specific models. They usually run linux on an arm inside.
http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/SortFileExample/F64FileSort....

At the time of the Commodore 64, it was not used for COBOL applications. There were mainframes that banks and businesses used.

This is not what my operating system is for. I made 100 applications and demos that show what it is for. Does yours have sprites in source code?

The RedSea filesystem will do only whole-file reads and writes of contiguous block chunks (or just let you do raw block access). I demand that Linux and Microsoft and VMWare support RedSea on hard drive and CDROM, so I can remove support for ISO9660 and FAT32. God's temple must be perfect.

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/RedSea.html

With whole-file access, only I can do compression.
Adm. McRaven Urges Graduates to Find Courage to Change the World
> In fact, I almost guarantee this change had multiple people involved, and probably at least several internal discussions.

You just described Hell to me.
You must be aware that Iran is under continuous sanctions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran

I think that may have something to do with their degree of achievement versus their desires.
Yeah, probably, but that's one of my skills, I have fixed a lot of bugs.

But take a step back. What are you trying to say? You're better than everyone who hasn't done these things? You're somehow a real programmer and everyone else isn't?

And look how big your penis is!

Seriously, what were you trying to achieve with this comment? What have you demonstrated? You're a specialist, you know certain things other people don't. So what? It doesn't make you any more of a programmer than I am.

And seriously, don't puff up the differences between languages, in the end every language is just a different way to take some data, transform that data and emit that new data. What happens in between is nothing particularly complex, it's simply the sheer number of those steps that can happen that make it complex. The whole point of languages is to make it easier to express something. Not harder.

I honestly don't know what perceived slight you were responding to. Carry on believing only the highly specialized 0.1% of programmers are real programmers if you want. Stop being limited by your own snobbish elitism.
What is wrong with you HN visitors that this is on the FP?
Pic chips would work just fine on such a power budget. Especially if you let them go dormant for a bit between work to charge up a capacitor.
Hacking Cable TV Networks to Broadcast Your Own Video Channel
I'm not judging them. There are great programmers who studied CS. Is a worthwhile thing to add. The best programmer I know studied CS.

It's worthwhile, if you can actually program.

It's unfortunate that a lot of people have to wait till they've gone to Uni, studied CS, gone into the real world, got a job programming, and found they cannot program.
Well, sure. There are many issues on which I am still part of the problem. As I said, that doesn't make me a bad person.
I thought you might like this: http://qntm.org/destroy
Just started to watch this presentation and it strikes me that what they do with C++ as a meta language resembles a lot what Haskell programmers do with Haskell and EDSLs.

The note about overloading the comma operator remembers me the idea that monads (and the do notation) gives us a programmable semicolon.

Here's an example of a fun variant of the idea where something that looks like BASIC is embedded in Haskell: http://augustss.blogspot.be/2009/02/more-basic-not-that-anyb...

The same author also made bindings to LLVM that still is in the same realm.
It's done all the time, and it's on the front page of HN probably multiple times per week.
I thought I recognised that from the Stephen Baxter/Arthur C. Clarke book "Time" - well worth reading.
Building a Web Server in Go: Handling User Input
An ad hominem argument is one in which you reject a position not on its merits but because of who is making it. They took a position that copy/pasting code leads to unmaintainable code, therefore his argument is not ad hominem.

He's being insulting, sure, but that doesn't mean he's making an ad hominem argument.
5 Tiles Keyboard
I think the best use of GAs is sort of rapid prototyping. Throw them at the problem to get a better feel for the search space then think about it deeper and find the best algorithm you can come up with.

With the appropriate disclaimers that there's usually better algorithms I think they are pretty valuable from a pedagogical point of view (actually I'm thinking more of nature inspired algorithms in general not just GAs). It helps if you can relate an algorithm to something in nature because most algorithms are very abstract and hard to grasp.
I also think nature inspired algorithms can help people think about problem solving in creative ways (just wander through your garden and see if you can replicate some of the stuff in algorithmic form etc.)
This is how they do "cut up" which is producing a document with its amendments/changes - the other old school way is to cut and paste (using scissors and glue) any amendments next to the paragraphs amended - effectively each person maintains there own version of the document they are debating.

More modern systems just produce omnibus documents at the start of the day/session which have the amendments and consequentials in one place.

Your right parliamentary systems could use a decent electronic system to replace a lot of the paper that is produced - but this would require extra staff working very anti social hours to process everything and put it on the system.
>The folly of premined cryptocurrencies is a well explored and established fact in the realm of altcoins.

I don't know if the folly of premining was established before, but it is now. Ripple will be an example to anyone who says this can't happen because nobody would depress the value of their own stake like McCaleb has done.

In the long run, it's good for Ripple that these large amounts of money will no longer be in one set of hands, if it survives, but it's not good for anyone who hoped to make a quick profit from owning XRP.

Bitcoin also has an issue with a large quantity of coins held by the developer.
Excerpts from the UCSB Shooter’s 140-page Manifesto
Anyone in Atlanta, Georgia?

I would love to have a mentor. I stumbled upon Hacker News about a year and a half ago. I was not into programming before. One day, I got interested in programming and stories about computer hackers and so naturally I stumbled upon this website.

I am still a newbie. Right now, I am interested in learning Ruby and Javascript. I dabbled around with Java for a few months a while ago, but I became more interested in HTML5. I taught myself nearly everything I know about programming. I am probably not at the level to have a mentor, but I would really love to chat with someone about programming or meet up and code together. Maybe get some tips and advice on how to accelerate learning.

I do not know how distance mentoring would feel, but I am open to it.

email: jamie.lee@gatech.edu
Presentation of the STTwitter library at CocoaHeads Lausanne
Show HN: ES6 lab setup.
I always thought it was meant to indicate proficiency with all 7 layers of the OSI stack.

So if you can't design and build a network (2 or 3 buildings 2-3k hosts) you are not a full stack developer.

Btw this small network is what CISCO expects a CCNA to be able to do.
I like the dock concept. Haven't seen it before. He (she?, they?) isn't claiming originality on the dock but it seems to fit his board form factor perfectly. Any precedence on that?
You'd make a fantastic English teacher.
> I can only imagine this change was the result of a dozen round table discussions and half a year of a/b testing

I really hope not...