skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a fan of rigor; I prefer to communicate in a short, simple way and let people fill in the blanks. But here's some better argumentation:

There are non-obviousnesses in the Scala syntax:
Watch this talk from Scala Days: http://www.parleys.com/play/53a7d2c7e4b0543940d9e551/chapter...

A language with backwards syntax compatibility will have either constant or deteriorating syntax over time:
This requires a cost function for language and library syntax. I define this as being a combination of syntax size, syntax consistency and syntax readability (as measured by learning curve for new developers). Syntax here includes the syntax and interface to features in libraries, not just the core language. Obviously, already existing syntax cannot be improved upon without breaking compatibility. This is bad as long as the existing syntax is not perfect, which is (almost) always. One can add better, additional syntax to mitigate but size and inconsistency will grow and new developers will have to understand the old syntax anyway, so you cannot fix existing bad syntax by adding new replacements. Any new syntax will either adhere to old, bad rules or break consistency with the old, neither of which are optimal. Conclusion: Backwards compatibility means you're fucked.

C++'s syntax is bad:
This is straddling the line between subjective and objective. I can't imagine any measure by which this is not true. If you want to claim otherwise please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
HN does some minimal formatting. You can add emphasis to text with asterisks

You can also prepend your lines with two spaces for pre-formatted text/code
No. :( Our users -- lab folks -- are not particularly computer savvy, and everyone benefits from the face time, especially when it comes to translating what they said on a JIRA issue to their actual problem.
I apologize for the bugs and confusing UI. We recently made a change where files that are ignored by git are no longer shared in Floobits.

Have you tried the summon command? It will cause everyone else in the workspace to jump to your file/cursor.
I think "Snowden" in the title is a penalty, still.
Total time = development time + run time

Perl might be one of the fastest languages from this point of view. I write 1%of my code in C and the rest in Perl for optimal efficiency.
It looks like Terraform is launching with decent coverage of AWS resources. Thinking of my own usage, the main ones missing are ElastiCache and CloudWatch. I'm not sure how you can setup a useful autoscaling group without the latter.

EDIT: There's an issue tracking adding more at https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/28
This looks like a great tool. I was going to use CloudFormation to setup a new VPC in AWS, but I will give this a shot instead.
Interacting with C Pointers
Roger Schell on long-term computer security research
Instance Methods are Curried Functions in Swift
As someone who has on multiple occasions left a case of beer in a car during a Montana winter, I thank your grandfather for making the cans bulge but not explode when frozen :)
How to design a successful web app walkthrough
I have a similar boiler/thermostat to the one in the article, and my thermostat also tends to cut out once a year or so. I tracked that down to the battery terminals corroding quite badly, and once the oxide layer is removed the thermostat works fine again for the next year or so. It's still an impressive bit of reverse engineering though.
Yeah, the scroll reveal is this year's Pinterest Layout. Don't worry, it'll be some other bandwagon in 12 months.
I don't think there's actually a good way to solve this (that I know of) for applications with complex enough permission and role hierarchies.

Once you need a list of all the glass marbles with their attributes, but can only see the color of marbles you supervise, and only the radius of a marble if it has a shooter role and only the names and emails of marbles ranked above you... ...and so on... it becomes a situation where each result has to be filtered item by item pretty much. And the filter hierarchies will snowball like tribbles.
What about just saying something along the lines of: "I think I'd like you because ______"?
They will if they know what's good for them. If not (and I have no doubt that often this is the case) then that's their problem.
How to implement a Self-Destruct button?
> After school we had BB gun battles.

reminded that nothing makes you run faster than an "enemy" with an air rifle with crafts-clay "bullet". Leaves nice haematoma even through wool pants :)

I'm all for the progress, yet i think abolishing BB guns/air-rifle battles isn't the one. Making sure that everybody wears safety glasses would be the one (we didn't have the ones, and that i think was unnecessary risk) Lead of course has to go.

Another - i see in the park children playing battles with "swords" which can't deliver any pain - foam wrapped by duct tape. We had "swords" we carved out of wood. They could deliver some pain, and that made the fight more lively i'd say :)
This cuts against everything I've heard about genetics and epigenetic developments since the the complete of the HGP. It was my understanding that we were finding that the so-called "junk" DNA actually serves a variety of functions in regulating and controlling protein production and usage.

Wikipedia seems to agree:
"The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project[3] suggested in September 2012 that over 80% of DNA in the human genome "serves some purpose, biochemically speaking".[4] This conclusion however is strongly criticized by other scientists,[5][6] with a recent article claiming that "8.2% of the human genome is likely to be functional, while only 2.2% has maintained constraint in both human and mouse since these species diverged".[7]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA
Most of the difference is likely just a matter of data. If Trulia has better data than Zillow, their estimate will likely be closer to reality. There is the added difficulty of coming up with what's basically one methodology that has to work everywhere. My guess is that if you're in a funky place, like on the border of two neighborhoods, or if you're in a rural area, your estimates are likely to be further from reality than if you live in a cookie-cutter subdivision or in a downtown area.

The point is: yes, it's frustrating, but it's also complicated.
Federal marijuana bill would legalize low-THC cannabis
I don't know about the OP, but in my opinion, it'd be anything less than or equal to an equivalent replacement part (if it were available--in the OP's circumstance it's not). For example, some manufacturers of vacuum cleaners easily charge in upwards of $20 for a small plastic piece that you wouldn't expect to pay more than $8 for. So, if on-demand 3D printing services could compete with that niche, it's something I could see being of use for aftermarket repair or replacement. Poorly designed plastic switches no bigger than your thumb shouldn't be more expensive than hose attachments.

The only thing to worry about is the manufacturers' response: I don't know how much money they make from replacement parts, but if it's anything other than a minor revenue stream, I'd imagine they might issue legal threats or takedown notices. I wonder if, in another 20 years, we'll see OEMs sending threats to 3D printing companies warning them not to sell replacement components even if customers sent them the schematic?
I still don't get that sentence.
tracking.js is a new library that intends to bring the power of computer vision to the Web. OpenCV is far older and is a inspiration for our team regarding the number of available algorithms, robustness and speed. With the increasing power of JavaScript engines, we believe that we can achieve very good results using current state-of-the-art algorithms and low-level optimizations, so real-time CV applications can also be done on the Web.
Currently tracking.js don't have as many algorithms as OpenCV, but we are making our best efforts to bring useful algorithms to the library while still keeping the API easy to use and to extend, so we can count on the community to help us to make this project a success.
One case I know of where eval is used extensively is Python's namedtuple function from the collections module. It generates a class that behaves like a tuple, except the positions are named, so kind of like a read-only struct. Python has the __slots__ facility for exactly this situation - when you know exactly how many members your instances will have and don't want extensibility, but when namedtuple was written, it wasn't possible to programatically generate a class body with __slots__ in any way other than to generate the source for it and call eval. So here we are.
Good stuff, but your feed will be 'hadcrafted'? No it won't. That specifically means a human being involved in structuring your feed at the other end I seriously doubt that's the case. Words have meanings beyond their emotional marketing value, subverting them for commercial ends will eventually erode the trust of your audience.
But they're slightly taller wagons....

Totally different.
I love NPR and listen to a few of their podcasts via PocketCasts.

Not sure if I'd actually use this app, but just wanted to say you guys in the states are fortunate to have NPR producing top quality radio!
You should have lots of sympathy for them, though. They're not on their guard about MITM attacks, so they deserve to have their data stolen?
The problem is you always have to cut features somewhere to remain clean.

Look at bugzilla: So many fields most people don't need. Who needs to separate "Resolved" and "Closed" for example? Who cares about the OP's platform when you're building a web app? And why is "importance" different than "priority"? Why is there a keywords field, a tags field AND a whiteboard field? Wtf.

But all these are actually useful to some people out there. The problem is the end result is a mess. I find github issues to be good enough for 99% of non-massive/non-corporate projects out there. People can just go check out your project and add 3-4 bugs/suggestions as easily as they would comment on a blog post.

Personally what I miss is being able to flag a bug as a dupe of another. But again, do most projects need that is the question.
Nice work, I did pretty much the same thing about one and a half years back [1]. Didn't know it's still running [2], haha. I built it because I liked Favematic [3], but thought it didn't have enough "radio" like functionality.

I like your visual design better though, it's way cleaner. Also the track is better presented, but then again there were no pictures for tracks when I started.

Edit: Oh and btw I also had no clue how to describe what it does succinctly ;)

[1] https://github.com/prayerslayer/favsquare
[2] http://obscure-basin-1623.herokuapp.com/
[3] http://ascott.github.io/favematic/
I suspect it would be the profile picture.

I know that my method for sifting through the hundreds of profiles given by the matching algorithm is to first discriminate based on the profile pic.
From there, I'll go on to read the profile text to see if she's someone I'd want to be around. After that, it's the compatibility list which can show any major areas where we would have a difference of opinion (stuff like kids vs no kids, for example).

If those three hurdles are cleared, I'll write a message. I wouldn't be surprised if she's using a similar mechanism to decide whether to respond or not (thus, the low response rate).
Great idea to build this into existing email workflow. It's smart when developers build on top of Gmail.. speeds adoption
Actual site for the project:

http://facebook.github.io/flux/

Seems to still be in flux.
I think I can argue that a raw "eval" is always going to be the worst way to achieve a given result.

Since eval calls the entire system to do something, it involves every possible danger that programming the system ordinarily involves and it involves dangers particular to it (not being able to directly check the syntax any of the code beforehand, constructing values with strings, the possibility the scope of variable-binding may vary from call to call, etc). The danger is inherent in the approach.

This isn't a reason to never use eval, just a reason to never use it if you can think of an alternative. Sometimes you can't find an alternative in the time allotted.

And if you use eval or any equivalent, just remember you have opened a bottomless can of worms. We have spent generations now cleaning up SQL injections, for example.
Here's an interview with a guy who runs indices that are not valuation-based and seem to do better:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/07/masters-in-business-rob...
What about a random fund? Is there such a thing out there?
I have the same thoughts. I can't tell you how many times I've said "I need to work there."
Nonablative Laser Light Increases Influenza Vaccine Response 4 to 7-fold
I think Google Code does this one right: "Subscribe" is a star and you get notified -- star counts are public. I hope github adopts that model.
(Author here)

I can see that the title comes off as too grandiose out of context. Sorry about that; I was looking at it from a different angle when I wrote the article. The idea is that in normal work, you often run into challenges that seem infeasible. This should be a trigger to look for a way to reframe the problem, rather than giving up.
So you're software guy and you can build things. You even have an idea of what to build.

The "business/money" part of things is easy. If you get big enough, you can hire an accountant to do most of that for you. The "networking" thing is pretty easy too: you can hire salespeople for that.

What you need is someone who knows this industry from a strategic standpoint: who are your competitors, who are your customers, and how do you sell to them? What do they even want? What value does your product give them over a more generic data warehousing solution?

I can tell you right now that your idea is neither novel nor particularly valuable (if your customers are big multinational companies, it's just a little custom reporting code on top of their enterprise data warehousing platform). Until you turn it into a product that serves some customer's needs, it will remain without value. But what you need is someone who understands the market enough to be able to tell you these things.

I would say your best option would be to find someone in the industry and say "Hey, I have a business idea I'd like to bounce off of you". Don't worry about people stealing your idea -- if it's worth doing, someone has probably already done it. That doesn't mean there's not an opportunity though, and you just need to find someone qualified to judge that.
I got a 404 when clicking a random hack button. fyi. Some real funny ones in there.
One of the main strengths of something like cloudformation, is that we can use libraries in languages we're comfortable with to build a programmable DSL.

A great tool, at least for Python, that exposes this is: https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere.

This gives me the full power of python, so I can build abstractions, use inheritance and encapsulation to specialize certain things.

We've done a lot of work to automate our infrastructure provisioning, but I'm interested in the abstraction layer Terraform provides -- especially for multiple providers.

How can we bridge the gap that is left by Terraform from having a fully complete programming language to define infrastructure (which has downsides but in my opinion, more upsides)?
I'm not sure why wind and solar power are always mentioned together, other than they both are forms of "alt energy."

From a U.S. perspective, solar power is less productive in the eastern half of the U.S., so I'm not sure why we haven't just concentrated on blanketing stretches of desert in the U.S. West with solar farms. This is the highest-reward area, not attaching solar panels to someone's roof in Wisconsin. I think that focusing on high-yield areas with lots of sunlight might be one way to make costs fall. Done right, it might fairly well take care of much of our energy needs.

Source: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html

Conversely, I don't think wind power can come close to taking care of large percentages of our energy needs. It's subsidized, so it happens, but it's not The Answer (imho).
Just stumbled across this project with the same name, and at least some of the same goals:
https://github.com/UrbanCode/terraform
Because I didn't want to add so many layers at once, I just implemented Stores -> ControllerView -> View -> direct Store call.

As far as my understanding goes that should be fine for most use-cases. The only reason that really requires a Dispatcher would be synchronization of the incoming Store mutations.
Isn't there a third possibility that US security services are capable of breaking Tor, and want to popularize it in order to encourage Tor usage among potential targets?
The Financial Side of Building Mac Apps
I don't have any issues with the colors, but I find the slight blurriness (aliasing?) to be a bit painful to read.That said, I love the design of the site otherwise.

On another note, Terraform appears to be great. I cannot wait to try it out.
I haven't used flux yet, but I'm assuming a single action might call on multiple stores? Eliminates having to handle that in a dependency
I recall Stripe was being positioned as a PayPal alternative to collecting international funds, but that wasn't the point.

My point is there is no black swan here. Far from it. It makes no sense in this context.
Vim Registers: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Parts
Finding the shortest path to the ground while avoiding obstacles
I've hacked quick userstyle [1] that adds text labels into blocks, it seems like [2] then.
[1] https://userstyles.org/styles/103877/game-about-squares-colo...
[2] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1571982/shots/game-about...
Depends how "unrelated". I have friends with non-CS PhDs who work as programmers, but they were all doing largely computational science.

Ultimately if someone has the right skills, they can get a programming job. If they don't have the right skills but are smart enough, they can acquire the skills needed to get a job in a reasonable amount of time (months, not years). But employers won't just assume that someone with a completely unrelated PhD will be able to pick up programming on the fly.
In fact, without the soundscape making it feel very lively i wouldn't have spent as much time on it as it did. It actually surprised me. The only other game i can remember which did it that well was Albion on DOS.
It's not paper books that become obsolete, but paper tech books. Although I love paper books and will never stop preferring them, they're less good for timely technical material like 'how to' books, which do go out of date.

That said, not everyone has a Kindle or a tablet, and if you're trying to do something difficult on the computer (true by definition, if you're using a 'x for dummies' book), then you don't want the tutorial material on the same screen as the software you're trying to wrap your head around. Also, I don't think they'll be obsolete in a year, more like 5+. Indeed, I've found that buying cheap books on complex software that go a few editions back is often an equally good way to get a grip on the fundamental skills even if the interface has changed in the meantime - you can easily figure out the newer features later, whereas learning the shiny new stuff first can often delay getting a good grasp on the fundamental skills.
1. Eich didn't just vote, he gave money for prop8. He went out of his way to support curtailing civil rights

2. Would I prefer bigoted assholes not try to force their vindictive bigotry unto others? Are you really asking that?
in 5 years, when the numbers should be real, i will shared all my aggregate data.

the normal warning i give people: seed investing has always been hard, and likely to continue to get harder. valuations are up on average maybe 3x since i started, and it's not clear the companies are 3x more valuable.
You have no clue how shocked I was to find that Paul Graham's YCombinator wasn't a math formula.
Obviously that is not true. Maybe they shouldn't, but they did.
Local urban farming is not assured to produce healthier nor tastier food. That squarely lies in the hands of the farmer. Farming is a skill; most people are not good at it.

LED powered farmhouses would be nice. But going back to the person that you commented on, now we're making energy to give to plants, instead of using the sun directly to make plants. This has the potential (especially in today's economy) to increase the carbon footprint of urban growing.

Certainly local. Fresh most likely. Efficient? Not so simple, probably not as efficient. And unless you're using GMOs that are resistant to invasive insect species, you'll still need pesticides (or lots of human hours....which severely decreases efficiency and increases cost).
10 Chrome Extensions For Boosting Your Focus and Productivity
Curious thought- you mention the (unsurprising) thought that people who are good at fundraising aren't necessarily good at running a company.

But, all other things being equal, I'd expect someone who's good at "winning" at the game called "raising money" to be the type of person who is better at winning at other games, e.g. running a good company. In other words, while being good at raising money doesn't necessarily mean they're good at running a company, I'd still take them over the "average person".

You seem to imply the opposite in your post - is that really right? Maybe people who are good at fundraising have spent too much time/energy on that vs. getting good at building a company? That sounds specious to me.
Tell HN: Google Disabled Our AdSense Account With $125K Earnings
Hello HN,

This is just a quick vent to the community because we've been so frustrated for the last couple of days. We were fearing something like this happening because of the recent AdSense scandal stuff that I'm sure most of you have read about by now.

Here's what happened. We built two sites in the last month that have had explosive growth from social traffic and we registered an AdSense account, got approved, and put the ads on the sites about two weeks ago. The sites were similar (we built a custom CMS) but each had different and unique content and 100% of the traffic was real and from actual people who shared our content.

Starting from July 10 we were averaging a few million page views a day. So we generated about $125,000 in revenue in a 12 day period. Around July 21 we got 2 policy violation notifications from AdSense for very innocent mistakes on Ad placement, we quickly fixed them and both issues were immediately resolved.

Fast forward three days, we get an email saying our account is disabled for policy reasons (because the sites use the same template) and we won't be able to get any of the revenue. We never got any warnings and it was all very immediate.

Our sites had very normal CTRs and CPCs. We're really shocked at the fact that this could happen even though we did absolutely nothing worthy of such action. We only have one screenshot of the main AdSense page for one of the days and we're kicking ourselves in the foot for not meticulously screenshoting the performance pages to use as legal proof.

Anyways, hope you all have good luck with your businesses but just be wary of AdSense if you're currently using it. They can do crap like this and not explain it at all and they still manage to get away with it.