skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't answer you directly but if I were in your shoes, I would ask myself what I would want to accomplish from this. If the answer is something vague like grow it into a sustainable business with more users, then it's probably not the right one to pursue (for me in my own opinion).

Every idea with intent of becoming a business has the goal of growing and being sustainable. That's too vague. I would prefer to work on ideas that I care deeply about because those are ideas I enjoy the most and if that is true, there is often a more in-depth goal of where I wish the idea or project to be headed even if I don't necessarily have all the details or answers mapped out.

If you don't have an answer like this in mind, at best my suggestion is to keep thinking until something feels right.
It doesn't help that it's pretty long-winded to just make a simple point, taking it from just annoying to painful. I think I could fit the point into a tweet to be honest - 'What was your most interesting project?' is the best interview question.

And the fact that we're discussing it here in this thread makes your point stand - it detracts from the message trying to be conveyed.
> - A story for passing typed data around between processes (potentially in different languages) rather than just builtins. I'm not sure exactly what the story should be, but it should exist.

I haven't thought much about FFI yet. But since in shells you interact with other programs so much, adding FFI would a worthy attempt.

> - A somewhat more succinct syntax, with metaprogramming kept in mind.

Coming up with syntax is actually the hardest thing I find when writing Elvish, since there is much more syntax constraints for a shell. Would be happy to hear advices.

> - A JIT, eventually.

Maybe later.
I don't think you need to work on side projects to be a great programmer. It's just that there are very few great programmers who don't have a variety of side-projects. It's a natural side-effect of the desire and curiosity that leads people to become great. They don't see side-projects as some sort of drain on their free time.

I don't think it's a bad thing if you don't aspire to "greatness" though. There's plenty of jobs where a decent, reliable programmer is perfectly fine. 49% of us are below average, after all.
I'm pretty neutral on marijuana legalization. If anything, I'm for it as I feel like it's a bit of a red herring for the media to discuss and ignore other, more important, issues.

That said, NYT, the morphing graphic of the stars in the US flag turning into pot leafs? That's just tasteless. Let's not go from illegal to "symbolizing our country" in one op-ed, eh?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/why-th... - and while that probably isn't the best link it links to several other useful things as well. Unfortunately, we pretty much found the Higgs in the general range we expected it to be, which was in some ways the worst possible outcome, and certainly the least surprising.
This UX is pretty abysmal.

The text is difficult to read (which seems important to a text-based todo list).

Marking a todo as done is a two-motion action: hover over the todo, then click the checkmark (assuming you see the checkmark). The transition to the done section could be smoother as well. I didn't actually notice what I'd clicked for a moment - took a bit of analysis to figure out that I had marked one as complete.

I should be able to move a todo by dragging any part of it - not just the obscure drag handle represented by the menu icon off to the side. Note: I personally am aware that this is also the drag handle icon, but I know plenty of people that aren't.

I can make blank todos. Maybe someone, somewhere, would like to make blank todos - for the other 99.99% of your users, this is a bug.

The keyboard controls are unintuitive. Pressing the left arrow at the beginning of a todo takes me to the previous todo (bug?). Why would I want to indent a todo? "Make a subtask" sounds reasonable, but "indent a to-do" sounds like a useless thing to be able to do. Also, I can't move between the done and not done sections with the arrow keys.

I kinda expected (hoped?) that I could use Vim keybindings to get around. Nope. Not a huge deal, but you might want to look into that (or maybe offer different keyboard shortcut modes - Vim, Emacs, or Pie).

"Sign up to save your lists" sounds like something I'd want to do; however, when I click on it, I go to some other (nearly invisible) screen asking for an email and password. I had a nagging fear that my lists might not have been saved. It looked like the only way to leave the signup page was to click on the Home link, which took me back to the beginning. Then, my first though was "Shit, are my lists gone?". They weren't, to be fair, but that sort of panic-inducing moment is unacceptable.

The entire interface is almost invisible.

Overall, I applaud the effort behind trying to make todo lists simpler, and as much like keeping text files as possible (but with the convenience of being on the web!). I feel like the execution just really fell short.
People get addicted — to their detriment — to video games and bacon too. It doesn't mean that those are meaningfully addictive substances.
What exactly got that better from iOS6 to iOS7 that justifies the evident performance drop?

I think the google trends graph for "iphone slow" search phrase says all that there's to say about this phenomenon.
> unless they're driving dangerously anyway

"Driving dangerously" should be the metric. Not whether your body contains chocolate milk, weed, alcohol, oxycotin, aspirin, or whatever.
Full legalization has a single major hurdle for me: testing for a person's level of "high". Think of this as a blood alcohol content breathalyzer test. There is a definite method for determining the amount of alcohol inside a person's body and laws use these limits for punishment.

This is highly important. No body wants someone "high as a kite" operating a vehicle. It is not in the public's best interest to have very high people driving just like having severely drunk people driving. Its all about safety.

You could frame the argument that marijuana is similar to other medicines (OTC or prescription, labeled with "do not drive or operate machinery") but the attempts to legalize marijuana for all uses - recreational - negates this point. If people can use marijuana at all times, any time, than a method of ensuring a using person is not endangering others is needed.

To sum, legalization requires a definitive method to measure "highness" to ensure safety for the public. Once this occurs and people know the rules and levels at which they can be high, then legalizing makes sense.
> That said, NYT, the morphing graphic of the stars in the US flag turning into pot leafs?

I hadn't even noticed that, way to shoot their cause in the foot. What a silly, and disrespectful graphic. It doesn't even use the right values for blue and red before the morph. Granted, I take our flag pretty seriously, and personally can't stand it when people wear it as shirts or have some bastardization of it plastered on their mug.
Indeed. That is certainly tasteless. I have no strong opinion either way really. It certainly should be legal for medical purposes and any other use should be heavily regulated (especially where under age people are involved).
You missed an easy Windows comparison by focusing on Windows 7 and 8: Vista brought big graphics changes but ran poorly on a lot of existing hardware, similarly to iOS 7 on the iPhone 4.
Then Lion came along and slowed things down to a crawl. Definitely the slowest OSX release I've had on my old macbook (circa '08). I eventually downgraded back to snow leopard until mountain lion came out, which was noticeably faster than Lion, but still not quite as smooth as snow leopard. But now Mavericks is back to being pretty good.

All-in-all, still not a very straightforward 'improvement' path performance-wise -- at least not from the end consumer's point of view.
Ask HN: What acquisition do you predict will happen next?
Lets see if we can collectively predict the future and give the SEC a headache if insider trading around the acquisition becomes a question.
I think that there is a non-negligible chance that I personally would follow the tax laws.
(Although it seems very likely that at some point in time I would choose not to, it seems plausible to me that I might for some significant amount of time opt to follow the non-enforced laws, possibly even most of it (provided that the government was still stable and such) )

Not that I inherently oppose the use of violence to ensure that certain things that society has agreed on are enforced,
Just that in many cases, I believe I would follow a current law set by a government even if there was no chance of punishment by the government (other than perhaps a public record)

(This is not to say that this is true of the majority of a given population, just that I believe that it is probably true about some people because I think it is probably true about me. (though I of course could be wrong in how I model myself) )

Note that I am claiming that there exist laws that I would follow without enforcement, but would not follow if they were not laws,
but I am /not/ claiming that, for all laws, whether or not I follow said law is not affected by whether it is enforced.
Microsoft buys Rackspace
I think this is part of the best answer.

Find a place where there's nothing of value under the surface (that we can think of), bury it really friggin' deep, and then put the warnings in a layer of, I don't know, engraved gravel about 100M above it, just in case anyone ever does dig there. In case the warning might help.

And don't put anything on the surface that'll outlast the people who can understand what's down there.

All of these signs, finding clear ways to say "bad stuff below" -- they're only helpful if the future people are inclined to assume the immensely-powerful, immensely wealthy, long-dead writer is being honest. Why in the world would they assume that?

Just imagine future-Indiana-Jones finding those signs, left by a long-dead civilization, and deciphering them. Does he say "oh, wait -- this looks dangerous; never mind then"? Of course not; instead he rounds up a digging party of locals, dodging future-Nazis, and after a harrowing adventure the Ark of the Covenant is finally unearthed -- but when the future-Nazis open it up the cavern, nothing seems to happen (but they oddly feel a bit warm), and then lots & lots of people die slow deaths (including future-Indy, sorry) as they trundle out the valuable "junk of the ancients" to be sold and traded far & wide.
Since it's Saturday night as I write, I'll bite: 'alien test'?

If humans or our near relations were to land on a planet in a distant galaxy and come across any symbols they could even take a wild guess at, their reaction should be: 'We've been here before.'

Correspondingly, taking aliens into consideration is the epitome of misdirected 'inclusiveness.' Puts me in mind of recent dispute in the feminist community, in which use of the word 'vagina' in a non-reproductive sense has become an issue becauese transgender women are excluded. (No cite, not going to google 'transgender vagina.' Thinking it was an Utne reader story.)

Gist, I assume: Even a human idiot should be able to figure out these symbols. Fair enough, and much discussed above/below. (And a fun design problem.)

But, other than an alien landing first in the 'forbidden zone' and accidently unleashing population-ending poison on whatever was left of life on Earth (and it's a stretch to even suggest credencene here), no proposal with 'aliens' in its text should be taken seriously.

Less than seriously, but I didn't open this can of sandworms, suppose aliens consider our radioactive material:

Tasty?
A sexual aid?
Unimaginably beautiful in some audio/visual/X-sensory spectrum we can't even imagine?

Don't bury it, advertise it!

An Earth rich in gamma radiation and alpha particles might be the celestial promised land, and certain aliens might gratefully resurrect our dead and take them through the pearly gates to their planet of toxic gold, frankincense and myrrh.

But, yeah, nuclear electricity could save the day for the next generation, so we need to figure out these niggling details.
Google buys Airware
Data logging (recording and storing). Random noises for NSA.
This is not an issue unaddressed:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/marijuana-dui-bill-...
Thanks ridiculous_fish. I'm still more or less following fish development, and elvish owes a lot to fish.

For now syscall.ForkExec (http://godoc.org/syscall#ForkExec) is sufficient for me. It is written to avoid async-unsafe calls between fork and exec, which is also what fish does IIRC.
This is mainly done to prevent linking and hosting pirated material; think movies and music. Newspapers and blogs are just collateral damage.
> The same is true of Apple when they ship a new app that does more.

There are often better explanations. GMail is fast. All the time. No matter how much mail you have. That's because it runs from a local database and all server interaction is abstracted behind sync and local accesses to data. Google Play is slow because it is a REST app with a native app veneer. It's harder to make an app like Google Play use sync'ed databases. So sometimes it does puzzling things like taking tens of seconds to go to the next track even when you are shuffling only your downloaded music.

Fast apps can "do more" and remain fast. Slow apps are slow for architectural and algorithmic reasons rather than because they "do more."
One of my favorite questions is, "Tell me about the best bug you've ever found."

It's a great touchstone. Sure, it's subjective, but it gives valuable insight into someone's level of skill, how they approach problems, how they do diagnosis, and so on. Are they scientific? Do they hate on people and their code? Do they follow through with testing?

I've gotten answers ranging from "I don't know" (which is a fail, by the way) to full-stack expositions that boil down to bad code generated by the compiler, to someone finding and solving a fundamental design problem in a years-long project.

Any sufficiently senior engineer will have a tale of a bug that they tell in the circle around the campfire when the kids are tucked away (and probably still listening anyway). And if you're not a seasoned vet, I'd still like to hear about the race condition / double free / syntax error that took you a while to find.
Thanks, Chuck, this is Topher, the guy from the article. It's clear that we see eye-to-eye on two of the fundamental tenets of the Rainforest Connection project, namely:

1) The Internet of Things need not wait years for specialized, embeddable hardware. Discarded smartphones offer an immediate shortcut that most developers are able to leverage almost immediately. They're chock full of sensors with mature APIs and built to be power efficient and reliable.

2) Surveillance is a emotional issue, but (to me) it has a different meaning when the hardware and software that produces the data are entirely open-source, and—most importantly—the data feeds produced are made immediately available to anyone who desires access. My hope is that Rainforest Connection will not be interpreted as "spy-[ware]" but rather as an open connection between the forest and those around the world. Forks of the project may be used for other purposes, but at its core, the project is about streaming audio/sensor data openly, and building modules for analyzing the data for distinct patterns (the first example of which is illegal logging).

If either of those statements doesn't make sense based on the Make article, I'd encourage you to check out the Kickstarter project page which contains a lot more information about our overall vision and activities:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/topherwhite/rainforest-...
US To Criminalize Moive and Music Streaming
Yes, this is the main reason for me. Where being a shell has two parts:

First, it's universal. Python and Perl and Java all have huge ecosystems, but one of the few places where programs written in all those languages can come together is the shell. By "real programming language" I don't mean some monstrosity with its own packages and whatnot. I just mean a simple principled language to tie things together that doesn't feel like a Turing tarpit.

Second, its highest priority is efficient interactive (REPL) use (although, as a "real language", it should be much better than bash for scripts as well). Some languages have good REPLs, but most don't, and there are important design considerations for them.

For example, if you're banging out a one-liner where you have some data and make a series of transformations on it - thinking through each step in turn - you don't want to have to write functions in reverse order of application, third(second(first(data))). With pipelines, it's forward, first | second | third. In a batch program (in both imperative and functional languages, though more often in imperative), you might avoid this by performing each step as a separate statement, assigning each result to a descriptive variable. But interactively, who has time for variable names? (The elvish author makes a similar argument in the readme.) Yet few languages support this outside of OOP dot syntax, which only works in a subset of cases.
Heroku for Science
You might want to try CFNcluster (https://github.com/awslabs/cfncluster) or Starcluster (http://star.mit.edu/cluster/). If you are used to Grid Engine, you should find them pretty easy to use.
If using the term "girl" is genuinely offensive, I'll happily stop.

There is an overwhelming body of evidence that it is offensive to many women.
To spare people time reading:

It's KeyMe, a service that lets people make copies of keys from a vending machine, using photographs of keys. He got the photos because his neighbor let him handle the keys.

No particular high-tech involved. (Even though he claims they're 3d-printed in the vending machine, i suspect they're simply cut from a raw.)
> Employers cooperate with garnishment orders because they wish to continue to be perceived as law-abiding

What makes you think that? As far as I know, there is no easy way for a third party to determine whether any given company cooperates with garnishment orders, so how can this incentive exist?

> and because they have accepted the proposition that paying a reasonable amount of tax is a civic duty.

I imagine that most citizens think some level of taxation is a civic duty. But I also suspect that a large portion of citizens think their own level of taxation is too high, and would give less to the government if the government changed its rule to "give us whatever you think is appropriate to fulfill your civic duty."
Why do you need to test a person's high? I don't care if a person has had too much to drink, too much to smoke, or taken to many prescription pills, if they are driving poorly under the influence of drugs, they should get a DUI. Having a test just makes the prosecutor's job easier, but the officer could always arrest the people he suspects are too high to drive and get a warrant for a blood draw.
>We seem to be increasingly moving toward such an era

You should visit a Maker Faire. I can't think of anything that restores my faith in humanity quite as much as a day at one.
I've lost many friends and family to drugs and alcohol. Tremendous loss. Most can use with no consequences, but not everyone. I believe legalization will result in more casualties.
> if Americans were civilized and tasteful enough to demand them.

No.
The human skull does seem like a solid symbol of death, but that doesn't prevent us from turning something like the Catacombs of Paris into a tourist ground (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris). The intent here seems to require more than just a symbol of death.
They're not anti-Google for crying out loud. It's the same thing as saying you're afraid of heights. No they're not. They're afraid of falling.

Not anti-Google/Heights

They're anti-Exploitation/Falling
Is that an argument against legalization or an argument that there needs to be better access to treatments for addictions of any kind? Especially since throwing someone in prison doesn't exactly limit their access to drugs.
I believe that most people would feel that they have a civic duty to contribute a portion of their income to the government. I just think the portion would be smaller than their actual tax rate for the vast majority of people.
I've been driving for close to 20 years and never have been pulled over. Equating dealing with cops to dealing with the TSA is moronic.
Others have noted that the best way to interview is to see if someone can do the job is to have them do the job or the closest thing to it. For the typical developer not available for freelance I combine this approach with the approach in the article.

Show me some code from a project of yours and I will ask you to add a feature, fix a bug, or maintain it. The project can be something really simple. It is hard to learn new technologies without creating some kind of simple project.

This is a second interview, the first interview is by Skype to figure out the logistical/cultural fit, go over resume, and then spend some time talking through a technical issue.

This worked very well for my first hire. The downside of this approach, and a big reason it is not done is it requires an hour of preparation time for the interviewer to understand the candidate's code, run it, look for bugs, and figure out what to ask about. I think it is a much less arrogant way to conduct interviews though and a much more rewarding process for the candidate: they get to delve further into something they already have interest in.
Don't worry about downvotes here. They aren't indicative of the quality or value of a comment any longer. The whole "downvote if you disagree" concept just encourages the disconnect even more.

These days, it's best just to read all of the comments, including any that have been grayed out. A lot of the time they're perfectly legitimate. It's just unfortunate that they're harder to read.
I feel like we'll have ways of knowing what the site contains forever.

Consider Herodot's account (he lived in the 5th Century BC) about the circumnavigation of the African continent by a Phoenician expedition under Pharao Necho II, about 150 years earlier. The fleet set out in the Red Sea and returned three years later through the Strait of Gibraltar.

Herodot, who clearly had access to the original records, which have since been lost, like so much of Classical material, says that as they rounded the continent the sailors had the Sun to their right, but he, Herodot, cannot believe this because everyone knows that at noon the Sun is in the South. A more complete account of the matter is here: http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodotus/hist01.htm

Knowledge is fragile, much more fragile than I like.
I would say that God is exactly what you are studying when you are looking at dark matter. God is a metaphor for the unknowable ground of being, the mystery that holds us all. The wisdom traditions have been about understanding the patterns of the Universe, in all senses and to provide a mechanism and context to dissolve the idea that something exists as separate from anything else. Theists and Atheists both seem to get it wrong when they argue over the "existence" of God, as Joe Campbell said, it's about understanding how to read a metaphor and experiencing the direct internal subjective experience of reconnection.
> in a way that is still digestable to a hyper-advanced civilization

I don't think hyper-advanced civilization would have a problem with this - they would either have not lost the knowledge or be able to figure out the danger themselves by using their hyper-advanced sensors and stuff.

The problem is that if our civilization collapses and the Earth goes back to 2000 B.C., those folks will need some warning not to mess with a deadly force that is beyond their comprehention before they reach sufficient level of advancement to know what they're dealing with.