skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a for-profit site that runs off unpaid/donated microlabor. It's gonna take some serious gamification to keep that model palatable to contributors if/when the cash start rolling in (or they get a big exit, etc).
By the time technical debt becomes evident enough for it to be noticed as a problem, it is most often too late to do anything about it. For those that don't believe me, show me enough businesses that have successfully refactored their way out of meaningful technical debts. The majority of case studies I know of prove me right on this point.

Usually when someone argues to refactor a system, one of two things happen. The developer loses the argument and is left frustrated. Or the developer wins the fight but finds that the cost is too high to successfully dig out of the hole.

When you're building a house, you've got to keep its structure sound as you go. If you violate architectural principles along the way, you will find it prohibitively costly (impossible) to revise your prior choices.

As long as we think bad architectural decisions are justifiable -- a mentality enforced by the idea that sound architecture comes at the cost of delivery time -- then we will forever be flailing.

The fundamental problem is that industry has failed to deliver good architects. The hacker culture and desperation of industry for coders has produced an ignorance, disinterest, and almost philistine disdain for the architectural skillsets. (Note: by architectural skillsets, I mean the ability to keep your technical components cohesive and decoupled with minimal interfaces.)

A skilled architect knows that solid design is a function of skill not of time. A skilled architect knows that there's no tradeoff between time and sound design. The comprimises in the face of time pressure are not to be made on the architecture. The concessions to be made are on how generalized you'll make a technical component or which features are most important to deliver today (think Minimimum Viable Product, a notion consistent with good architecture not opposed to it.)

But a majority of practitioners in our profession never learn the architectural skillsets and how to apply them. We learn how to hack, to code, to deliver -- this is all good -- but we don't learn how to build sound architectures.

Acadmeic environments have trouble teaching it because its a skillset acquired through years of practice in the real world. Industry has trouble teaching it because businesses can't afford to send their juniors off to go learn it. They need the juniors to execute, not go through the hard labor of learning architectural skills.

Our industry needs to figure out a way to produce workers with the right skillsets. Then we can avoid the major technical debts in the first place, without thinking we have to make a tradeoff on time. It is too prohibitive to dig yourself out of an unsound architecture. You have to build the house right. That it is "soft"ware doesn't change the game. The house analogy applies.

We have to produce good architectures to begin with. There's no other way. And that requires skill in architecture, a skill far far too but unnecissarily rare in this industry.
> I think the fact that sexism reduces the desire of women to participate in something is established.

[citation needed]
Hello,

Nice job but why do you require postfix?!

You should be using either sendmail/mailx or a custom user/password SMTPD server (e.g. google's smtpd).
It's a chip for very low-end routers: 2.4GHz only, no gigabit switch (although apparently it can be equipped with two gigabit ports), and a CPU that would struggle to do 50Mbps WAN-LAN with firewall and QoS. It's only redeeming quality is that it apparently has a PCIe lane, but the CPU is still going to have trouble feeding whatever NIC you connect to that.
> In my IT experience, anything requiring manual human checking basically doesn't get done

I fully agree - that why I like this idea; it doesn't rely on humans actively doing something, and instead engages the subconscious. Because our brain is constantly making predictions about everything we perceive, we tend to notice (without trying) if something subtly violates those predictions. We see this effect when people describe how they felt something was "off" or "wrong" before some big event. They probably did see something important, but not enough to recognize it or parse it consciously.

Engaging the warning system that our fight-or-flight reflexes - which is very effective at processing visual sense input - is probably one of the more practical ways of getting past in this "humans won't bother" category.

Also, a visual-hash isn't really trying to be perfect anyway. It's just a trick that would be very easy to implement. It won't get anywhere close to catching all attacks. It would probably catch more than our current strategy of doing nothing. When you start from 0, any improvement helps. The only reason not to do this kind of scheme would be if it raised the costs, but I doubt that would be a problem given how much headroom we have in modern hardware.
The've been here...for years.
This might be useful for you. The founder talks about the exact same problem - prospects say they like the idea but no conversions.

https://medium.com/@michalbohanes/seven-lessons-i-learned-fr...
The problem I often see with "open" devices like that is that they typically work with exactly one Linux kernel binary that shipped with the device. They usually don't work with upstream kernels.

Even if you can get original kernel source, it might not be trivial to get it to compile. Porting the required changes to a newer kernel once a security vulnerability was discovered can be very time consuming.
When I was on my own, I used Google Doc to keep track of daily logs in a loose way. I am getting a team so I switch to asana. It has been for 3-days I am fine with that.
Books that build on foundational axioms and go on to prove or derive theses/theorems out of them are helpful in your case, since they show you proof construction in action. Pick a classic, something that everyone is familiar with but at the time of its writing it was revolutionary. Euclid's The Elements come to mind.
I'd be in complete agreement if it offered any substantive benefits; however, I've yet to see an example of function-hoisting that can do something regular var-hoisting can't.
But being a parent also gives you many new opportunities to learn. My 11-year old loves YouTube so we have been working on making our own videos, experimenting with different cameras and editing. My 3-year-old loves swords so we fight with foam swords (a lot) and watch sword fighting videos (plus Princess Bride and Star Wars.) It's not much now but in 10 years we could have a nice set of fencing equipment and he could be a fighting force to be reckoned with (he already terrifies me.)

Other great areas of expertise for family guys are: Cooking, music, coaching sports, outdoorsmanship, and almost anything educational (science projects are my favorite.) Get ideas by listening by to what your kids are interested in. It will help motivate them to learn and it will expose you to cool stuff you would have never thought of on your own.
> glorified messaging app < puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science

This is obviously not true if you count economic value, and obviously true if you count "value" as in something good and useful for humanity. In our economy, the former is a proxy for the latter, but both forms of "value" are getting more and more misaligned nowdays.
It's difficult for me to say. After I wrote the first comment, I remembered hearing long ago that the reason softball pitchers typically don't have arm trouble is that the under handed motion is a natural motion, while overhanded is very unnatural. With baseball you typically don't want to do anything that causes extra tension on the elbow (i.e. curve balls) at a young age. So, I only threw fastballs and change-ups until I was in middle school. You actually can cause a lot of ball movement with altering grip pressure. (but that's off topic.) I'd recommend talking to an orthopedic specialist if you have access. I had a bad case of tendonitis in my early teens and I remember seeing an otho doctor who had dealt with a lot of sports injuries. Also, reach out to a local college coach and ask. As always, be careful with advice off the internet, people are idiots. I know that from middle school on, we had very structured "bullpens" that would increase in pitch count as we got closer to the season starting up and that helped a lot. Unfortunately, it's been a long time and my memory is fuzzy. I also know that it's not one-to-one with softball. I found this pdf for Babe Ruth pitching rules[0]. If nothing else, I wouldn't exceed what they say.

[0]http://files.leagueathletics.com/Text/Documents/5200/27001.p...
Logarithmic scale makes sense for everyone. If you buy at X dollars and has 100% return when the price is 2X it does not matter what X actually is. Logarithmic scale reflects relative changes which is the only interesting metric for investors. If Bitcoin was traded at $98 12 months ago and now trades at $480, it shows relative change of 400% while the prices themselves do not tell you much.
Ask HN: Where can I find some people willing to participate
How would you go about finding people willing to lease me rights to use their name and address for cleanly spelled out purpose. I am working on an idea of a startup and while I am close to building I have to verify viability of the idea.

For this startup to work I would need identity providers.

In a sense I would offer some incentive like some $ per item or merchandise to people to let people use their name and address for clearly outlined purpose which is would nothing illegal and would be spelled out in the terms of service and the person would have a chance to opt out. There would be limits set, etc and they can approve.

In a sense we would be renting rights to use their name and address for a set period of time and we would compensate them for it.

Also their identity would be protected as much as possible. The worst they might get some junk mail, which they would anyways. We would do our best to avoid this as well. Still working out how.

So a couple of questions:

1. How would people recommend finding people who would be willing to participate.
2. What kind of incentive do you think they would need. How much would you do something like this for.
3. Do you think can this work ? If you cannot, can you offer an alternative.
Inside Scotland's technology masterclass at the 2014 Commonwealth Games
"This isn't Science magazine." Finish that thought.

This isn't Science magazine so... we can just make things up and say whatever we want, even if it's blatantly and provably untrue?
I have a six week old son. He is actually quite strong already, but he doesn't have much control over his own body. He will scratch himself in the face to the point of bleeding if he's upset and he's not wearing mittens/his nails aren't trimmed. He can straighten his legs and body out and it takes a surprising amount of force to unstraighten them (if you need to, say, clothe him or change his diaper). Babies already have a device that allows movement based on neural activation patterns... it's called a body. They just have to learn how to use it.
The Minimum Viable Building Blocks For a Federal Government API Hub
Doesn't G+ do that? And it's already on my phone and browser...not really interested in trying another implementation. Good luck!
TL;DR: No.

A newborn baby is not a CPU+motherboard which just needs to grow the other peripherals and BAM it all just snaps into place, nor is it a tiny adult with fully functional tiny appendages.

A newborn needs to develop all sorts of skills - starting with breathing patterns & sleep patterns, not to mention feeding. Yes, these things become automatic pretty quickly; however, the baby needs to "bootstrap" itself from the absolute basics provided by reflex, iteratively, to more and more complex tasks - it cannot start in the middle of the "technology tree," to use a metaphor from strategic games, as it would lack the underlying capabilities. Muscle coordination (in other words, developing the neural activation patterns whose existence you're presupposing), sensory input (movement w/o vision, very useful) and cross-referencing the inputs/outputs comes much, much later.

Now, with a 6-month-old, that exoskeleton of yours might be actually workable (in theory) - but a newborn? No way at all; your view of human biology is rather cartoonish: we're not starting out with a complete brain which just needs some muscles, the brain develops alongside the rest of the organism.
NodeSource Docker Images
This is just stunning. Bravo, sir.
For a minute I thought this was announcing that Cider[1] now supports iOS -> Android (Cider is currently existing tech used for porting Windows games to OS X, based on Cedega/Wine).

[1]: https://www.transgaming.com/cider
In 1999 it was pretty obvious that if Moore's Law held up as expected, you could do all kinds of stuff within a few years.

Until we see rocket fuel doubling in energy every eighteen months, any idea of a Mars mission (let alone colony) paid for with private money is wishful thinking.
This webpage doesn't seem to interact well with Mac's touchpad scrolling...
Seeing as we are starting from 0 (no verification at all), any improvement would be a benefit. This would simply be a cheap and easy way to catch "some" attacks.

Also, see my response to halfcat in a neighboring post.
I am not sure if you are aware, but if you hold a newborn baby under its arm, it will make a walking motion in the air with its legs. This is likely the remnant of a legacy behavior that was useful a few millions years ago. I don't know how the test is called but it is part of the standard test protocol at birth. I am not sure if this is part of Agpar score [0] or called something else.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apgar_score
I thought the EULA doesn't count for much, especially in Europe?
Python Mentors – Python Core Mentorship
What’s a Browsewrap?
Good architecture is a windmill. To do that right, you have to know how your requirements will change and grow over time, and put effort into being flexible and extensible in those feature areas.

But seeing into the future is risky/imperfect. So code bases are full of clever features and libriaries that are used exactly once. And where rapid growth happened but the code wasn't prepared, sketchy chains of conditions and runon code to paper over the gaps.
It's not the communications money that drives insane valuations of random apps, it's the advertising money.
Well, if you're willing to ignore the existing base of bitcoin already mined (and even in some cases the sunk cost of buying hardware that can be used to mine them) go ahead and do your calculation based solely on the price per unit energy as a starting point.

If you use this calculator[1] you can see that if your 50GH/s array spends 300w which you had to pay for, you are burning about $0.48/day at the current price, assuming all of that from before. This is not top-of-the-line, but it is some relatively modern ASIC equipment from BFL. Previous generation miners, 5 and 10GH/s "Jalapenos" from the 65nm fab. They are supposedly rolling out 28nm "Monarch" now which are at least 10x as powerful and certainly more than just marginally better at power efficiency.

If you look at this chart[2] you can see an estimate of the next difficulty and adjust your calculations for next week, it becomes pretty clear that more people are turning on their Gigahashes than turning them off, even if that was only marginally the case two weeks ago. You have to imagine those people are mostly those with newer equipment.

I don't have a graph of price overlaid with difficulty, but it can't be too hard to find one. A few months ago it was possible to scale them and demonstrate a relatively good fit where price and difficulty were roughly correlated, but since difficulty shows no signs of falling yet, I suspect that fit is not so good anymore.

[1]: http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
[2]: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
Hey Dave! (Craig here) nice, achieved 6x speed up on an 8 gpu box (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.5997v2.pdf). Thanks for the pointer and hope to see you soon.
I don't know how much it being open-source will help though. The open-source world is chock full of libraries and tools that have been abandoned long ago, despite having numerous contributors listed on the project. I'd say that about 30-40% of Rails gems I come across everyday have not been updated in a year if not more. Sure, they have forks, but unlike the original gem, they are not mature enough to be used in a production environment.
Configure Entity Tags (ETags)
The 'microwave thruster' article posted recently circumvents that problem - no reaction mass necessary. A Mars mission is now supposed to be practical, energywise.
1) Are they paying enough? Money is not the only motivation, but usually a underplayed employment comes with other environment problems.

2) Some ideas that may be useful: "Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000332.html
Ask HN: Cheap and Reliable IAAS Provider for a web app?
If you had an on-line product/web app to launch, which IAAS provider would you pick, knowing that initially your funds are very limited? You don't want to break the bank but would like to have the option to scale out if necessary without it becoming very expensive with load (I particularly want to stay away from solutions that are free or almost free to start but expensive to scale).
> "a new system that can run iOS apps on an Android device for the first time"

We at Apportable (YC W2011) have been doing that for 3 + years in a much for commercially viable way. We strive for source compatibility and are not building an emulator that requires taking libraries from an iOS device.
Does anyone have insight whether creating Reddit ads can hurt your chances of trending as an organic post?
From a quick search [1] it looks like the process for spin coating PbI2 is a bit more involved than just spinning a substrate. There are several other solvents an a boiling process which will have byproducts but ones that have their own recycling process.

[1] http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/ra/c3/c3ra43228a/c3ra43228a.pdf
For my coworkers based in Taiwan who are somewhat fluent, they mostly don't recognize it, and really can't.

Their limitations are effectively hidden from them. Odd things still come out, but in informal contexts it's not worth correcting, and there's little opportunity for formal critique. (There's also the issue of "face" that complicates matters and drives me insane. It's easier with people who have spent a few years in the US, though.)

If there's no (near-)native speaker around to check, nobody's going to notice until it goes out to the world, and then there are a half billion people ready to jump on it.

If they recognized it, I don't think cost would be a factor. I could review/correct a site like this in an hour (or less). I might spend a day on the mini-manuals that come with some gadgets.
Just the difference in energy budget is enough to prove your point. But there are additional issues like radiation exposure to astronauts that make travel to Mars prohibitively difficult even with the biggest rocket imaginable.

Realistically, the only hope we have of seeing astronauts on Mars is if China and the US (or some other pair of countries) gets in a Cold War-style pissing contest.
About linear correlation: there's a Derrida point in statistics where everything becomes relative to a model. Linear correlation is the preferred mode for cardinal (not ordinal) quantities because it's directly related to linear ANOVA (the decomposition of variance between "explained by the covariate" and "unexplained by the covariate") (among many other reasons), but it's a choice. There's nothing outside theoretical decision.
Nice job Eliot ;-)
Have exoskeleton market development teams tried such experiments on young animals? It would be interesting to see the developmental growth results of a statistically valid sample, assuming such experiments are ethically ok.
Big news for Highrise
Opensource is not about price. Its value is not in having $0 price. Never has been, never will be. How can people still be confused on this?

Also, you can and should support / give some money to open source developers as well.
Nope. Swift isn't mature yet.
How much water does California have left?
Doh! I somehow after 16 years of education never managed to understand the point of the log scale. Thank you.
Oh yeah! And the rocket can use faster-than-light neutrinos to avoid annoying latency when talking to Houston.
Have you considered that it may have something to do with the adjectiveness or adverbiality of the word? Words that are exclusively single-use readily take the -er and -est suffixes, whereas those that perform double or triple duty as nouns and/or verbs as well (perhaps as inflected forms) are less apt to sound correct when suffixed.

Since -ly is an adverbizing suffix, most anything ending in -ly could also end in -lier or -liest. A dual-purpose word might generate ambiguity when using -er, because -er is also used to transform a noun or verb into an associated noun, much like -ing changes a verb.

"Opener" could be an adjective meaning less enclosed, or it could be a person or device that opens things.

Hot may become hotter and hottest, but heated can only become more heated, because it is already heat and -ed, and the suffixes won't combine. Old becomes older and oldest, but aged only becomes more aged. Red -> redder -> reddest; rouged -> more rouged.

Likewise, the -tic suffix does not combine. Emphatic is already an adjective form of emphasis. The -er and -est suffixes tend to attach more easily to a word that was originally a modifier rather than a noun or verb, because only a few suffixes that modify part of speech combine. I wonder if it would be better to be "most emphatic" or "most emphasized"?

The rules are complicated because English grabs vocabulary from so many other languages, and the words with germanic, romance, greek, or other etymologies don't always play well by the same rules.

Native English speakers are somehow able to apply etymologically consistent alteration rules to words based on the qualities of their sound rather than by their actual source language. That's how we got "cherry". The French word was "cerise", which was imported as "cherries". Obviously, by English grammar, a word ending in the /s/ or /z/ sound is a plural. So you chop off the /z/ to get the singular "cherry". English has sort of a Procrustean Bed approach to word acquisition. If it don't fit, we makes it fit.