skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, Sears never actually made their white goods appliances, but they used to do a very good job of sourcing their Kenmore brand ones. That's what my mother, something of a Laundry Nazi, used when she was washing for my father, who hunted and did other things that got clothes dirty, and me, my sister ... and my two younger brothers. Serious cleaning required, which I helped with. Hummm, ditto refrigerators.

Now it's a don't even bother with them.

I don't know about your private equity compliant; are you referring to the late 2004 deal with K-Mart? I'm pretty sure Sears had already "lost it" by then, although I'd have to check to be absolutely sure about Kenmore appliances. If so, it took them only two years to completely lose it, because I bought a washer and dryer in 2007, started looking in Sears and then went with GE (in part because my family has a special relationship with the local dealer). Of course I learned my own Laundry Nazi style from my mother....

"When brands throw away their brand name and turn into the same cheap shit, you can't blame consumers for shopping just on price."

Bingo. There are times when I just give up trying to get something I have confidence in being good and roll the dice with price being a major factor.
Sucked into the Clickhole
3 people who have changed the way I think
Misread this as "Heathkit" and felt old.
1and1 has extremely aggressive telemarketers.

They once called my computer illiterate father who can barely speak english and instructed him to go to trial.1and1.com to sign up for MyWebsite.

Another time I refused the MyWebsite trial and the aggressive-pissed-off guy on the phone signed me up anyway. Twice. I finally got $350 refunded after months of complaining.

Always hang up the phone. Yell "no no no" and hang up immediately. Always. They use phrases like "I'm going to sign you up for that so you're all set." and "ok you're all set with the mywebsite service". They don't ask you if you want a trial. They opt you in. It's up to you to interrupt them.

I love their services however.
> The most commonly used protocol is called HL7 – a gargantuan protocol with many variants. In the real world, no two institutions use the exact same implementation of HL7. Most systems in the US use one of the 2.x versions, which are pipe delimitted, prone to error, and not human-readable.

This understates how awful HL7 is. It's true that it's a non-standard "standard" (the only common thing about it between implementations is the name). Many implementations are both pipe-delimited and fixed-width, which makes generating a valid HL7 message for a single client absolute hell. Multiple clients? You might as well start from scratch each time. (And people wonder why innovation in health tech is so slow...).

I remember one brainstorming meeting I had with the CIO of a major, reputable hospital. I casually made some reference to setting up a webserver to receive HTTPS requests. I will never forget his expression. He sheepishly informed me that no, they can't use HTTP (even with SSL). Instead, the process involves creating a dedicated tunnel, setting up a tcp connection within the tunnel, and then reading each "chunk" of data off the wire. Each datum comprises a variable number of packets[0], so you essentially have to buffer the stream manually so you can virtually "push" packets back on the stream if it turns out you weren't supposed to read them.[1]

This is not a dig at the CIO; he clearly knew what he was doing. Unfortunately, he also knew the state of the systems he had to maintain internally, as well as the external ones he had to interoperate with, and the realities of what was feasible and what was not.

[0] If you're having trouble picturing what I'm saying, imagine you're in a foreign city and ask someone which bus stop you need to get off at. He responds, "Watch which stop I get off at, and you want the one four stops before that"

[1] Now imagine doing this with broken Unicode implementations!
Yep. Straight from Fedland.
Tomorrow morning or even better tonight on group call - hey, I don't want to be working 14 hours a day or receiving texts every 5 seconds. I'm going to be taking action to reduce this burden (you'll be teaching someone to do your job) over the next 3 months - I got into this for a more balanced life and this isn't feeling balanced right now.....
Yea but there's really no good docs for Persona around anymore, that I can find.

The plan is to use Persona for ones FxA:

> One we get the basics down and enable single sign-on for relying Mozilla Services with your Firefox Account, we hope integrate Firefox Accounts with Persona on the Web and Firefox user agents to make logging in everywhere as painless as it should be.
Let me start this off by saying that I sympathise with you. But, you should start thinking outside the box. Software development is a craft - and as such, it plays a part in achieving outcomes. I don't consider the ability to program a super power - anyone with a technical background is able to learn programming given time and the proper resources.

Start thinking more about what you are trying to achieve (the goal) and why you are approaching it in this particular way (the purpose). "Meaningless work" is often the result of decisions made on a whim - take the responsibility to investigate the goal and alternative methods to achieve the same result.

In order to find your work more meaningful, you should become more focused on the business aspects. Sometimes the best approach to solve a problem is meaningless work - but at least then that would be a comfort.

If you want to try something outside of your day job and you consider yourself good at web-related things, there's little stopping you from setting up an e-commerce store and selling things. Shopify is an e-commerce solution on a platter, but there are many alternatives. I've recently setup a Wordpress + WooCommerce website + bought a theme (Kallyas) for my wife - http://www.swartsbooks.com - still busy working out the kinks. Even though I could have built the store myself, I opted for the practical solution. My current side project focuses on addressing communication issues (e.g. complaints, notices, notifications, sharing of documents) in micro communities such as complexes, estates, shopping centres/malls and corporate parks.

You could also write e-books about your craft, similar to what Authority (http://nathanbarry.com/authority/) suggests and sell them on gumroad.

If you like doing business, you might consider doing consultation + web development. I occasionally did this the past 2 years and made about $6K at $36/h for development and $30/h for consultation. The consultation part revolves around advising the best approach to take regarding the technical side and the impact on business concerning the technical side. You could also do some research on behalf of your client if you consider yourself more knowledgeable.

The moral of the story is that you do not necessarily have to find your day job meaningful (and most people don't), as long as you can do other meaningful things.
In the project description, mention that "only people who will provide a sample solution/data for the project will be entertained". This is a decent filter to remove 90% of applicants.
To decide between the rest 10%, check ratings, previous jobs, portfolio, cost etc and make a choice.
> Mozilla persona is a good initiative. Hope they prefer standardization over trying to use it to promote their own browser.

Well, there's this:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.identity...
I haven't yet found it to be that bad, at least not yet. E.g. I've always considered Kingston to be iffy except for DRAM, where their lifetime warranty speaks for itself (and isn't bogus, I've had to do one replacement).

The auto decontenting is pretty obvious if you pay any degree of attention, and American tend to do that with their cars.
Also, the word "hacker" has a very different meaning (criminal who breaks into computer systems) in most of the world (e.g., to your potential customers) than it does within the software development community. So definitely don't refer to yourself as a hacker.
I'm not sure... you should ask on Cliff's blog! The NWS/NOAA websites are rather ad-hoc and disorganized.
Popular real time tweets with Kayak like filter
When a user is logged in, use a Vary: Cookie header, when a user is not logged in, leave that off. Set the expiration time as appropriate.
Cool! Before I sign up, is there a way to cancel?
This is a great idea but I don't think it's unique. I remember a similar app that was on the iPhone when those apps first came out. I remember looking at it but it had a cost to download it so I never did use it. I just can't remember what it was called.
True but then the article also brings up the point that most corporate bureaucracies are unable to notice talent and promote it on a faster timescale than the rest of the organization. In such cases if you know you're good enough to get better pay elsewhere then there is no reason not to.
I guess we're at the point where each of us carry around sufficient technology to give us subtitles on demand, useful if we missed a few lines of dialogue.

(We're probably not socially or legally cool with that, though.)

Ooh, a more experimental place like the Alamo Drafthouse might be able to pull off restrooms attached to each individual theater, simulcasting the show onto screens in there. Licensing for extra screens, even tiny ones, might be complicated though...

Here's to home viewing I guess.
I too need melodic/funk/trance music to get started, but sometime after entering flow I realize that whatever playlist I started with ended a long time ago and I've been coding to silence ever since. If there are a lot of noises nearby it reminds me to put music back on.

I recommend Anjunabeats and Above & Beyond if you are looking for melodic/uplifting electronic music that avoids potentially distracting lyrics and jarring sounds.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think the US gov't ever just gifts you a ticket home. They could probably help you receive a wire transfer from friends or family, but it's very unlikely they would buy you a ticket.
I'm sure Apple is aware of the mess of regulations they would encounter if they advertised the Health app and HealthKit to be a hub for all of your medical data. Not only would the connections between your iDevice and a hospital potentially fall under scrutiny by a variety of health-related state and federal agencies, but the complete iOS to iCloud connection and what it sends and receives would probably start getting heavy analysis and would need to prove to bureaucracies precisely what Apple and third party vendors do and do not transmit.

There be bureaucratic dragons.

Agreed with the other commenters here, although I do appreciate the original blog post for pointing out concrete examples of backwards technology use in health care. It is a good reminder that pretty much every industry (perhaps outside of tech companies with tech customers interoperating with each other) has major dysfunction and underutilization of current technologies.
For what it is worth, I recently found a spam bot hacked into my unused twitter account. It was using my real name so I had to clean it up. I used a new email address to be able to move the bot tweets to new user name. When registering my original user name again the experience was as described in the article. Actually, in my case it was [frighteningly] accurate down to what the user thinks.

You get to a point where it tells you to follow a preselected set of celebrities and it wont take no for an answer. There is no skip button. (I'm sure there isn't one, it took me ages to not find it.)

What drove the decision?

I think what happens is that Google picks up the new twitter account, flags it as a duplicate and increases the celebrity page rank in stead of indexing yours. It seems a good trick to make bots less effective.

But I'm guessing of course.
Okay, that makes sense!
>Social psychology experiments in the laboratory tend to throw up spectacular mind-boggling effects. Many of these fail to replicate and are later discredited. The ones that do replicate are not always generalizable – sometimes an even slightly different situation will remove the effect or create exactly the opposite effect.

Generator-based tests (as in Haskell's Quickcheck) could help here. Standard unit tests run assertions with hardcoded input values such as [0, 1, -1]. Generator based tests instead try to show that properties hold over randomly generated inputs, by replacing 1 with a generator of positive integers, -1 with a generator of negative integers, etc.

Imagine if social psychologists ran generator-based studies as a hedge against unknown unknowns. The biggest challenge would be generating and executing valid permutations of the original experiment. Perhaps ad network AB-testing could be repurposed to run experiments as ads with randomly generated values.
If you are interested in mathematics and algorithms, you can solve Project Euler problems projecteuler.net/problems
> It's amazing that each of these three consecutive statements are inter-contradictory. ("build a computer out of anything" != "build a computer out of nothing"; "nothing" != "observing nature"; "build a computer out of anything" != "without building anything whatsoever".) I have no idea how to proceed.

Oh sorry, let me clarify. I'm taking it as a given that you accept a computer can be built out of anything, i.e. that you can have electrical computers, mechanical computers, biological computers, etc. and they're all computationally equivalent and can execute all the same algorithms. The whole Church-Turing thing. My point was that you don't even have to build anything. So you can completely ignore the "build a computer out of anything" statement if you think it's contradicting anything.

And observing is not building. It seems exceedingly obvious that you can't patent squirrels gathering nuts, or leaves growing on trees, or raindrops falling from the sky, etc. But you can map desired calculations onto the occurrence of things in nature in much the same way as you map them onto electrical signals in a PC, wait until they enter the state required by a given algorithm, observe the result, and thereby execute any algorithm you can execute on a computer. The machine is a completely abstract concept. Trying to patent an algorithm because you can execute it on a computer is exactly the same thing as trying to patent a formula because you can compute it with a calculator. The calculator doesn't become a new type of machine based on which buttons you press.

> > I'd like you to show me a granted software patent that cannot be implemented on any computer. If you can find one, I'll show you one that should be chucked in with perpetual motion machines.

Obviously a patent on a solution to the halting problem is fraudulent, but you have the issue reversed. It isn't that you can't use a machine to execute an algorithm, it's that you can execute an algorithm without a machine. The machine isn't a necessary component, it's just a convenient and efficient way to do it.
The problem with 'intelligent design' is that it's such an infantile way of trying to understand the world. Stating "God did it", rather than using one's brain to figure out the mechanisms of how the world works, is just lazy, regressive thinking that doesn't advance our knowledge and understanding in any way whatsoever.
Here's a couple elementary examples that are useful:

f[x_Integer]:=x^2

Basically the pattern for the argument of f must match the pattern _Integer, which means that the argument is an integer. If the pattern does not match, then it stays in an unevaluated form; you could have it throw an error by having an extra pattern f[_]:=Assert[False] or whatever.

f[x_] /; x>2 := x^2

Same, but in this case only if x>2.

Basic symbolic manipulation:

Sin[x^2 + x + 2] /. x->3

Evaluate at x=3.

θ^2/r /. {r -> Sqrt[x^2 + y^2], θ -> ArcTan[x, y]}

Convert from polar coordinates to Cartesian.

General programming:

In[21]:= Cases[{1,2,3,4}, x_ /; x>2 && PrimeQ[x] -> x^2]
Out[21]= {9}

Kind of like a list comprehension.
You can send 'STOP' to end incoming SMS!
> HealthKit provides a way for iOS devices to integrate health-related device data for use by the iOS device owner, no more, no less.

Perhaps he didn't state this so explicitly, but the subtext in his post is that that he believes HealthKit not going to have an impact on care delivery without EHR integration.

He did mention this, albeit towards the end:

> In practice, I expect HealthKit will have little or no impact on professional healthcare delivery.

There are a lot of interesting things that can be done in the world of health-tech that don't qualify as "healthcare delivery". On the other hand, most of the parts that people talk about "disrupting" do. Care delivery tends to be the most expensive (though also the highest yield, dollar-for-dollar) component of health.
I have a tool that syncs my DNS records to CloudFlare using flat files that I keep under version control. I just extracted it from my personal tool set:

https://github.com/dnerdy/namesync

This flat file format seems to work well, and the tool could potentially be updated to support other DNS providers.
I was scammed into adding on the website builder to my package. I was sitting at work and I received a call. I took it and a sales guy started trying to sell me on this. I explicitly asked him whether I would see any recurring charges if I said yes to this trial and then took no further action, and he assured me that was the case. I really just wanted him to shut up so I could go back to work. Imagine my surprise 4-6 months later. I was looking at my invoices and I notice this line for the builder! They did reverse the charges (I had just received the second bill and they bill quarterly), but it had to be done over the phone and during east coast business hours. Well, I work those hours.
Since I just finished implementing a toy HTTP/1.1 server, I must throw in my newfound knowledge that 2732 has been updated with Zone IDs:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6874
I was going to write a message here congratulating this guy, as I love the concept - but then I realized he'd emailed me a few months back, blogged about us, then ripped off our product after we ignored him, and poorly at that.

1) On April 19th, Steve wrote this blog post mentioning us, Namecast: http://blog.steve.org.uk/i_was_beaten_to_the_punch__but_felt...

2) At around the same time Steve sent me a personal email doing market research on the concept of Git-backed DNS. I didn't respond because, well, it was a bit of a clunky first way to ping someone. Still no problem, though - who hasn't sent a random stranger an awkward email before, right?

3) He then decided to build a competing product - and steal our messaging?! Seriously, go to http://www.namecast.net right now, check out our above the fold copy, and then check out dns-api.com. "Imagine if updating your DNS records was as easy as running "git push"." Really, Steve? Really?

This is where things go in my mind from "hey, two DNS guys had the same idea about Git and DNS, neat!" to "this dude can't create his own ideas so has decided to steal our copy and cargo cult copy our product."

Luckily Steve isn't very good at DNS or handling traffic, so his servers have fallen down and people are complaining about his feature set, so instead of complaining too hard:

For those of you who want a provider who's site won't fall over after a tiny crush of HN traffic, check out http://www.namecast.net.

We've also got working SRV, TXT and alias records - some of you have noticed dns-api.com doesn't - as well as geoIP and native IPv6 amongst other things, and as good members of the open source community, we're contributors to the open source geodns project (written in Go by Ask Bjorn Hansen, it powers the global NTP pool - so if you've got software that talks to pool.ntp.org, like say, ntpdate, it's talking to a server running geodns.)

mic drop

--afsheenb
Interested in doing Web-Push on the same data? Can hook you up to a totally free roost.me account.
At least we managed to answer the question "do irrational people exist?"
PHP is a dying language – A Rebuttal
According to the RFC, since domains are allowed to be entirely numeric, there is overlap between valid domains and valid IP addresses. The RFC says that if something could be a valid IP address, it is to be thought of as an IP address.
I guess bloat is subjective. Your setup looks nice and I'm glad you found something that works for you. But on the flip side, it "looks" bloated to me, too— any reasonably useful Vim setup will have at least a dozen or so plugins and/or an intricate .vimrc.

Sublime Text did almost all I wanted out of the box. Maybe it has more functionality than I need, but it won hands down in terms of installing (and maintaining) software in order for it to be usable for me.

FWIW, since I abandoned Vim as my main editor, I just grab spf13-vim[0] when I want to use it. It's still really handy to be able to type vi foo to edit a file at the command line.

[0]: http://vim.spf13.com/
As a pre-emptive note for other HN'ers:

1) I'm not annoyed that Steve's built a competing product. That would be like the developers of Squid being annoyed that Varnish exists, or lighttpd and Nginx, or.... you get the picture. Competition in the free market and especially amongst software providers is good and healthy, and saying otherwise is tantamount to saying that software is sacred. That way lies patent madness. Besides, LuaDNS and I'm sure others have similar products. I was actually really excited about this, as it validates our market, theoretically - until I recognized the name and visited the site.

2) I'm furious that Steve blogged about us, mailed us directly - so he damn sure knows about us and our product - and then directly lifted our copy and messaging, and is now presenting this as an original concept on a Show HN post. That's where this all falls apart. Just - not cool, buddy. Not. Cool.
I've found with businesses like this (though not 1&1 specifically), the magic word is "chargeback". It helps you cut through the bullshit because if they get too high a percentage of chargebacks, their credit card processing fees go up (and they can even lose the ability to charge cards).
I remember well over 10 years ago when I first used 1and1 when they started aggressively advertising.

Piss poor service, a few years and a couple hundred bucks in erroneous charges later and I finally managed to cancel them but not before getting sent to collections and having the only stain on my credit (which has long since gone away). The collections agency they use is as bad as they are.

They are truly among the absolute worst service providers on the internet, along with the similarly-famous Network Solutions.

Avoid at all costs.
HHVM is not official PHP. Its a hack developed by facebook to specifically improve the performance of their web apps.
The component isn't complete in all respects and one solution doesn't fit all sizes.

Node.js, on the other hand is officially supported and the core and node modules are actively developed by the community.
Don't take another piece of work that can't be delivered lazily.
Seven Ways to Stress a Postive Perspective
300k vulnerable to Heartbleed two months later
الطيران الاردني يدمر 4 سيارات لـ داعش
You can never be completely prepared for programming interviews. How well you do in a particular programming interview depends on whether you have had any experience working on similar questions/problems in the past.
So, bottom line - program as often as you can.
What flavor of regex are we do making this in?
Right, but my point is that if a drone is flying over an area like the Golden Gate Bridge, you're really not going to pick up any audio aside from wind noise. You'd have to be in close proximity to some sound producing subject.