skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So any rebuttal to the "it used to be so much better" trope that is trotted out every few months is now made into an example of how "bad" things have gotten?
If you enjoyed responding (like I am doing now), then that's that. You got the worth of the time you spent. Of course, if one were _expecting_ more than that (e.g. others not being a jerk or even being nice), then its fulfillment is an added bonus. By not getting the bonus, should we be unhappy also about the salary that we already got? Or is this too idealistic an opinion? If the others' behavior _deeply_ affects us then we are too vulnerable, no?
Ask HN: Did you go to a 3 month coding school? Did it work?
I'm considering going to a front-end coding school and trust the people here more than other forums. I'm curious if those who attended, or know someone who attended, enjoyed or disliked the experience and why. Is it worth saving 10-20K and just subscribe to Lynda or Pluralsight? Thanks in advanced.
Didn't know todoist is a single-founder company. I'm a big fan; only todo list that's stuck.
[PHP+Easy Cron] Auto Backup Database on Linux Server
I've been enjoying the Parrot Flower Power. It's just a sensor you stick in your plants. It's connected to a database of plants so it can give you advice based on sunlight, water, soil chemistry, and temperature, depending on what kind of plant you select.
If you want any chance of understanding real compilers, the "optional" optimizations and parsing algorithms are actually pretty important. I do think starting with an interpreter for an AST is just as good a method as starting with code generation, and code optimization can probably wait until the end, but teaching parsing should avoid any kind of CYK/LL/LR unless you're specifically teaching grammar theory.

Using a parser generator of some kind is possibly okay to teach the concept of a grammar, but it's terrible for error handling, efficiency, and simplicity. For most programming languages, nothing beats a plain old hand-written recursive descent parser (optionally with pratt parsing for expressions) on those metrics. And indeed, most compilers I've seen in production are written that way.
Small communities become insular festivals of group-think. Large communities become whitewashed noise full of trolls. There doesn't seem to be a way to "win".
And that article, having the same tone, would be about it being bad. But not understanding the conventions is not the same as being bad. A lot of this coding style is hard fought and battle tested.
Thank you! It's always best to read the actual paper.

I note that not only is there no shielding to reduce the Earth's magnetic field, but there are large NeFeB magnets in the torsion balance assembly. I strongly suspect that the "missing momentum" is going into the object producing the magnetostatic fields which lie in the RF cavity, whether that be the Earth or the damping magnets.

Not to say that this wouldn't be interesting (RF interaction with magnetostatic fields), but I don't think this has met the level of proof required of a claim of violation of momentum conservation.
To ponder about the meaning of life.
In my experience college curricula have plenty of non-major courses for every degree. Surely there's room for negotiation, sales, and why-being-labeled-a-cost-center-is-generally-bad-for-your-career in a four year degree?
I know it's silly, but I'm leading a huge purchase of google equity right now because of these things. Maybe I'm naive but I believe this is the trademark of a top engineering company and I have faith that they will deliver on some of their moonshots.
What better way to teach someone assembly, etc, than to teach them how to convert code that they understand to code that the architecture can understand?
And Cold Fusion... ugh... I was at Georgia Tech in 1989 when they announced to the world that they had reproduced some aspects of the cold fusion experiment. So embarrassing.

Reproducing an experiment, even with reputable scientists at NASA or reputable universities is in no way a guarantee.
"Meh. For most of us the people hiring and judging our work are programmers themselves, and they're gonna think you're lame if you try to inflate your status via your job title"

Talking about a previous role from different perspectives (end-user, technological, business, etc) shows a balance that is rare and valuable in our field.

There are many expert technical developers that are no more valuable to a company than an average developer. They are too busy focusing on the craft and the process more than the overall product, the end-user experience, and the business value added.
I don't believe in deleting comments in general. I've said some stupid and mean stuff here on HN, and I think it's important to leave those up, especially if there are responses below them. If nothing else it helps me feel an incentive to be less stupid and mean the next time.
In my experience I've learned you can't control other people so telling them not to be a jerk would rarely cause them to change their behavior in the future.

You can only control your reaction to them.

The way I look at it, you don't have enough time to waste caring about how someone treats you bad or annoys you because there's more important things to do Now that need to get Done.
Is Big Data Spreading Inequality?
Extend vs restart 3 days later does not strike me as anywhere nearly the same.
I agree with the buzzword comment for "agile." Just wanted to send the idea of natural evolution.

(A bit off topic, but Scrum is however an actual methodology name.)
Yeah that sounds reasonable. Thanks for the orchestration link, I hadn't seen that post.
But Python Closes Files Automatically
i think you're out of touch. HN is valuable because experts sometimes post things here that you can't get elsewhere. Try to post comments that are valuable to everybody and further the discussion. Comments like "Thanks", and responses from non-experts, contribute to the discussion derailing. All it takes is one non-expert to make an incorrect side remark and the discussion risks derailing into a flame fest.

Here is an example excellent, useful discussion with comments from experts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8143905

Here is an example of a not useful discussion with comments from non-experts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133835

This post falls into the latter category which is probably why it just got nuked off the front page.
Not to mention numerous other western-backed offensives in recent history... Wikileaks gave us brilliant statistics on civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's important to maintain some breadth of perspective here.
Not at all. I'm open to rebuttals. But a good rebuttal comes with examples. It's possible to prove me wrong simply by showing a bunch of instances of how things weren't any better five years ago than today.
Unless you are sensitive about the karma score then downvoting, or upvoting to determine where a viewpoint falls in the thread seems valid.

Personally, I upvote comments that I strongly agree with, and I don't think someone downvoting ones they disagree with is that big a jump.
While I support his right to travel I think he would be foolish to exercise that right at the moment. If I'm traveling abroad and find myself on a flight with him I will politely exit the aircraft.
Correct.

I have seen Affinity Designer put forward as a page layout competitor also, but this is naive. Just regarding color alone, it would need to be able to support multiple colorspaces in a single document and retain them in the resulting PDF. In the world of modern RIPs and digital printing, the RIP often handles colorspace conversion. Thus it is common to leave your source material in its original colorspace and tag the individual objects in a PDF with profiles.

And don't even get me started on how bad type is in the open source world (No, TeX is not an option in print).
Google confirms it's giving HTTPS sites higher search rankings
Yep, this is probably the first thing to examine, if repeatability is achieved.
My point is that people often confuse understanding the model with understanding the thing. The model becomes a ritual, it becomes a kind of complex dogma, and when people master the model they claim they understand it. But it's not true, they don't understand the thing, they only understand our description of it.

Feynman also addresses this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05WS0WN7zMQ

The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)

Models are just a complicated way of calling something, not a way of understanding it. Getting experimental results just means you've used the correct name, not that you understand anything in particular about it.

Calling a hot bright thing "fire" doesn't mean you understand it at all -- no matter how many complex tribal dances you do around an open flame. Knowing what fire actually is gave us modern civilization. For many fundamental everyday things like gravity or magnetism, on the scale from "calling an open flame 'fire'" to "rocket ship", we're charitably somewhere around "learning to cook meat".
Chasing Saturn’s Immense, Six-Sided Hurricane
Why absolutely is relevant. If there is a dead man in your home, did he break in and threaten you or was it someone who you invited in and then killed? It is appalling for a defendant to be prevented from giving his story. Generally, a prosecutor wants a defendant to take the stand as to trip them up in their lies. Never in Espionage Act cases. Why?

The context of the Espionage Act absolutely matters. Daniel Ellsberg, Drake, Manning were not able to speak for themselves at trial. Lawyers would point out that a law from 1917 is wildly being taken out of context by US prosecutors. In all of these leaker cases, including Snowdens, the government was revealed to be involved in incredible immoral and illegal activities, and sometimes even atrocities. The US Prosecutors think that is irrelevant. To an amoral society it is.
Moving around the map is really difficult. When I select anything except the dragging icon, the map seems to scroll to the edge. After right clicking and rotating and zooming the problem was even worse. If I didn't have this issue, it would be loads of fun to play. :)
I went to school for computer science and work for a non-profit. Some programmers (or whatever we're supposed to call ourselves) work for government, or any number of other things. The fact that we share technology in common doesn't necessarily mean we need to share any other particular skillsets, and I don't see how it's incumbent upon CS departments to make assumptions about how we'll go on to use our CS educations.
At Sun, whenever an engineer claimed a task or problem was "trivial", the work was assigned to him or her.

A lot fewer problems were deemed "trivial" after that.
I recommend reading some nonfiction too. Cryptonomicon is one of my all-time favourite books, but I feel by focusing on it alone it's a little bit of a disservice to the reality of Bletchley.

The Secret Lives of Codebreakers and The Secret Life of Bletchley Park are both great reads, both by Sinclair MacKay, and Hodges' Turing biography is fascinating and, as we all know, heartbreaking in the end.

Bletchley wasn't just about Turing, though he certainly deserves his due, and then some. Tommy Flowers, for example, who built Colossus -- or Mavis Batey, who broke a coded message that led to reverse engineering the Enigma.

I highly recommend visiting if you can. Really drove home to me the people aspect of the whole thing, and the somewhat frightening (and yet a tiny bit wistful!) realization that had we all been born a few decades earlier, and taken similar paths through life, Bletchley may well be where many if us spent a good chunk of our years.
No question about it. My answer would actually be a lot more about the history of both Win32 and Win16, both of which I programmed in C++ for years. Looking at something like that now and proclaiming it bad is about the same thing as deploring the Mongol invasions.
I believe the fix is simple - don't start fading out downvoted comments until a certain threshold of negativity has been reached. I think the visual 'reward' of being able to silence a commenter without effort or reply contributes a great deal to the noisy and petty nature of initial downvotes.
> It used to be that you could hold a contrarian opinion and not be at risk of being jumped on by the community or your position being misinterpreted. That seems no longer the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8143432

Asking a question many times ("what law has been broken?") is a form of trolling. You may not have meant it as such, but that may well be how it's seen. Since the EU privacy directive is explained in very many places across the Internet just asking questions is effectively concern trolling.
Great feedback, thank you. I agree that better progress tracking would be quite helpful. Also, we hadn't thought of giving people learning material based on the amount of time that they have to study -- really interesting idea.
Latest PHP Weekly just out
Very true. My post was self-described guesswork and theory, but I wouldn't be so dismissive of it!
The article all but explicitly states exactly what the parent comment wrote. Everything in the article is an elaboration on "humans are social creatures" and they act accordingly, in the article author's view (apparently) to maximize value for themselves (which is often the same as doing so for the company).
That is the difference between a software engineering major and a computer science major. With a CS degree the expectation is that you will stay in academia, while engineering curriculums have business courses baked in. Most CS professors are out of touch with the industry, and really, why wouldn't they be? Out of sight out of mind
Sundance Screenwriters Lab Video. I shot this to get in
If you taste them raw, they all definitely have a common, slightly mustardy flavour.
A Few Irons in the Fire (Phone)
Thank you. From the wiki page, I can't tell if that's Broccoflower is the result of cross-pollination as would happen naturally or the result of direct human intervention - I also can't tell if the seeds from Broccoflower are viable - I'll Google around more and learn :-)

As for overlooking - you're right, I did and should have thought of that before commenting. After a few attempts at saving seeds it became obvious to me that buying them each season was preferable.
I'm fairly certain Marco's Instapaper was a one man project until he sold it. [0]

I can't really comment on the rest.

[0] http://www.marco.org/about Past Projects
We're currently discussing whether to aim for breadth or depth with metacademy, i.e. whether we want to work towards becoming the "ultimate AI resource" or a differently structured wikipedia. If you, or someone you know, has the necessary knowledge/interest to contribute business content, we'd love to work with them to add it to metacademy.
TLDR; (1) Docker can be much slower than plain containers - particularly if using NAT or AUFS. (2) Run VMs inside containers, not the other way around.
"404: File Not Found" Is that the joke or is it down?
I don't think there should be a downvote option.

There should be an option for upvoting, and an option for flagging offensive content/content that is against the HN community guidelines.

As it stands, there is no visual emphasis on high quality comments. There is a visual emphasis on low quality comments. Why is that? Apologies in advance if I am making an ignorant statement.
If your reply was technical in nature and their user name is their actual name it could simply be worry about being googled during a job application.
Lessons learned from Apple's API strategy
I also don't pass that test, but I don't know how to fix it. Something that bugs me about both this and the SSL Labs scanner is there's no guide to fixing problems. Obviously it's different from webserver to webserver, but I feel like at least Nginx and Apache suggestions should be there. Maybe lighttpd and whatever else kids are using now a days
Meet the Creator of “Rocket Raccoon”
That's what I was thinking, but imagining maintaining an index of Google's scale just boggles my mind.
RORSAT[1] were Soviet satellites that carried radar and were powered by small nuclear reactors. The reactors provided between 2 and 6 kW of power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RORSAT
Snowden granted three-year stay in Russia
A $2,000 powered skateboard, with a breaking system.
Yeah, I suppose there is no explicit guarantee that a CS degree will prepare someone to pursue a wage-earning career in a competitive market.
In related news, reddit is now introducing a karma floor of sorts; they recently announced that though negative karma would still accrue without limit, negative karma below -100 would just be displayed as -100.
Appreciate the detail, that is one of the companies I didn't know well.
Codius (and Orisi.org) can deliver external inputs to the contracts - it's something no blockchain system can do by design.

In other words - if you want your Ethereum contract to rely on weather, a certain website, or a currency price, you need Orisi, Codius, or some other similar system.
Snowden gets 3-year residency permit in Russia
The most important question that should have been top center: with reactionless propulsion it is possible to create a free energy device.

Attach the thruster to a wheel.

When the thruster is firing, it consumes constant power and the wheel accelerates, spinning ever faster.

The wheel can be attached to a generator that produces power which is thrust times the rim velocity.

Thus, after a certain speed, the wheel produces more power than the thruster consumes.

This was discussed on a rocketry list.
"Prototype engine weighs about 15 kilograms"

"EmDrive, produced 91 micronewtons of thrust for 17 watts of power"

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=91+micronewtons+*+1+yea...

428 miles per hour, after a year.

Am I doing the math wrong?
> Would you cite which EU privacy law Facebook broke, and how they broke it?

Simplistically: The EU Privacy Directive; and it was broken by keeping data for too long and doing stuff that they didn't have user permission for.

More complicatedly: What ever country the lawsuit is taking place in will have implemented the EU Privacy directive, and so that country's law is the actual law that's been broken.

And also more complicatedly: Just having permission via checkbox might not be enough; the EU strongly prefers "privacy by default" where the user has to specifically check a box to lose that bit of privacy.

Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/;ELX_SESSIONID...

Factsheet: EU Privacy Directive and Social Networks http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/document/review2...
When I was there (and I assume still) the UCSC compiler courses did it the forward way. It was a fantastic experience; I don't know how it would compare to this flipped version (for which I can certainly see an argument).
There's a smell of survivorship bias to this. The author picked 20 already successful startups and looked for commonality between them. Arguably the 20 that they chose could do anything to their homepages and still soldier on successfully - the fact they all follow the same trends doesn't give any insight in to what works and what doesn't. Take the 'they all have a slogan' lesson as an example: having a slogan might have killed 50,000 startups and these 20 are the set that were lucky enough to have done everything right to survive in spite of that huge error.

If you're going to examine homepages to learn what works, you have to look at the failed startups as well as the successful ones. You can't learn anything just looking at one side.
The issues raised by Baez are quite substantial. I'm surprised the report was still published by NASA.
Was it an "Ask HN:"? It Took em some tries until I figured out that was just it, add "Ask HN:" to the title. I have deleted 2 earlier tries. Didn't see any responses though, but perhaps I should have hit F5.
It could have been that someone was just being naive.
I'm sure this is how things go for a lot of people, but I found it pretty defeatist. The current programmer/developer/whatever job market strongly favors employees -- if you have solid technical chops, you probably have your pick of jobs all across the industry, and I don't think there's any reason why you should have to accept a "soul-crushingly boring" job where your value is so poorly appreciated that you have to resort to scheming to justify your continued employment, or where anybody gives a shit about job titles. Yuck. Work someplace else.
Google Glass From Real Life Perspective – Is it useful?
Maybe I missed it, but how do you get money to live on?

I'm kind of doing the same thing. I quit a corporate job a few months back to work on stuff I'm really interested in. Doing a bit of blogging and hoping that maybe working on things I'm interested in and then blogging about it will get me a gig getting paid to work on things I'm interested in. But I suspect it's going to be a long slog getting to that money part. I'm fortunate, in that I've been frugal over the years and saved up so that I could continue on this path for at least another six months to maybe a year (well, insurance for myself and my wife is almost the biggest expense, almost as much as the mortgage). I'm just afraid that after six months or a year or whenever I can't afford to keep doing this that in the end nobody will have taken notice and I'll just have to go back to a soul crushingly boring corporate job again.
This.

The "trustlessness" in Bitcoin & Ethereum are conditional on the lack of collusion between miners.

It's particularly jarring to hear people clamor that it's "trustless", confusing the computational security of crypto with the much weaker game-theoretic security of Bitcoin.
Marketing I suppose.
Here's the github repo if anyone is interested.

https://github.com/michaelcolenso/tcplatmap

I used d3.js, and data from an ArcGIS REST endpoint that was linked on the City Assessor's website.

http://arcserver.tclp.org/arcgis/rest/services/City/CityParc...
Pinboard comes to mind.
These guys kick major ass! Love the concept and the app. It's very much needed.
HN used to have a pervasive gentleman culture, to the point of being mocked as uptight by proggit because of it.
Proteasome
And where would the "free energy" be coming from? Pretty sure you'd be losing energy, as energy doesn't come from thin air.
Well, there's more to that. Conditions by themselves can be handled by the blockchain, but using external sources (like websites, price feeds, etc) requires something like Codius or Orisi.org.

One fun example of an oracle smart contract is Mechanical Turk arbitration...
http://orisi.net/discussion/4/mturk-and-distributed-oracles-...

But basically anything that requires external inputs can be done. If you don't need external inputs, you can probably create the contract within Bitcoin/Ethereum alone.