skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a category of questions on Stack Overflow like,

> How do I do (complicated task X) without using (class of solutions Y)?

It's like madlibs. I'll fill in the blanks for you:

> How do I write a portable function for searching the filesystem in pure C++?

Here, X is "search the filesystem portably" and Y is "just use Boost, dummy".

> How do I create an iOS application without using Xcode?

> How do I do AES encryption in my network code? (instead of just using a library to handle TLS)

Programmers develop highly specialized taste as they mature, with preferences like "C is good, Java is bad" or "everything should be done with the command line" or "I never want to leave Visual Studio again". I'm amazed by how many people say, for example, that they absolutely can't use Boost but when pressed, they can't give a good reason why. That's because Boost offends their subjective sensibilities for some ill-understood reason, not because Boost is flawed in any particular way (although Boost certainly has its flaws).

I have a ton of rep on Stack Overflow from answering questions, and so every time I answer a question like this, I remember all of the discussions I have had with people which go like this:

> Me: (complicated task X) is a complicated task. It will take you weeks to do it by yourself.

> Asker: But shouldn't it be easy?

> Me: (reasons 1, 2, 3 why it's not easy)

> Asker: But I don't care about 2 and 3, and I don't think 1 is a problem.

> Me: (list of ways that things go horribly wrong if you do it yourself) If I may ask, why can't you use libraries?

> Asker: I can't use libraries because (misconception about how libraries work).

> Me: Oh, that's not true at all.

The exchange takes place typically over the course of a couple hours, since Stack Overflow is not designed to allow a question to be used as chat.

So sometimes, if I'm feeling like a show-off, I post some ridiculously complicated way of solving the question just as it was asked, then say at the bottom:

> Or you can just do (easy solution Y), which is super easy, but you apparently can't do that for unspecified reasons.
As someone recently noted in the discussion of Swift, Objective-C is basically older than the CD-ROM. I'd say the language has had several decades of life, not 15 minutes of fame.

(Actually, it appears Objective-C is certainly older than the CD-ROM and is from about the same era as the audio CD.)
I've come close to buying one but I can't help but wonder how painful it's going to be on my fingers. My keyboard keys have nice padded, spring like qualities. My desk however is waiting to draw blood from my finger tips after a days coding...
Tesla boss Elon Musk hints at technology giveaway
Note the notable author: Jim Gray, 1998 Turing Award recipient. Gray tragically was lost at sea in 2007.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_(computer_scientist))
How Twitter Can Avoid Becoming the Next AOL
To follow up on this point, I went to speak at a couple of free software conferences this year and all the audiences at each of them took for granted that we should be scared about electronic surveillance and try to make it as difficult as we can. The other speakers and I never even had to say that.

I know that there are IT events at which people think electronic surveillance is OK and even make a living doing it. The obvious example is surveillance trade shows like ISS World (which folks have systematically taken to calling the "Wiretappers' Ball"), but even attending mainstream and broad-interest security events like the RSA Conference, a lot of the people in the "IT security" industry are selling things that are aimed at monitoring: mostly for corporate networks and at least partly in the IDS sense, but in any case figuring out how to capture and analyze lots of network traffic, and often explicitly viewing end-to-end crypto as a threat.

Somebody is working for the companies that exhibit at ISS World. Somebody is working for VUPen and Hacking Team and Packet Forensics. Furthermore, some of those somebodies feel that their work is intellectually interesting and even in a classic hacker spirit because they work hard figuring out how systems work.

I'm happy stigmatizing that work (and I hope that people come to feel uncomfortable about working to enable surveillance!) but I don't think we can deny that there are lots of geeks out there who are doing that work, and who are often even happy and excited about it.
I don't see myself ever replacing a real keyboard for this, at least not for long typing sessions (being tactile is the most appreciated aspect of a keyboard for me).

But there is absolutely a huge demand out there for this. Not to mention that other applications for it may appear (other than just replacing traditional QWERTY keyboards).

But in the end the question is the same: how good it is?

Anyone got a video showing it working (other than just the concept)?
Hapi: Walmart's Node.js Framework
Ladder tall enough so a leg can be either side.
IPv6 gives you the ability to make that choice for yourself rather than having it foisted upon you.
I am the learning design lead at Play-i (play-i.com). We build robots to teach kids ages 5+ how to program. I am a cognitive and developmental psychologist. I did my PhD in how early language input from parents affect kids' readiness to learn number and math concepts before a postdoc on applying cognitive science to middle school science education and another postdoc on how 2D and 3D block building affects geometric and spatial cognition and later math performance. I joined my first educational gaming startup in 2011. It imploded within 6 months, but that's another story ;)
Samsung 840 EVO Series Solid State Drive
Douglas Adams saw this coming. From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive – you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
The problem with Leap is that to do anything remotely accurately for a moderate period of time takes an huge amount of effort moving your arm in mid-air with only visual feedback. It will be marginally worse than using a wii controller to type on a screen keyboard, as that includes tactile vibration feedback as you hover over keyboard letters. In the video it struggled at typing a single word on a keyboard.

The device looks great for toy/demo cases like google earth and fruit ninja. There aren't many normal use cases where you would need slow, low accuracy pointing or gestures from a distance that isn't already covered by wii, kinect or a laser pointer for example.

Remote control is already solved by remote controls with buttons and smartphones connected to a tv. The tactile feedback increases the speed of usage so much that no touchless device will ever surpass.
Conversation with my Son
If anyone has access to the 1934 paper Blair wrote about this, I'd love to read it. My address is in my HN profile.

SPIDER POISONING: EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF THE
BITE OF THE FEMALE LATRODECTUS MACTANS IN MAN
A. W. BLAIR, M.D.
Arch Intern Med (Chic). 1934;54(6):831-843.
doi:10.1001/archinte.1934.00160180003001.
I was actually just looking at your startup for an application I'm building. Nice to see you on HN! Do you have an email I can use to ask you about cross-promotional opportunities?
On Teaching Quantum Mechanics
> <azonenberg> wordpress is an unauthenticated remote shell that, as a useful side feature, also contains a blog

That's an old joke and obviously an exaggeration, but it's not horribly far off. Wordpress instances fall to attack constantly, due to a combination of bugs in the base application itself (not terribly common) and extensions (not just common -- CONSTANT). In terms of breakability, I would rank Wordpress in the top 1% of applications without a second thought.
Story about Shaw (in canada, BC):

I had one of their built in modem/router combos that provides internet and wifi, me and a room mate had a minecraft server set up on a box wired into the router, and we played locally, but for some reason every 20 minutes, our connections to the server, the internet, and eachother would just die.

leaving an active traceroute on a spare computer suggested that the router just stopped routing for a period of 20-30 seconds, every 20-30 minutes.

Angry and annoyed, I called in a tech from Shaw to look at and replace the hardware. Standard operating procedure here: "We will show up some time between 8am-1pm". Of course he showed up at 3pm, with no call that he was going to be late. I had to call them.

Unbelievably, he logged into the router (with no permissions given, so those routers are backdoored... goody) and actually identified that the router WAS resetting every 20 minutes or so. Yes, the problem was identified! The problem was that my internet plan was not sufficient enough to support online games, and that if I didn't get another better one, the problem couldn't be fixed. (For the record, I had a 30 mbps down, 3 mbps up, cable connection.)

Jaw agape, I tried to explain to him that A. The game server he was referring to was literally right next to his feet, and B. that even if it wasn't, game data is minuscule compared to video data, something I am a prolific consumer of with no obvious problem there. All that combined with the subtle hint that the router literally just told him it was resetting, the conclusion clearly was that the router is broken, and my internet is fine.

His response to that was:

...

that's a direct quote. I'm not paraphrasing.

He didn't want to say anything because I had the audacity to say something that went contrary to the marketing line, and the only option he had was to either say I was wrong, or accept it.

He wouldn't replace the router regardless.

So I told him to take his modem/router, put in my old modem, get it registered, and buzz off (though maybe not so colourfully).

When I talked to a Shaw customer representative about having a Tech show up late, lie to me, and not fix the problem without an upgrade, I got this response:

uh, ok?

That's a direct quote. I'm not paraphrasing.

Fun part though: that transgression was actually considered a transgression by Shaw's regulatory agency, So I reported it to them after I got piddly squat from customer service.
that is unfortunate considering they are using cloudflare... I wonder what the hacker news software does with IPv4 addresses that couldn't work behind the service described in the article.
What amazes me is the question: what kind of evolutionary pressure would drive creatures to develop stings and venom this viscious. I would have thought nature would stop optimizing once a sting is a good enough deterrent. It is as if someone said, no, I would optimize the crap out of this chemical weapon.

I have always been intrigued by how much does the effect generalize across the victim species. Consider tarantula wasps, their sting take pain and suffering to new heights (for humans). But really what the wasps use it for, primarily, is to temporarily immobilize a tarantula so that it can lay eggs on it. The hatchlings end up eating the tarantula. If temporary immobilization is the main use case (surely not the only use case), must it be this painful. Is the tarantula in as much pain and if so what purpose is that serving ? It seems something that gives them a pleasure trip makes more sense.
And the CDROM wasn't a blip in history between the Compact Cassette and now? BTW the CD-ROM is still way more popular than Objective-C.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=cd%20rom%2C%20objecti...

But nice try anyway.
The entire back catalogue for the Things I Won't Work With tag is extremely excellent, and well worth a read - http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...
Find out All Optimizely Tests Any Company is Running
http://caolanmcmahon.com/posts/how_i_want_to_write_node_stre...

http://highlandjs.org/

https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream

http://reactive-extensions.github.io/RxJS/
I've just been bitten by a spider, and I'm supposed to calmly and quickly corner it, kill it, and scrape it into a baggie to show to the doctor? I'm supposed to do this after reading this article, knowing what's ahead of me?
Looks like Objective C finally surpassed Fortran and Cobol somewhere in 2011. Good luck to you in the future ;-)

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22objective%20C%22%2...
And the (downloadable) resume, it says 60000.
And then I go to shake somebodies hand/ wave to somebody / hold a sandwich and I have this thing stuck to my hand.

Edit: Might be different if it wasn't so hard, big (across my whole hand), and plasticy. Gloves and rings don't seem to cause much trouble during day to day activities.
My 6 yr-old daughter asked me to get rid of a spider from her room. In I went with a "ho ho ho, of course dear" fatherly attitude to find a mature female Black Widow sat on the rocker switch of her bedside lamp. I calmly asked my little girl to go fetch her mother.
DevOps for Humans – Ansible presentation at DrupalCon Austin
Looks very cool.

Minor note of little importance:
'Features > Performance > "abandonned" ' is a misspelling.
Carbon-14 dating should work in principle, but in practice the error on carbon-14 dating is several decades. So that's out.

I'm not sure about tritium dating for the water. Reading the USGS website on it, it seems to indicate that the way tritium dating works is that they seal some water in a copper tube and see how much helium magically appears as the tritium decays. They ask for two 500mL (two 1 pint) samples.

So if tritium has been decaying into a sealed glass container for 40 years, should there be a measurable amount of helium in the container?
Funny thing, you saying "15 minutes," since Objective-C had existed for 15 years by the first time Apple used it. Eighteen years ago.

As a multi-decade PHP developer, I would have guessed you'd be used to people deriding your language of choice and, based on that experience, developed enough common sense to not make a fool of yourself so publicly. I guess I expect too much of people.
Can someone with access to the original paper kindly lookup specifically how long each fast lasted and how often?

The article is a bit vague: periods of no food for two to four days at a time over the course of six months
Uber’s $18.2B Valuation Is a Head Scratcher
Looks great. Need to see a real demo.
"Most of the standard library is missing."

So it'll take some time I guess. Still nice to see people trying, Ruby is a great language but it needs as much love as possible.
Reminds me of writing Win32 applications in C + Asm, although it looks even more difficult because the documentation is lacking and there's more stuff that has to be done. I find the fact that a simple, "do nothing" native iOS app is much bigger than some very featureful apps on other platforms somewhat sad... I don't know of any 64k/4k demos on iOS either.

Great work for trying it though. Are all those bytes actually needed? E.g. I see a lot of "restore VFP/Advanced SIMD registers" when you don't seem to be using those at all. It would be interesting to see how much you can cut out, as currently it looks more like a mostly mechanical ObjC -> C -> Asm translation, like a compiler would do, instead of a human. As a point of reference, on Win32 an app that just shows a window with some text in it requires <1KB of binary.
Great find! Here you go: https://mega.co.nz/#!bcUjRZoB!2nZjyURearxqO-0DDxUA57UnzEa1jh...
Great to see those languages be rewarded for the quality of their design.
I just checked out their product. I'm an engineer and it is one of the best wearable devices I've seen out there. The initial product demo video doesn't do any justice to the latest version they have.
Would you buy an app that allows you to program on your phone (that is sensitive to the limitations of the on-screen keyboard)?
I don't expect much wisdom from the youngsters here.

If you were even able to read back then, nobody had heard of Objective-C until your idol Steve touched it with his golden finger. If you remember, Apple was a sad joke of a failure from the 80s till the iPod launched. And I'm sure Objective-C was really integral to the success of the Apple IIe and the iPod.

Thanks for proving my point.
Relying on an implementation detail of the cpuid instruction seems like a very bad idea. It'd be safer, I think, and just as fast, to initially use the atomic version of the code, then NOP out the LOCK prefix once initialization is complete.
Y is also partially determined by the employee. There is uncertainty from both the employer and employee on what the potential upside of Y could be. If an employee (programmer) believes his unique skills will be instrumental in making the company succeed, he won't discount Y as much as another employee (e.g. a chef just cooking the lunch meals for the programmers).

The potential employee programmer knows more than the employer about how good his skills actually are and how dedicated he will be which can affect the value of Y.
Toastio | Email 2.0 accepting beta users
These are people who want to learn how something is actually done, to experience that sense of accomplishment themselves, and not just use a solution someone else has already written; and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
> Investors often wait months before investing in order to let a little more information surface, during which time the valuation can (and often does) increase by literally millions. Given that the cost of doing the extra research for each deal would be nominal...

Not sure about math here. Lets say that average increase is $0.5M and only 1% gets funded. In that case it is around $5,000 per study to break even. I do not think investors could fit reliable evaluation into this money.
You didn't indicate that they were changing the environment like that. You just said "bad user input". But for them to mess with the db constraints and database in general - my response would be: this is a whole new project.

Nothing free at that point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
As other posters have said, just leave the damn room to take a call.

But seriously, are you so incredibly important that you cannot spend 60 minutes listening to a lecture?

This generation (and yes I know that includes me) seem to have an incredibly inflated sense of self-worth, as if they're the centre of the universe.

It's like those idiots who can't stop texting in the damn movie.

The world will keep spinning if you don't answer that tweet for an hour - trust me.

I had this exact same argument with a friend last week when we went to a three-hatted restaurant, and she insisted she needed to check her phone every few minutes, because apparently people would "panic" if they couldn't get in touch with her via chat.

Surely if you're paying $200 for a dinner, you can at least enjoy the dinner and company around you without needing to tweet every 5 minutes.
Don't be silly. This kind of thing is not rare and exists in many schools throughout the country, just not many this old.
Some people are more useful in emergencies than others. You're right that some will fall to pieces, but I'm the type with presence of mind and I would be doing that as quickly as I could rather than waiting until I caved in to the pain.

Per the description, it's not that bad until the reaction spreads, so you want to take care of something like this before your feel like you're about to die.
This is a pretty big deal. As short-sighted and destined to fail as the current backlash against Uber is (see the cease-and-desist order issued in Virginia this week), it becomes a different narrative altogether if you can show that Uber saves lives. Any correlation with a decrease in DUI's is going to be hard momentum to counteract. If Uber can show definitively that highway safety increases in Uber cities, it's very compelling evidence that they should be in every major city regardless of existing taxi laws.

Although lobbying for increased highway safety has gotten us some atrocious national policy in the past (the 21 drinking age) - it would be nice to see it be used for a good cause here and give more cities modern transportation options.
The problem being that I might not know this particular thing is configurable. They need better defaults.
It does sound like a viable business opportunity, but the only way to know for sure is to survey the literature.
So it appears that you have to keep your fingers elevated off of the surface, and then strike down similar to a touch screen?

The best part about a mechanical keyboard is that you can rest your hand on the keys. I've actually never tried a MS Surface touch cover, but something like that without actual segmented keys might be best. Sort of like a touch cover and Fleksy hybrid.
Disagree. Uber is just another taxi service with availability of smart phone. There are many other services which allow you order taxi with smartphone.

DUI has nothing to do with using Uber or not. One may get ass-drunk and still don't get caught and others might be one or two ml above limit to have DUI.

Correlation is very hard to prove that says drunk people are likely to order Uber and there by reducing DUI. How many other drunk people ordered taxi service or how many people drove themselves while being drunk ? Where is this data ?

Most bars/clubs always have taxis ( at least 2 ) or in close proximity. They wait there in case someone get blackout drunk or fight breaks out then patrons throw them out.
Sounds about the right amount of time for a dev cycle in a large corporation.

Yes, I may be a bit bitter...
it looks like a static site...
> Me: (complicated task X) is a complicated task. It will take you weeks to do it by yourself.

It sounds like you're arguing against learning. When you're a beginner, one of the most frustrating things is when people won't answer your questions due to an air of superiority. I know you feel like you're guiding people onto the best path, but it can't be true that you're correct in every case. So it must be true that at least some of the time you're being deliberately evasive for incorrect reasons. In other words, you believe you're being helpful, but you're not.

Answer their question, choose not to answer, suggest an alternate way of doing something, but please don't go on for hours about why their original plan is a bad idea. It's often the quickest way to kill the fun and their will to learn.
How are the categories obtained?
A few layman hypothesis:

* A more powerful venom will work faster and more reliably.

* This is not only a very powerful, but also a very efficient venom. More efficient venom reduces manufacturing costs (as only a few molecules are needed).

* Chance probably have played a role here. Black widows hardly had any pressure to evolve a specific venom against humans.

As our nerve system is based on the same basic molecules as every other land creature, but not the same structure, a venom that is good enough to kill a mouse may have a devastating (albeit non-fatal) effect on us.

I'm already speculating, so I may be cruel: maybe the spider wants to paralyze the mouse, but keep him alive for a few days so the flesh stays fresh as they eat it.
I don't really buy it. What if DUI rates fell across all cities nationwide, regardless of Uber being on the market?