skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do it K-Means-style: group users geographically targeting a particular population in each chat. As a bonus you can make some nice visualisations as a result.

(I'm reminded of a friend of mine trying to use OkCupid from Orkney, finding only four people using it within half a day's travel)
It's from the same company.

Edit: oh no it isn't! (thanks!)
Revisiting the Past with Logentries and Syslog
I don't mean this negatively, but in my experience as a high schooler and in college, the programming crowd tended to be lacking in written (communication) skills. This is certainly a huge blanket statement, but for younger programmers today I think the stereotype has at least some truth.
That's an excellent idea, I was thinking about how to fix this problem. I think starting with a radius of 5 miles and increasing it until users can see the chatrooms from the closest 100 people would solve all that.
I remember looking at this ages ago (I browse my share of wikipedia)

trying to work out why you couldn't use ice as a submarine hull. I mean the deeper you go the more freezes on it and the thicker it gets?

inb4 it floats, so does air
Is it anonymous?

Permissions:

Identity
Uses one or more of: accounts on the device, profile data

Contacts/Calendar
Uses one or more of: calendar, contact information

Location
Uses the device's location
The very link from Wikipedia you used says that half-life of knowledge in psychology is five years. Still, that's not very long either.
STUNNING REMAKE  OF THE MOVIE FRESH
That makes some sense; that's what Apple has been doing as well. Both OSX and iOS use the Darwin kernel and base, along with some shared user libraries, but then each has considerably different UI on top.
This has me hoping HN will do another ideas post soon. I got a lot of value from the last one, and I've got five new ideas to share.
I'm very happy to see this at the top this morning.

HN has tended to prioritise product development at the expense of business development, when the reality is you need both. Many of us seem to come from that product dev background and like to stick to the "if you build it they will come" mentality, which isn't so hot in practice. A lot of modern business models (especially those like ARM's licensing or Google's sublimely evil auctions) deserve respect from the hacker community for being almost as innovative as the products being sold in them.

Finally, I kind of wonder if the promotion by 37 signals has introduced a sort of conservatism that doesn't really work. Their true success came from the then radical idea of software as a service, and while I admire the way they cut through a lot of start up bullshit their approach seems to destroy ambition in a way that, for example, YC doesn't seem to.
Sweden Has an Education Crisis, But It Wasn't Caused by School Choice
It's a problem everywhere. I think Physics is somewhat spared because the gap between observation and math is less. (String theory perhaps being an exception) I think biochemistry runs into these issues more because it is harder to "prove" things with math. In general the less you can rely on supporting math or theory, the more you need to be careful about replicating experiments to come up with the truth.
Do you really think the time spend writing a comment is comparable to improving the code? Personally, I can't think of an occasion where that would have been true.
Disagree! This is a great list, and I hadn't seen it. Thanks for posting it, applecore.
Predicting gender from a personal name: how reliable is it?
Wouldn't that necessitate all phones to ship with complete Win32 API (complete with all backwards compatibility stuff) as well as the translation software, I can't imagine what that would do to battery life, let alone storage.
Ambi Climate launches Smart Airconditioning Device on Crowdtivate
Just an idea here...

Maybe complaining about some of Microsoft's decisions has more to do with user frustration and less to do with being "all the rage"?
i dont get it.
I like the reference. :-) And I've been misusing the idiom for at least 10 years without correction!
As someone that has a Windows Phone and uses Cortana, yes. Everything he was doing is a pretty standard response or action from Cortana.

I mention this every time, but I think the most interesting thing about it is that developers can integrate their apps with it. For example, you could open Cortana and say "Send a Yo to John Doe" or "GenericBankingApp, transfer $25 to my checking account".

I've been meaning to sit down and build a couple small apps that take advantage of this, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Other languages probably do this too, but some Scheme implementations don't have a stack limit, or no stack at all. So you can define certain functions (map being a notable one) using their natural recursion and not worry about exhausting the stack with large inputs.
Can anyone think of a use case for this beyond what a precompiler (Sass, Less, Stylus) can do?
Ask HN: Are you an affiliate for theme marketplaces?
I'm curious to see how many of us are affiliating with one of the many theme marketplaces. I'd like to get an idea of which marketplaces are most popular and how they're performing for you.

I'm also keen to see if you have any issues with them and what would make the affiliation side better for you.
is there something which should happen?
Independent authors support Amazon against Hachette
Building a SaaS company as first-time entrepreneurs
Two issues:

1. It's not responsive enough. Some SPA magic would be appreciated.

2. Instead asking for deletion confirmation, provide "undo" button.
+1 for BMC. I found it to be a very effective way to organize my ideas and come up with the right questions.

EDIT: As others have alluded to, the posted link only refers to one aspect of a business model, which is immediately obvious with BMC.
I'm in a field (healthcare integration) where vendors constantly break spec or handle things in a quirky manner.

The actual code I work with is fairly straightforward and easy to understand functionally. I can understand the what of pretty much any of the code my organization runs in short order.

But the why is vital. This week I've implemented things for reasons I won't remember in six months. Simple, easy to understand code. I've also been fighting with another system that predates me. I can see that it's modifying the original message to map particular values elsewhere downstream, but I have absolutely no idea why or which downstream system is expecting them. I've lost hours trying to track this down when a line or two explaining WTF the piece of code exists would have told me exactly where I needed to look.

Yes, your code should be understandable and self documenting to some degree anyway. But your code doesn't exist in a vacuum, and can't document what exists external to it.
Or Savoy of Italy!
A closer look at OS X Yosemite
But it will only be the same code base to a manager or bean-counter. There will so much conditional code and special casing that maintenance will be a nightmare. Fix things for system, break the others. (Or "same code base" just means all stored with in the same repository.)

Same old Microsoft, same old mistakes.
>> You talked about market clearing and I'm not sure the concept makes any sense in the absence of a marginal cost of production.

> I would respectfully disagree. Market clearing is I think technically the price for the next unit of production, but even in a world of zero marginal cost (not quite true) then the capital cost still needs to be paid back (laptop, time spent coding flappy up and flappy down). So perhaps the clearing price is the expected number if sales divided by capex?

This is closer to reality (and further from economic theory but that is a different rant[0]).

The trouble is to decide whether to make the investment of that capital cost you need to rely on that other economics assumption: perfect information. The real world doesn't provide perfect information of future customer behaviour so you don't know at the start if you are making Flappy Bird or Floppy Bird. Once you have made it your aim is to maximise your income from it (given the zero marginal cost in the App store). That maximisation needs to occur at a time when the capital cost has already been spent so the capex doesn't actually affect the price you charge. Even if you are making a loss increasing the price doesn't help as less people will buy it (you were already at the profit maximisation point) and if you were making a profit cutting the price reduces the profit.

Note that even the information at the time to set the price isn't available so you are guessing again there without the economists perfect information assumption.

Free markets are good but especially in the real world they are not always optimal and market failure isn't unusual. I think app review (at least the keeping malware out, not necessarily the Apple payment lock in part) is a public good but one that would be hard to get people to voluntarily pay for separately and some of the benefit is communal (you benefit from me not having a malware infested phone). We might end up in agreement here.

Yeah, regulation is a balancing act.

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded...
Ask HN: Freelance client won't pay. What now?
It's not that they've outright refused to pay, it's just that they're
a) past the payment due date specified in the contract (which was 21 days from receipt of invoice ... really lenient)
b) not responding to emails as of about 2 weeks ago
Wow, crazy to hear that its still like that. As an American, we take for granted that our economy tends to recover quickly.

Having all of your smart citizens move away has to be terrible for a country. What industries are hit the hardest?
FreshBooks First Venture Round: $30mm
No, if an account is inactive for five years, and the company is unable to contact the account holder, it's turned over to the state to hold. The state publishes a list of unclaimed property and provides a process that the owner or other appropriate party can use to claim their property. You can see how it works in New York at https://www.osc.state.ny.us/ouf/.
The Little Schemer is fantastic. I recently picked up The Seasoned Schemer as well, but haven't gotten a chance to really dive into yet. I'm looking forward to seeing how the authors tackle more advanced topics using their out of the ordinary teaching style.

Now, go cons a cake onto your mouth!
TCO isn't really transparent to the programmer. Some recursive calls cannot be optimized, so the programmer has to know how to write recursive functions that can be.
where is the discussion for using `var()` ?

The rationale for the "--" sigil matches what I'd expected, but I don't understand: why not just `name: --value` ?
I believe that's what the new grid fins they've been testing out on the Grasshopper are for. Those are there to let the rocket steer even at the speeds it comes in at.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_fin
The most surprising thing is that the textbooks haven't been updated. When I was a psych prof this was a commonplace among all my colleagues and even students. It's even common to use this "experiment" as a case study in class to discuss problematic experimental design.

I'm not sure why textbooks haven't been updated, but I doubt the hypotheses mentioned in the article (ignorance, that the authors believe the study, and pressure to keep textbooks short).
Your comment is quite disingenuous. The major ISPs parental filters have all suffered numerous false positives and varying commitment to fixing the problems. The porn filters particularly often block access to sex education, anti-bullying, and support sites for young gay/transgender etc (also I believe some charity sites for women suffering from sexual and physical abuse at home). If someone opts out of the default filter they are ensuring that people in their household can access support they may need, not just letting porn in.
EEG, AI, and Neuroinformatics Technology May Change How we Meditate
Small claims court. However big companies pay late, it's likely not intentional. Check it is first.
The rational is vary reasonable. Basicly, all recursion can be replaced by a loop that does not risk blowing the stack or using extra memory. However, tail call optimization is basically the compiler doing that conversion for you which also removes the risks.
“Bitcoin: The Stripe perspective” is the view that will render Bitcoin useless
I think our scientific reductionist worldview is a better fit to simple datastructures plus functions that work on them than OO.
Mario 3 using CSS3 keyframe animations and media queries
Talk to your lawyer. Don't waste time faffing around with this. You don't have to sue them but you do need to get advice from a legal professional who specializes in this kind of thing.
The text of the article contains evidence which supports the title's assertion and contradicts your assertion that "every textbook" criticizes the experiment. Do you have evidence to support your assertion?

> So, have the important criticisms and reinterpretations of the SPE been documented by key introductory psychology textbooks? Greggs analysed the content of 13 leading US introductory psychology textbooks, all of which have been revised in recent years, including: Discovering Psychology (Cacioppo and Freberg, 2012); Psychological Science (Gazzaniga et al, 2012); and Psychology (Schacter et al, 2011).

> Of the 13 analysed texts, 11 dealt with the Stanford Prison Experiment, providing between one to seven paragraphs of coverage. Nine included photographic support for the coverage. Five provided no criticism of the SPE at all. The other six provided only cursory criticism, mostly focused on the questionable ethics of the study. Only two texts mentioned the BBC Prison Study. Only one text provided a formal scholarly reference to a critique of the SPE.
In that case the title of the article is wrong. Are we talking about have a single kernel on all platform or a single os on all platform?
Fostering Resilience and Motivation: Learning Through Design Thinking
IaaS - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure

I thought that would be a fairly obvious one.
It's a bit contrived but it's not even as useless as it would appear to be (if you forget about the likely intentional mismatch between the default value and its documented value).

The purpose of this comment is obviously not to clarify the code for someone working on it, but to ensure the automatically generated API docs stay consistent. I write comments like these above functions all the time, because we have a zero-warning policy for doxygen comments over here, to prevent people forgetting to document public API methods (or slacking off out of laziness). Sure, the comment block is redundant since it contains nothing that cannot be derived from the parameter names and the name of the function, but it does make sure a doxygen run will not spew warnings and errors all over the place, drowning out uncommented methods with far less obvious functionality or parameters. The redundancy is a small price to pay to enforce a good self-documented API.

I really don't understand any of the discussions about not documenting code because it should be 'clean and obvious'. First of all that's mixing up 'how' and 'why' code is like it is, second it's a small effort to write and maintain code comments (contrary to what some people like to suggest otherwise), third it can help you organize your thoughts while you are writing the code (write the steps of your algorithm in comments, then translate them to code), etc.

Personally I also like how the syntax highlighting breaks up blocks of code with API doc comments, which makes it much easier to see where functions start and end when scrolling fast, or how they can separate distinct steps of an algorithm. 'No comments' really is the inverse of 'literate programming', like most of the time, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
There is shockingly little data on this available. The most systematic research I have found was led by Lehman at Imperial in the 90's : http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/mml/feast2/papers/abstra...

Interestingly I am in a position to revisit the evolution of one of the systems in the FEAST study. The key insight from FEAST was the idea of an "S-curve" where complexity overwhelms drive for features. Initial development progress is slow because the infrastructure and framework for the system is not in place, then comes rapid development then a slow down as complexity kicks in.

The reviewed system behaved like that in the study (I checked the data) and for a few years after. But then a period of explosive growth occurred, halted only by a strategic decision to move away from the platform for technology management (obsolescence of mainframes) reasons.
Ask HN: Is Teamgum.com – Pinterest for projects?
Help me find the analogy for product positioning.

In my quest to figure out the perfect positioning for our product, I pose this question to you all. http://www.teamgum.com - is a browser extension/app to discover, share and discuss over anything across the web, within your private group.From articles, discoveries and research, inspirations, images to videos.<p>We have 400+ teams on board. And some of our users mentioned it as "Pinterest for projects"<p>What do you think?
Startling lionfish discovery made in 6th grader’s science project
It's worth reading his response to Apple's latest documentation - http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=3466
Sure, but there is a bit of variety in this collection. bootswatch.com just look like different colour themes to me.
Ok, it seems that the update hasn't gone through yet, where it only asks for location now. Should be through soon.
I'm not convinced by the "number of lines" measure unit. It's clearly something which depends on the programming language, so one should gather different statistics depending on the language. Not to mention the fact that different projects might be prone to get messed up in different ways...
Yup, there's a lot of inspiration from that, except the big difference is that this system isn't dynamic. In L4D, the flow would change based on your performance. We want our system to be fully set up from the start, since we're designing it to also be a competitive speedrunning game and need reproducible challenges for everyone.
Hemingway App now available
Daniel Kahneman Explains The Machinery of Thought
The app you see under "more from developer" isn't the original Yo.
I think the idea is you use this rather than a precompiler.
> But you have to ship in 4 weeks, so why not just get something working first?

If you do that, after the deadline is over, you will get assigned another task with another 4-week deadline. And then another. The code will get increasingly complex until you can't keep with it any more. And then you will leave the company, or they will fire you. And the people who gave you that deadline will refer to you as "the guy who left that horrible mess of code".

I decided long ago that that's not how I want to live my life.

If someone gives me an unreasonable deadline, I negotiate it. Hard. By explaining the problems, and making sure everyone understands the tradeoffs being made.

And if the deadline is really immovable, I negotiate a period to refactor after the deadline is passed, and in which I am not assigned other tasks.

And if that is not possible, then I start looking for another job. Fortunately now it's a great time to be a programmer.

But hey, if that works for you, then great. To each his own.
3D-printed Big-Ass SmarTwatCh
If it's a really useful service somebody could re-implement their API as a new open-source backend that existing clients could use. (Personally I don't know why you wouldn't just make a couple bash scripts and a makefile to manage these things, but I guess not everyone's into making their own sausages)
You can't assume it's not intentional, and we don't have enough info to know if this claim is small or not. Really the only thing to do is to talk to a lawyer. You should already have a lawyer since you've got a contract: talk to them. If you don't have a lawyer, then get one immediately. No one who runs a business should be without legal advice.
7 questions to ask yourself before joining a startup
Everyone who down voted this:
1) I know this would NEVEEERRRRRRR happen, but if there was a website that didn't hash a password, the timing attack would be applicable.
2) It worth mentioning that a timing attack can be frequently foiled if hashing is used on the server side. I.E. Google gives me an API key, stores the hash on there side. I send the API key to Google they hash it and ocmpare the hash to their stored hash.

I think it's crazy how fat fingered people have become with the down vote trigger finger. I think it's 100% crazy to discus the timing attack without considering how it could be thwarted.
Anyone who has lived off the grid understands that an inverter is the least efficient solution to the problem of running consumer devices from a DC source. We laugh at the newbies running an inverter to supply a laptop PS that takes AC right back to DC. Hopelessly inefficient.

DC-DC is the way to go, or else if you need higher voltage, take an auxiliary feed from the charge controller, since most solar puts out 21-25VDC anyway. For more efficient and powerful motors, use series battery banks. Duh.

This is just another way of pandering to the people who do not understand efficiency and who are locked into the idea of "house current", in other words, dinosaurs.

Our industrialized world is so inefficient that we throw away about 80% of generated power. What a holocaust for the natural environment! When you go off-grid, that just won't fly, because no one wants to upsize their generation capacity five-fold to run some inefficient consumer device, except for the aforementioned newbies who have yet to notice an open artery.

Inverters simply extend the inefficiency of the consumer experience to alternative forms of power generation. The smart solution is not to make the inverter smaller but to lose it entirely.
That's not deflationary in any sense. The total amount of Ether issued always increases, thus devaluing all the Ether issued earlier.

That's why it doesn't make any sense to buy it now, unless you need it now.
Living Up to the Hype: VFF Tomorrow
> What matters to me in a language is whether I can use it without thinking about it.

I love this statement. It reminds me of the what it feels to be good at mathematics (not my words): "Your intuitive thinking about a problem is productive and usefully structured, wasting little time on being aimlessly puzzled." from http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-understa...

The author also says more about mathematics:

> To make an analogy with math, it's nicer to have a general formula that you can derive others from than having to memorize a whole bunch of formulas for specific problems.

> This is where Clojure comes in. With it I can always easily derive a solution to a particular problem from a small set of general patterns. The number of things I have to keep in my head is not overbearing.

Any language that lets you spend your brainpower on the essence of the problem is a tremendous advantage and joy. This unlocks creativity and productivity.
Debian runs fine on my Android tablet and on my server, and it doesn't take up much space. I just install different packages.
The Mystery of the White Flags on the Brooklyn Bridge
You can get your hands on OS X Yosemite preview tomorrow
Yes, but you probably want some cut off. It might be better to see a shorter list of people who are reasonably close rather than 100 people who might not even be in the same country.
Have you actually built a universal app? There is actually quite a good pattern for the separation of concerns here, you should check it out.

spoiler: It is not like what you are thinking, quite clean actually.
Well that is ... sad. I have not been around for 30+ years and I see good code on a weekly basis. Maybe you should consider changing something in your environment. I assure you it is possible.