skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now this may be old, but it had something called "pods" which I think are servers. And you have to run one, or register with one. Once done it would store all the data. There didn't seem to be a way to have intra-pod communications. This didn't feel sufficiently decentralized for me. Basically it seems more like a tool to create your own facebook. I still have to trust the guy running the pod.

I was expecting a locally running app, with all my stuff available to it, one or more bitcoin style IDs and external servers acting as a napster style introductory service, which once complete would have nothing to do with the encrypted p2p communications that followed.

I think with a sufficiently scoped out messaging protocol and simple demo client software something new and important could be created.

Since everything would be encrypted for the end-recipient it may well be data intensive, if sharing videos amongst many people for example, but perhaps some shared secret/ one-time pad/ dropbox (old and new meanings) would be a good solution to this.
Audi to let driverless car loose on Selmon Expressway [video] | Tampa Bay Times
> Error establishing a database connection

How fitting...
please be a joke
I just posted it to /r/Christianity for you: http://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/2bp1k8/onebody...

You could probably talk to the mods and get it as a permalink on the sidebar. Quite a few pastors/bishops/other church leaders hang out there.
I suggest that you ballpark how many Teslas you expect to be on the road during a given time and place (say, a 1-mile stretch of highway during rush hour), and compute how much square footage of flying solar panel you're suggesting putting into the air, assuming 100%-efficient transmission of power given the current best efficiency of solar panel. (From there it's easy to compute what it would take given less than 100%-perfect transmission.)

I'm not just being rhetorical... try it. It's fun.
I'd work on my "brilliant but stupid and perhaps useless" idea - automatically generating web apps from desktop apps, in realtime (i.e. as you use the web app, it's really controlling the desktop app behind the scenes).
Cringely should stick to commenting on tech as opposed to the validity of raising debt to do share buybacks in a low interest rate environment.
Better to quit grad school or spend extra year to get MS?
I was enrolled in a Physics Phd program but took a leave of absence from the program and have been approved to re-enter the grad program starting in the Fall 2014 semester (I could've tried transferring to other grad programs, but they wouldn't accept me until Fall 2015 and I would have to pay out-of-state tuition for them. However, I'm still funded for this program).

I would say I still have interest in Physics, but definitely don't want a phd. I just want to get into industry asap. I want to look for work as an engineer, statistician, data analyst or something like that afterwards. But I've been advised to return to the program since MS degrees look good and if I dropped out without the MS, I would have a fairly large gap in my resume (and I have already have plenty of gaps in it)

Because this program usually awards phD's and not MS's, I'm not quite sure what to do and how to plan out my coursework. I spoke to a couple of student reps in the program and they suggested I email the director of the program or just email many labs since it may be difficult to find placement as I just want to get the MS. Also, I may have to work as a volunteer and TA for the first semester instead of working as an RA.

What I'm most concerned about is that the director may find it suspicious and have the other professors subject me to additional scrutiny for re-entering the program only to plan to leave with an MS instead of the PhD.

Am I over-worrying about this? Or should I tell the professors I'm emailing directly that I plan to just pursue an MS instead of the PhD, or just bring it up later?
What's wrong with flute players?
Fizzbuzzed
Yeah it does. Apps can have permission to the current tab when you click on their action icon (either in URL or to the right of it)

I agree though that this app has permissions that are too broad.
I really thought 'Error establishing a database connection' was _the_ joke. :|
Or a temple, synagogue, cathedral, monastery, abbey, tabernacle, or center?

"Church" is just the generic English word for "place of worship".
This was just for demonstrating the idea. It isn't for any use. As I said, it was when I started programming.
Promises are a superior abstraction, easier to reason about, provides consistent error handling. Sadly (in my opinion), this is an `async`-like library.
It's not the type of website that decides what hosting price is expensive, it is the amount of visitors.

If your site is visited enough to require non-trivial optimization, then 30 dollars a month is probably the least of your worries.
It depends. It's not like there's no safe way of using strcpy and sprintf.
In Rob Pike's opening keynote at GopherCon, Rob attributes the first hello world to Brian Kernighan written in B in 1972.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoS7DsT1rdM (minute 2 to 3 it's discussed)
I think there's a good reason that plants are not mobile, and animals are. Standing mostly still probably has advantages when collecting solar power.
Wow, that looks like some quality stuff. Nice work.
Unauthorized email (not in my address book) to pay "entry fee" (bitcoin?, amount determined by me) to get into my inbox.
In what timeframe? Every quarter? Amazon is in it for the long haul and will likely make shareholders a lot of money in the end.
It says they show 'both big and small' changes acurately, not that it's good for large jumps.
This sounds interesting. What are you using for your pubsub servers might I ask? And what are the scalability and fault-tolerance requirements on them? Are pub/sub servers in different data centres essentially independent with consistency handled by other servers colocated in an origin datacenter?
Behavioural Interview – Do candidates have the upper hand in an interview?
Yes, fully agreed, it's not specific to FP languages and it's not always easy to use.
It will be interesting to see if this is the inflection point where Amazon is held to the same standard as other companies (finally).
Control+Alt+V or Control+Shift+V in most applications that support rich text will paste without formatting.
I have worked on and off on a small developer oriented CMS based on PHP, but I could never get myself to work on it continuously. If I had half a year, I would develop the CMS which I could easily customise to write applications faster.
Cool! I wasn't aware of Sandstorm... will check it out!
Structuring files/folders is debatable based on code base size/estimation, no opinion is "wrong".

Yep, that's why he labeled both ways as "good".
This paper argues it's a poisson distribution:

Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters[1]

while others disagree:

In the case of plane accidents, the authors
of Ref. 7[1] found that the time lag between commercial airline disasters and their
occurrence frequency could be well described by time-dependent Poisson events. On
the other hand, authors of Ref. 8[3] have found that beyond certain timescales the time
dynamics of both plane and car accidents are not Poissonian but instead long-range
correlated.[2]

[1]http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0509092

[2]http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3183

[3]http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437107...
"You can see lots of screenshots here." - Amazing how many people forget to do that. Good stuff.
Data Migrations [tutorial]
So would a ridiculously slow PHP framework be an example of why we don't code serious web apps with PHP?
This is really nicely done. My parish seems really fond of phone services like CallingPost; you might be able to do some integration with Twilio to annoy other church people the same way. :)

You might also consider an explicit obit feature, along with explicit features for weddings and baptisms, since those are the big "out of process" services (at least in Catholic churches) that need announcements.
Ask HN: Systems programming – where should I start?
I want to get involved in systems programming, but don't know where to start.

My background is in developing web applications, and have used PHP, Ruby, Python and JavaScript heavily over the years. I don't have a formal education in computer science.

I've recently started looking at Rust[1], and have found myself having to learn about things like memory, pointers, lifetimes, ownership, (de)referencing and so on. I've found that I've been spoiled by dynamic languages over the years in not having to think/worry about any of that.

Where did you start in learning all of this? Can you show me any resources which would help me in learning this sort of thing?

What computer science concepts do you find most valuable when it comes to systems programming?

Thanks for the help in advance!

1. Rust - http://rust-lang.org
Even though I'm not religious, this really looks wonderful. I'd be happy to recommend it to church-going coworkers and friends.

Echoing zerokarmaleft, this time you are the inspiration.
I'm not sure how it can't be construed as a joke given the poor accuracy of the CAPTCHA "paint" app and the fact that if you fail the first ridiculously complicated image, you are greeted with this image as the second CAPTCHA to replicate:
http://www.geee.net/acids/cntpaint.gif

Granted, maybe they just have humor on the Contact Form (they also say "Your message has been sent to the Prime Minister who will be making some more cuts shortly." when you fail both CAPTCHAs), I haven't read the writings you're referencing.
I know little about this kind of software, but a local church uses this site like it provides similar functionality?: http://www.onthecity.org/

Have you compared your project to this company's offering at all? I'm just wondering if they are even similar.
This is probably the 10th time this has happened in Amazon's history. I am invested and not worried at all, FWIW.
The software is definitely Christian church focused because that's where we first built it, but no reason it couldn't be adapted for other uses!
With minor adjustments, you can probably deploy your Django app on Google App Engine using Cloud SQL for storage, but ElasticSearch would probably have to be replaced: https://developers.google.com/appengine/training/fts_intro/

The nice thing is that you get free quotas for resources every month (ie., you don't start paying until you start succeeding)!: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
Wish the matching_engine had a better readme so that others could play around with this
I remember using this years ago to build out a private social network for a fraternal organization. It works very well even for non-monastic purposes!
US Congress banned from editing Wikipedia after staff caught trolling
I think part of the problem is in how you value companies. Basically, you can only "value" a company when someone makes an investment. So if a (sophisticated?) person or VC invests in it, or if it goes public, we would consider that an estimate of value.

If no one invests in it, and you are clipping coupons, how would you know you have a billion dollar company? You could have $100 million a year in earnings and some growth, and have a pretty good idea, but you don't know. Conceivably, whatsapp could have bootstrapped their way to $1 Billion before they accepted VC money, but even they may not know.
It saddens me that people are bothered about this. It highlights the continued disconnect between the interests of the companies traded on the market and those of the investors at large.

Bezos has been completely transparent about his philosophy regarding long-term and short-term profitability. This is not out of character for Amazon. Rather the opposite: the day I hear Amazon cutting long-term projects to boost short-term profitability is the day I would sell my Amazon stock. This is the way Amazon has operated for most of its history. They've already built up enough of a track record for us to trust that they know what they're doing. It is stupid to expect them to behave like other companies when we have seen them operate in this manner for some 20 years successfully. Maximizing short-term profitability is not a high priority for Amazon, and it never has been. Why is the market surprised then when they re-invest in growth? Because the market can be stupid.
How the CIA was fooled by India
Writing a (at least somewhat usable) compiler has always appealed. Would be tempting to try an implementation of PLOT -- http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/

Alternatively, and rather more contact/resource dependent, would be some at-least-semi-lab-based biology.
I don't know about it not being "good law", but one difference between Ford and the modern CEO is that the modern CEO is significantly less likely to out-and-out say, "screw the shareholders...they're not who I'm doing this for" as Ford basically did.
You can downvote? Does it come with higher karma?
How do I build a SaaS prototype with little technical skills?
I would highly recommend starting out by building your own linux distro by following the linux-from-scratch book or similar.[1]

You will learn a lot about what goes into making a distro actually boot, how the different pieces of software are interacting with each other, and how to solve and debug typical issues and kernel panics.

From there, I think many would recommend attempting to make some sort of Kernel Module, even if it's a very basic one that isn't of much use. The experience alone will teach you a lot of valuable skills and knowledge.[2]

Learning some assembler will help as well. There is a great free ebook from the gnu assembler (GAS) project [3]. Assembler will help teach you how the computer is really doing what it does. This is important if you are going to be working closer to the kernel and most of the critical subsystems, be in Linux or the BSD's (even Windows actually). There are many different Assembler languages, but learning some basics in one will help you understand how others work.

[1] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/

[2] http://www.linuxchix.org/content/courses/kernel_hacking/less...

[3] http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/Programmin...
Mapping capslock to be esc is what made vim possible for me.
Very nice. I feel this should have gotten more attention.
Travelling the world and learn a new programming language. In fact, that's what I'm doing right now. Learning Go while sitting in a coffee shop in Vientiane, Laos.
'A Beautiful Mind' is a fantastic movie, but, as you implied, it's fundamentally a different story. The book is where it's at:
http://www.amazon.com/A-Beautiful-Mind-Sylvia-Nasar/dp/14516...

I will also say that it's impossible to over-state the breath and depth of the varieties of experiences that stem from what is called schizophrenia. There are certainly groups of people who share somewhat similar symptoms, but even that is tenuous. Words simply can't adequately describe it.
Carrier attack groups have a refueling ship along with all the cruisers/attack ships. It probably makes sense, just going by the size differences the carrier would use more conventional fuel than all of its escorts combined, so having the carrier be nuclear powered doubles your range.
Innovation will never be done. Some kid somewhere will find a new way of doing things. Anyways, for programmers, I would think something like this. Imagine you are coding/executing on command line and you repeatedly get an GCC error "Cannot use Non-POD objects in ....". Sometimes, I break my head over these kind of non-obvious errors. I want the command line/terminal to tell me the solution immediately instead of me needing to go to stackoverflow.
Case law (and now statute) affords a lot of discretion to management as to what is in the best interests of shareholders. http://everything2.com/title/business+judgment+rule
Shaders have always seemed like some kind of dark magic to me. Would love to see this book happen.
I have a few in different areas, mostly writing for technology-based magazines but have previously worked at local and larger newspapers.

As for news orgs. to be a bit slow, I hear you completely! I conducted a closed workshop with a corporation that develops enterprise-level software for newspapers and you could literally wow them with simple CSS3 transitions and animations, let alone flexbox layouts. :-)

Motivation is a big factor for me too, I tend to dream about applying my skills to the common good, but end up creating either entertainment-based webapps and / or tools other web developers (https://github.com/AndersSchmidtHansen?tab=repositories).

I'll keep you in the know! I think that investing our skills into evolving our society (local and global) is the next, natural step for us geeks. ;-)
Your point is well-made. Language is very important on religious websites. My church used an online directory from a commercial provider which had fairly obvious opinions about the appropriate mix of genders in a family. Their opinion was directly opposite that of our congregations and ultimately we dropped the system in favor of another.
Thanks. Okay, that makes sense.

The $resource usage described still works in version 1.2.19, with no promise unwrapping options set. I could be wrong, but I think it is because the $resource returns a reference to an empty object that has values copied into it when the call completes. The actual promise is a property named $promise on the returned object.

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/92zmG/7/
Marten Mickos had this to say: http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-10-15-marten-mick...
A better title would be "Why is down voting on comments disabled on some submissions?"
Very nice, thanks for the update.
I've been programming for a couple years now, part time. I work in IT troubleshooting proprietary software on customer's machines. I've written several vb.net applications to automate things in the office. (Screen scraping/website automation, log file readers/parsers,, etc...) Lately I've been working in python more for my screen scraping needs and also learning web2py. I've thought about trying to apply for a programming job where I work, or at least maybe see if I can shadow a programmer to see what it's like.

I've always been put off by thinking that I'd just be embarrassed because I'm not good enough and they'd laugh at my code. Nobody in my group at work does any kind of coding or scripting, and all my work is proprietary and I can't really share it on the internet for feedback. I've heard of this fizzbuzz test before, but just now looked up what it is exactly. I can't believe how easy that is, and that people are actually failing at it. Makes me feel like maybe I should apply for some of the developer jobs at our company.
Why is the FAA so against drones (or whatever you want to call them) is any case? Sure none of us want police drones circling our backyards, but there are so many positive uses that the FAA seems intent on stifling like search and rescue, agriculture and surveying.
And it's not just hitting in obvious places.

Consider Hadoop. I know of at two major DB2 customer who are investing in Hadoop rather than expanding their DB2 capabilities to handle problems IBM would love to solve with their solutions.
An article like this deserves an image.
Hmm, well if a Brigade is a team of developers then I'd definitely go for that and ask some of my friends. But starting an entire Program seems better suited for some other people I know. :-)

The Google groups tip is nice, that's a very nice idea. Thanks again!
Had I been Ford, I'd have suggested that these investments were indeed intended to "maximize shareholder value" - build more capacity, build more product, sell more units ... profit? You can spout the humanitarian stuff all you want to journalists, but in court, you should really be addressing the specific grievances of the plaintiff.
I don't know about you, but I don't want football field size anything flying over my head, shooting energy beams.

I like... air, instead.
Actually I think the strongest defenders of emacs say you use C-s and the like for most navigation. Moving character-by-character is slow and inefficient, so the argument about whether C-n C-p etc. are better or worse than hjkl is irrelevant.

I have my own code editor which is more like vi than emacs, but I'm using interactive search in it.
It's a good idea to pick a game framework first, which will shorten the tutorial considerably, since the basic Android specific stuff would likely require several tutorial of its own.

I started a few months back and chose LibGDX for my first game. Although I believe LibGDX was originally developed for Android, it also runs on the Desktop and can also be ported to iOS, which is a bonus. It is designed mostly for 2D games. It's easy to use, there's a good wiki and it's actively maintained.

Here's a tutorial for getting going on a simple game with LibGDX.
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/A-simple-game

And here's a set of tutorials and videos for getting a LibGDX project all set up in the IDE of your choice:
http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/documentation.html
At this point I think the only captchas that would be reliable are ones that trade on the inherently illogical nature of human decision-making. Ask people questions or give them things to solve that they will initially answer illogically due to their human biases. A computer, even if it could answer correctly, would have to learn about how humans make decisions, or how perception causes us to view certain things differently. You'd have to create an AI smart enough to make bad decisions like a human in order to beat it.
I really wish people who talk about wireless charging would do some math.

To get any efficiency, you need to tightly constrain the EM field, at which point, you are effectively hitting a plug anyway.

Or, you are accepting enormous radiative losses and losing massive amounts of power. Doubling or tripling the power draw in every device just so it's powered wirelessly is a non-starter.

For cars, we're more likely to get automated charging stations that just plug themselves in. That's going to be a useful problem to solve.
Only if there were no surface-to-air missiles involved.
ProTips for Freelancers
How to qualify a lead: the hot tub test
I've never understood early merging. Why eliminate a lane of traffic before necessary.
Chicago has a group called "Open City" that builds open-source applications for the city.

Link: http://opencityapps.org/

One thing you could do is look through their apps (they're all open source & on github) and figure out which ones might make sense for your city.

You can then clone the apps you like, configure them for your city (many cities use the Socrata data platform, so this may be simply a config change in some cases) and deploy it for your city.
Simple web-focused Docker-based mini-PaaS server
No, there is no story-downvoting feature on HN, at any level of karma.
I'm in. I'd love to chip in some $$$ to support it, as well.
What if it was only for things in the same "class" (wrong word, but I'm not sure what to actually call it)?

So variables only with variables, classes only with classes, functions only with functions?

(I.e. you can define a class called Arduino (bad name, by the way) and a variable named arduino, and it won't complain, but if you then try to define a class called "ARDUINO" or a variable named "ARDUINO" it will error out.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8081384
I didn't say they did. Read.

"Even a "company" with a monopoly can't avoid going bankrupt every 5 years and these buzzword ads won't help them. Give my letters (and 3D printed items) to someone who actually loses when they do a crap job, thanks."
The law does not require it.

A further note: private corporations are under absolutely no obligations as to how they do or do not reinvest their profits. So your blanket statement is way off base, the private company economy is drastically larger than the publicly traded economy.