skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. Its not insurmountable like some of the other points (assuming you throw money at it), but its definitely there. A few examples:

* Most of the examples are hand built of stone. Which is beautiful and lasts forever (by contrast most suburban homes have a ~40 year lifecycle) but costs a fortune nowadays because of the scarcity of material, labour and transportation costs. This goes for the streets as well as the buildings.

* Complex topography is hated by builders. Much cheaper and easier if its dead flat. Also difficult angles. Much easier if everything is square. This is a big one.

* Topography and small streets cause problems for access. Once the street is there, no chance you can get a bulldozer in. Or a cement truck of a large size. You might get a small crane but it will be very difficult. Getting your bathtub delivered or even getting your plumber in and out (when most of his tools and pipes are in the van, which is parked where?). This is a big problem for ongoing maintenance/repairs as well as initial construction (particularly if you aren't building out of stone to last forever).

So if you imagine the same places built square, flat and with cheaper materials you might come close to a more typical construction cost. But its not going to be anywhere near as attractive.
> and two car starts?

That's a great way to have your dinner interrupted or end up waiting forever for your car.
If this was available convenience would trump security for many people.
David’s Health Tech Newsletter: No. 18
The Mutilated Chess Board, Revisited [pdf]
I agree about the passion indicator. I over interviewed and was told to prepare a 15 presentation on anything I cared about. It did not have to be technical, but I needed to be prepared for questions.

The interview ended up being one of my best interview experiences though I turned down the job.
I would assume that all first world countries have stored food/medicine/oil/etc. for emergencies. At least Finland keeps enough for six months consumption (was 12 previously, but with the current economic troubles it was dropped to 6 a few months ago). Of course that wouldn't include all the luxuries, but enough to keep people alive and the important industries running. And I suppose there would still be trade with countries that are known to be safe.
I agree. FRP is, sadly, a siren song (for the most part). I was enchanted by it back in 2011 when I began studying the source code for Flapjax[1] (the development of which goes back to 2006!).

What I learned the hard way -- both trying to develop a "next gen" derivative and using it in my own projects -- is that it's all too easy to underestimate the pain of getting trapped in the monad, over and over again.

FRP is not the answer. Clojure/Script's core.async is a better way to do reactive programming, and yet... a declarative and structural DSL which allows for little bits of imperative glue code with contracts and highly controlled effects, and which allows disparate components to "automagically" pass immutable messages without extra plumbing, that is the future. It's what I want to use for own projects, and I hope others will enjoy it as well. Work is in progress. David Harel[2] showed the way over two decades ago[3].

[1] https://github.com/brownplt/flapjax/

[2] http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/papers.html

[3] http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/reactive_systems.htm...
> Doesn't help that they have legal cruft dating back to the medieval ages

Can you give examples of that?
optimizely.com

http://mashable.com/2008/07/18/product-reviews/
Is HN safe from non-developers?
> which is the reason they get these crazy ideas that wouldn't even be considered for a second anywhere else.

Yes, that crazy idea would never have been considered in Germany, for example
Does that graphical stuff not destroy battery life?
The examples shown aren't cities of the size of Paris. Paris would be described here as more of the 'hypertrophic city', reliant on public transit, where for the author "When your primary focus is on walking, there is very little need to invest in extensive public transit".

The whole of Europe is full of small towns like the ones used as examples. There has been a big shift in living in the 20th century away from these places as modern jobs have shifted to larger cities.

Your example is right. Perhaps I should have said 'less connected environments' rather than 'low density environments'. Paris is quite dense and connected by public transport. Atlanta less dense, but probably easier to drive around. The amount of people within a 1 hour commute of the centre of either will, however, be hugely higher than the examples shown.
I get this error:

clang: error: no such file or directory: 'libgcc.a'
We Play Elite: Dangerous in the DK2
Note that the MD5 hash appended to the plaintext is probably just an add hoc system to provide integrity protection[1] of the plaintext. The scenario is that Alice sends Bob an encrypted message without a signature and Eve selectively tampers with the plaintext (without being able to decrypt the message though). For example if you use the CTR block cipher mode[2] you can switch any bits of the plaintext (by switching the corresponding bits of the ciphertext). The MD5 hash of the message at the end supposedly adds enough structure so that such attack is impossible. This added security layer does not rely on collision resistance but on the avalanche effect[3].

Nowadays you would add a MAC[4] to the message or use an authenticated encryption scheme[5] instead of just an encryption mode to achieve message integrity. But PGP, like SSL, comes from the Bronze Age of cryptography and does not really adhere to modern best practices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_security#Integrity

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_authentication_code

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticated_encryption
I like a more structured technique called GRASS, described in Ovid's 'Agile Companies go P.O.P.' presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/Ovid/a-14058644/22

The basics are: ask the candidate to describe a project they worked on (that they enjoyed, listed on their resume, or anything). Ask follow-up questions until you find out: the Goal of the project; their Role on the team; what Actions they personally took to reach the goal; whether the project Succeeded or not; and Speculation on what they would do differently in hindsight.

Repeat until they run out of projects to talk about, or you run out of time.
I can't quite remember what search terms I used .. Calibre was one, because it's good for doc mgmt. I added "open source". Then a couple of software reviews used the term "collection management". http://alternativeto.net was helpful, after I found one of the apps. Not really sure how I found them :)
Android 4.4: 17.9%
iOS 8: I don't know, but it's not released to the public, so currently maybe 1%?

So if you want to actually reach the majority of mobile users at this point, IndexedDB is not yet the way to go.
My interview question was similar "What is the biggest program you have ever written" (As I hire only freshers). Problem is, not even 1% seems to pass this test. For those who are talented but lazy till now, I offered another choice, or "Can you do me a small Snake game now"?
Byron, if you need a place to stay in the Los Angeles area, shoot me an email. I'd be more than happy to help you get back on your feet.
Well, the earth is not a sphere, so not a huge problem.
Hi Richard, thank you for your comment! It's very welcomed.

Honestly, I made it for myself initially, I'm the only active user right now (so there goes the social proof), but for that reason alone I don't plan to take it down any time soon.

Still from the very start I've always played with the idea to charge for it (maybe something like $2/mo at least), and that's the reason I recently polished it and released it. I didn't want to bother integrating a payment system and have no one use it, so that's why it's free now, just testing to see if there is any interest (thanks for yours!).

So from what you say I'll ask you, would you pay $2/mo (or even 1) to use this? Do you think there could be a potential market for it?

P.S. Pro tip: You can import your text lists by pasting the text on a new list. Not fully developed yet though, only works when pasting at the end of a list.
Good idea. Caching JSON responses as opposed to rendered HTML makes a lot of sense when the server has little RAM.
I grew up in NYC and after a number of years avoiding a driver's license, I did get one (but like in 2006). It was "freeing" to own a car, but the glamour of it faded. I moved to Staten Island for a few years, and there, you need to have a car. When I got a chance to move to Manhattan, the real weight of having a car starts to set in:

a. You have to constantly move the car because of alternate side parking (the amount of times it was required, I thought, was overly-excessive in the neighborhood where I lived),
b. The fact there is very little space to park which caused me to spend a lot of time just looking for parking (I'd give up and go to the only place I knew that had gobs of space - Riverside and 122nd, near Grant's Tomb :P),
c. The cost of fueling the car, mostly used just to find parking,
d. The fear of damage, from dings from careless people swinging taxi doors or the time when someone threw a brick through the passenger side window to see if they can find anything in my car,
e. The insurance cost (glad I owned the car outright and that insurance was cheaper in Manhattan),
f. The fact that parking garages in Manhattan are absurdly expensive ($400-$500/month around where I lived ... only the wealthy can eat that cost).

All this, just to have a weekend drive to upstate NY. That was the only enjoyable part of having the car. Otherwise, the burden was never freedom to me.

Whether it be NYC or where I live now, getting on a bus or train is freedom to me. It's freedom to know that this cost of modern living is off my budget and that when it comes down to it now, I really don't have to drive to get around.

I will say though that this is all really dependent on where you live. It would get stifling if you lived in suburbia or rural areas and can't travel anywhere. My parents had a vacation place in a rural area outside the city. I'd go stir crazy if I couldn't drive to town (I sort of did when we vacationed at the place, when I was much younger.)

The whole point is that this is really contextual. In the end, given cost of living and having to add budget items, I'd prefer things to be simpler. No insurance payments, no car payments, no fuel payments is a breath of fresh air to me.
More New Businesses Accepting Bitcoin
I don't know about Ruby, but can you please elaborate about Python? I'd argue that non-cross platform Python code is actually quite uncommon.

There are of course OS-specific features that can be bound to Python code, but those can be bound to Java code as well.
His examples were smaller than Paris, but I think Paris in many sections matches what he was talking about. His emphasis was on small streets.

I picked a couple random areas in central paris on google street view and found this:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Paris,+France&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=48.859802,2.360516&spn=0.034502,0.079308&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=42.089199,81.210938&oq=paris&hnear=Paris,+%C3%8Ele-de-France,+France&t=m&z=14&layer=c&cbll=48.858935,2.357198&panoid=KFedUek_xPdwmoxKOlmqLQ&cbp=12,312.34,,0,3.28

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Paris,+France&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=48.875074,2.338385&spn=0.034492,0.079308&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=42.089199,81.210938&oq=paris&hnear=Paris,+%C3%8Ele-de-France,+France&t=m&z=14&layer=c&cbll=48.875074,2.338385&panoid=JTi6slw3B6yserHz2yLGoQ&cbp=12,291.51,,0,11.39

Paris has transit, and large streets, but it has many, many small streets like that.
A Router-Based Dev Board That Isn’t A Router
Symmetric encryption key (Km in the article) get encrypted separately with Alice, Bob, Sam and Joe public keys and then all those encrypted keys get concatenated with the message.
That's an awesome story and your dad sounds awesome :) made me think of Red vs Blue actually, "I signed up to the army as a conscientious objector!"
Perhaps I should have qualified that more than I did. As I said elsewhere in these comments, my father served in the U.S. Army for 21 years, and he's one of the finest men I've known. Militaries, like all human institutions, are made up of good people and bad people and people just trying to get by, from the lowest ranks of the highest.

I do think the chain of command is inclined to respect the majority of soldiers who do their jobs competently and don't cause trouble--people like my father; it's not necessarily a bad thing. But the chain of command doesn't like it when people rock the boat, even if they have a good reason; and it doesn't like it when people make their superiors look bad, even if they did it while following orders.

Of course I'm generalizing. Certainly officers with real integrity exist at every level. But I do think my examples demonstrate that there's a real cultural problem there, and I don't think enough is done to address. The fact that even worse groups also exist doesn't excuse that.

And yes, I'm speaking of the US military in particular. I don't know enough to either praise or condemn any other. I'm not railing against terrorists and rogue states, because there's no reason to point out that water is wet. No one expects terrorists to be decent people. But we should expect, and demand, better of the people who are tasked with keeping us safe at night, who are supposed to be the best of us.
Ask HN: Major differences between DarkCoin and BlackCoin?
What are they? And what utilitarian value would one have over the other?
BEM modifiers: multiple classes vs. extend
What happens if the "Key" DB gets hacked and stolen? Is the company required to buy everyone new locks?
This "in France you can't fire people" meme needs to die. Most software engineer contracts have an four or eight month no questions asked firing provision.
As vague as is may sound, once we feel it's ready. The development is active, but there is still a lot of work to make the project release-ready. You might help too - we started accepting external contributions recently and the project is covered by the bug bounty.
This is cool. I actually sat down just today to start coding something that would help me automate my exploration of a tunable band-pass filter (or set of tunable filters which could be switched).

In my degree programme I did computer systems, not RF - but even this involved designing/building microwave amplifiers, playing with network analyzers and learning transmission line theory. I wish I could say that this work ~10 years ago has properly prepared me for the task but it seems I have many months of weekend study ahead of me...

In any case, even back then the RF students were generating pretty funky antenna designs out of modeling tools that ran for days sweeping through physical dimensions, numbers & types & topologies of elements, etc. to optimize toward some goal.
>the way that military whistleblowers are treated

No different to how any other institutional whistleblowers are treated.

>the fallout from military atrocities in Vietnam (invariably blame was heaped upon the soldiers on the ground and not allowed to sully the sleeves of the officers who gave them their orders

Do you live in an alternate reality? The only people court martialed over My Lai for example were officers, including a Colonel and a General (who was demoted).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_W._Koster
My suggestions :

- reduce line height to make text easier to read

- add your logo/name in the header nav (top-left maybe)

- make your Github/Twitter accounts more visible than tiny icons in the footer

- talking about footer, it probably should be highlight how to contact you - being able to contact you only through a "Support" form seems quite unfriendly

- add an About page telling a bit about yourself, where you are located, ...

- probably better leave the Testimonials page out until you can fill it http://www.longviewbits.com/testimonials/ - an empty Testimonials page doesn't provide any positive value
> lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth

This seems like a really strange argument to me.
Nice and thorough article. I am always amazed by the fact that despite oceans and distance, we are physically connected to each other.

It is obvious, but nevertheless mind blowing.
Clojure Destructuring Tutorial and Cheatsheet
Kinetisense: developing a Kinect app the right way
While it may require an extra set, the following is a lot more pythonic, and also finds the first missing positive in the same two passes that your code did (which is actually O(2n), and honestly made my eyes bleed trying to follow.)

def missPos(a):
b={x for x in a}
for x in range(1,len(b)+2):
if not x in b:
return x
Do you know of any countries where 'proper' borders exist, other than those between East and West Germany, and North and South Korea, which existed for political reasons and economic reasons?

Or the one between the USA and Mexico, which has more to do with a dislike of the racial makeup of those wanting to cross into the USA?

Isn't a border nothing more than a line drawn in the sand patrolled by armed men in places where it is feasible?

If animals can cross borders at will, then why can't humans also? After all humans are a peculiar breed of apes without fur?
Famous Bugs in Programming History (20th Century)
The issue is thinking average keys and locks are anything but a mild inconvenience. Spurned lovers/friends/coworkers could easily "borrow" a key and get it copied.

They could also just get a screwdriver and a rubber mallet and remove the lock, or smash a window.
OT, but, what happened to that budapest FP night?
I'd love to attend :)
Out of interest; Amongst the Snowden leaks, was there a map of the physical locations where the NSA and the 5-eyes have their tap points in relation to where these cables pop out of the water onto land?
Tokenadult has a regular post that has grown to the size of a small essay which basically says the only way to tell if someone can do the job is to give them the job to do.

How long does it take to become obvious someone is not a good fit? A couple of hours? No, if humans could not fake it for a couple of hours no one would ever go on a date again.

A couple of days - maybe. My own pet theory is when I hit a new contract is to commit a bug fix by the end of the day and push to production by the end of the week.

But no one sane is willing to give a week to an interview, and few a whole day.

I think in the end we judge people by their public output - in other words GitHub reall is going to be our CV
30-day-long Swedish movie Ambiancé, a surreal dream-like epic
At the github repo, it is mentioned to have a Linux machine to get started. What is a recent, decent Linux stack on a laptop to look at? I wanted to buy again a laptop for linux for some time already, and maybe someone here as some buying advice?
I suppose the work the candidate is most keen to discuss doesn't have to be recent which makes it fair.

All good programmers I know have at some point spent significant amount of their free time programming on their own, that's why they've become good programmers. They might have kids now or too much work, but I would be amazed to meet a good programmer that has only ever programmed at work.

Despite that the fact that I have kids and a job that does take its time, I do program as a hobby. It mostly kicks in when things are slow at work or when work is less about coding and more about something else as if I had a weekly or monthly coding quota that I need to fill in. But I do have the urge to write programs independent of my work -- if I'm lucky I can abuse my work to fulfill that urge.
I have criticisms of FRP implementations, but the supposed two fatal flaws proposed here seem wrong.

1: Static type support for causality. If this is referring to what I think it is, then it's something normal async code doesn't have to begin with.

2. Memory leaks: these are mostly symptoms of lazy programming a la Haskell, not about FRP. Once you eliminate this bug of Haskell's, the significant ones go away. For avoiding them in practice, try FrTime (scheme), Flapjax (javascript), and Rx's "hot" streams (most languages).

Edit: for those proposing tasks, that's about something different. The loose answer to tasks are promises. FRP is about a more expressive (multiple assignment scenario) and structured (more synchronized) promise.
Experimenting with a simulation is a great time saver as far as it goes, however, all models are just models, subject to the assumptions that went into them.

There is a great deal we do not know about cellular biology. Any simulation would be a fairly gross approximation. The point of many experiments is to further our understanding of the model of cellular mechanics.
You don't necerally need high buildings to create density. You can have density with single family homes, if you have narrow streets and less parking. http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2011/061211.html

There is such a thing as sound insulation, not every appartment building is noisy.

Not everything need to be super high density. There are thresholds that make a local restaurant, corner store, transit stop etc profitable.

Not everybody wants to live like this sure, but many do, and these places are sadly often straight up illegal to build. Besides sprawl is incentivised through subsidized road construction, parking minimums, zoning etc.
> by contrast most suburban homes have a ~40 year lifecycle

Living in Germany this is kind of mind-boggling for me. Does that mean each generation has to practically rebuild the houses of its parents?

> Much cheaper and easier if its dead flat.

Don't several story buildings pay for themselves as you can sell / rent more flats using basically the same amount of infrastructure?
He should've stayed a street person? That's a horrible thing to say.
The problem with this fantasy is that easily automated and distributed tasks are not the rate-limiting steps in most biomedical research. The hard parts (in addition to designing the right experiments and analyzing data..) are in constructing and validating relevant model systems and doing the specific experiments to address questions of interest.

These are extremely dependent on the question being studied and often are not amenable to automation, and may require very rare, expensive, and difficult-to-handle samples. For example, my collaborators work with transgenic mice that are a model for a particular disease, and these mice have to be bred then aged to 12 weeks until they exhibit the phenotype before we can even start doing an experiment. In another model, they have to do brain surgery on each mouse and then wait several weeks for the phenotype.

The 'easy' parts, such as DNA synthesis and sequencing, are already highly standardized and automated, and there is fierce competition to improve the technology and bring costs down.
U.K. National Grid status
The only examples you see are centuries old. There is no reason why you couldn't bild something accessible today.
New ransomware employs Tor to stay hidden from security
It's worth reading the book just to understand in some small way the experience of Malcolm X and people like him. His father was murdered (probably by the police & because he was becoming politically active) and then his mother was cheated out of the life insurance because his death was falsely ruled as a suicide.

In turn the struggle of bringing up her family ruined his mother's health and probably her sanity.

So one can understand his being bitter and twisted. What is impressive is that he overcame this. I would put this book on any must-read list.