skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow! I am mentioned in Chapter 1.

> If you still find this tutorial too difficult, you might try starting with "Learn Ruby on Rails" by Daniel Kehoe...

Thank you, Michael. It's generous to mention my book. I've said that we need a better introduction for beginners and I'm overjoyed to see the improvements in the 3rd Edition. In the last two years, so many more people want to learn Rails, often without any background in other web platforms (or even programming).
Apple has 99 faults, but your lack of touch typing skills ain't one :)
Citymapper's UX is really awesome, and I always use it as my example of the degree to which attention to detail is so absolutely vital in this sort of app. Like, first-class, best-app-I've-ever-used level of UX.

I'm still not totally sold on their routing algorithm in London, but I'm not sure exactly what's wrong with it - all I know is it often suggests routes that no same person would take. It definitely seemed to get a little worse maybe 6 months or so ago; it's possible it's just been tuned in a way that doesn't get on with my usage pattern.
The Welcome Email Robot Disaster
But that depends on the government’s success in luring great people to revive the dead zone of government IT.

In my experience, that's only a part of the problem - good people usually don't stick around for too long (since they don't want to deal with the inertia and other difficulties of this environment).

Also, I take issue that only "great people" can be found in Silicon Valley - for example, I recently developed a web application for the government (as a contractor) that's modern, mobile-ready and which uses MongoDB.
The shareholders absorb the profits, as well.

If a CEO messes up at his job in a purely business sense and the shareholders lose money, that's ok, right? I mean it's the whole idea of having shareholders.

I'd include "broke federal laws and exposed the company to serious financial liability" in the same (or a worse) category.
"web-app war" threw me off for a second, because the file type for java server applications is .war for Web Application aRchive.
I wonder about it too, but I don't think that's the case. I mean, even their offices (like the new one, in Paris) are not just a luxury show off, but they're meant and actually used to attract new volunteers, host events to foster the web, get media attention…
it's really surprising to see how strongly people here oppose the idea of Mozilla making money. Mozilla is arguably one of the most important tech companies, committed to FOSS, transparency and providing a much needed counter balance to much larger tech giants that would steamroller all over the web without them. This is probably the least obtrusive change they could have made, how do you expect them to survive without revenue?
. . . and is interesting as it's almost completely orthogonal to this.

Google's existing offerings fail most spectacularly for knowledgeable people in urban environments (I cannot overstate how much GM's handling of subways drives me insane), which is the niche this lot have successfully found. Apple seem to have a lot of customers in that bracket so they are the better fit.
cue a slew of copycat stabbings as a result of this being given mainstream media attention.
I especially want that for scheduling of recipes. Right now they run all the time, but there are definitely things I only want to run at specific times on specific days. For instance:

"If it's 7:00 AM [AND] it's a weekday [AND] the forecast is rain [THEN] Tell me to bring an umbrella" would be much more useful to me than getting notifications every time it's going to rain.

As it stands now with a single condition, I don't can't come up with much I want to do with IFTTT.
Holiday.com Going Up for Auction
IFTTT surely has a lot of potential. IOT device management might become a problem for normal users, if IOT does become mainstream in the future.

The normal scenarios which we can think of right now for example coming home and things turn on to appropriate settings, blocking phones during meetings etc are surely easy for us to understand, but my parents if they figure these things out and can setup such tasks them selves, I see a huge market and use for such services. It is still too geeky for normal people, it needs to provide use cases for normal folks not just tweeps or facebook generation.

IFTTT needs the money, their servers used to be slow when I last used it.
You don't need to use an iframe. HTML5 video tags natively support multiple formats. Between WebM and H.264, you support every major browser.
It's definitely still harder to work with videos than gifs, thus we all pay the bandwidth penalty.
My kid's school was on lockdown because of this.
But is that what the government was gunning for them about or were they doing an 'Al capone' and targeting tax fraud? Without details of the settlement, it's just projection to say that's what the settlement concerned. The argument isn't that the legal system should act, the argument is that the justice system should be transparent--especially when the people issuing the punishment are collecting the payout. Without transparency you create a perverse incentive for the bureaucratic agencies to hunt for targets, drum up charges, and collect windfalls. That's not in the interest of justice or a equitable legal system.
I find the tiles highly useful, and Mozilla metrics show that so does a large portion of their uses.

I recently had to deal with a completely fresh Firefox and the empty tiles were quite annoying.

A few years ago a Mozilla engineer talked about advertisement and how ads should not annoy users but benefit them. His example was high-end fashion magazines, which people happily buy - not despite most of the magazine consisting of ads - but because the magazine was mostly ads. The ads are beautiful and tells you what style is in vogue.

Advertisement can be mutual beneficial.
Apple announces special event for Sept. 9
I'm curious--in these cryopreservation arrangements, what is done to incentivize future people to resurrect you? Anyone know?
Except, of course, that PACER has various requirements that conflict with this, and they make as hard as possible to keep this profit (which was 150 million in 2008) up.

For example written opinions that "set forth a reasoned explanation for a court's decision" must be free of charge.

They make it is as difficult as possible to access this, and do not allow any sort of bulk download, because doing so would make PACER/courtweb less useful as a pay service.
> He tried really hard to remove all the Ripple references from the code

No he didn't - have a look it is littered
Apple announces special event for September 9th: ‘Wish we could say more’
I'm glad to see this since an easy overlay for Docker is badly needed. But ugh, userspace encapsulation. This would be a lot better if it used OVS + VXLAN.
All of my projects have been in Coffeescript since 3 years ago (over 100k lines of code). Have had almost little to no problems. Like you, feel 10x more productive when I'm using it!
"I'm curious -- does Google ever circle back on no-offer candidates to discuss the interview process?"

Yes. They do this quite often, actually.
Let's see: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I find it hard to add meaningful value to almost all discussions, so I can easily shut up and listen.
I switched to hubiC.

I think right now any american company is in bed with NSA until proved otherwise.
The startup that is working on the app you want, covering every city with any public transportation, is going to release sometime in 2036. Coming soon!
> The point isn't that the companies were or were not doing something wrong, it's the opacity of the entire process--it's almost Kafkaesque. The government accuses them of a crime, gets a payout, and everything gets settled hush-hush.

I don't think that's really true, though. It's more like "the government accuses them of a crime, and then the company and the government come to a settlement." For instance, look at the recent eBook price fixing matter. The government accused 5 publishers and Apple of a crime. The publishers agreed to a fine and business changes, but Apple refused to settle—and it went to court. The fact that it went much more poorly for Apple through the court process shows why companies are so eager to settle.

Or to put it another way: it's opaque from the outside. From the inside, it's all lawyers deciding what to settle for.

> No one knows what exactly about their conduct was illegal

I think the companies have a very good idea of what they did that the government disapproved of; companies don't want to find out exactly the exact legal result, because they don't want to actually be found guilty of a crime.

> how the fines are being used by the government.

That's not really the business's... well, business. They don't get to dictate that.

*

I agree with you that there should be more visibility in to these settlements, but more so companies can't hide behind "we weren't actually found guilty of a crime". But I don't think companies want that kind of public visibility into their misdeeds. With these secret settlements they can make problems just disappear. And certainly, from the public standpoint, what exactly happens to these huge settlements needs to be more visible.
It is bullshit. There is nothing wrong, at all, with it being empty. It's a burden on those of independent mind to have to delete extraneous crap.

You might as well be Microsoft saying it's fine that IE is default and bundled with Windows, thus effectively pushing Netscape out of the market.

This is also the exact mentality that leads to bloatware on PCs and phones. The person that put it there thinks it's helpful, even if it took a bit of financial persuasion.
Ads are currently their only real form of income. If you use the search bar to look for Amazon items and buy something, Mozilla receives money, if you search Google with it and click an ad, Mozilla receives money.

Mozilla may be a non-profit, but they are in the advertisement business already.
I don't envy this guy; what he's dealing with is a very hard problem.

Government tech has the unfortunate problem of requiring instant scale. As in whenever you develop a new app or tool, it needs to roll out to a hundred thousand (or hundred million in the case of healthcare.gov) people and needs to integrate with dozens or even hundreds of different systems. Which of course, is the entire problem to begin with.

It's pretty obvious that the old way of doing things is not sustainable. Most people would say the answer is Agile processes; but that has drawbacks in a government context. Agile can mean many things. Depending on how you implement it, but there is an inescapable trade-off of efficiency for oversight. Government contracts need oversight; otherwise you have contractors who aren't meeting their obligations and collecting millions of dollars while throwing obviously unqualified people at a problem. Often nobody on the government side is even paying attention that the work isn't getting done until it's too late.

I really don't know what the answer is here. There are lots of problems with the government procurement process, but there is a lot of money on the line and the people receiving it have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Ultimately the procurement process is the biggest issue. Contracts go to the company that can navigate the procurement process most effectively; not the company best suited to do the job. Given the bureaucratic nightmare that is government procurement, any procurement process designed to find the best company for the job will still ultimately reward the companies most adept at gaming the system through back channels (e.g. calling in a favor with a Congressman to ensure the criteria for contractor selection benefit a specific company).
What if I'm optimizing for cost, not speed and reliability? My printer works just fine while I'm away, so I don't really care about a print taking an hour or two, and plastic is bendy and forgiving enough that a bit of accuracy sacrificed is fine.

I'd argue that additive manufacturing via hobbyist FDM printing is a lot cheaper for one off designs than subtractive manufacturing of any form, because the consumable cost is limited to utilized filament and a tiny amount of printer maintenance rather than huge amounts of waste combined with expensive, finicky tool bits and the same kinds of maintenance.

I do agree that for items like a Raspberry Pi case which could be mass-produced via molding to much better tolerance at a low cost, 3D printing might be silly, but for truly one-off, low accuracy consumer parts I don't think 3D printing can be beat.

I personally have also not had much problem getting square, true, dimensionally accurate prints with a crappy printer (Solidoodle 2). The most deflection I've ever seen is about .8mm across the 150x150mm build area. That isn't perfect and obviously won't work for precision equipment, but combined with ABS's flexibility and forgiving nature it's certainly good enough to make one-off enclosures, fasteners, buttons and knobs, adapters, and other "glue" parts, which is most of my use for 3D printing.

I will say that 3D printers are hard to set up, and that's probably the source of a lot of the warped cases you've seen. CNC mills and lathes are just as hard to set up, though - you've just generally paid the vendor tons of money to do it for you.
Had an idea a few days ago. Spent the next couple days after that validating and iterating through mockups on first build. Just literally started coding it 2 days ago. Haven't really gotten very far so can't say much but for now I'm excited
The Death of Film: After Hollywood Goes Digital, What Happens to Movies?
indeed, I was expecting...

"...Hello OpenStreetMap"
Love the story, reminds me of the early days of Primecoin where I had my first exposure to cryptocurrency code. I spent the first two months of it fighting to stay ahead of the curve as well and had a blast. Not nearly as successfully as Dave however and my wife wasn't too happy about me spending every waking hour when home from my full time job on it.
Writing a path tracer in Rust, part 5: tonemapping
I'd prefer to not have to load some 3rd party of who-knows-what-quality-or-what-else-it's-doing extension or plugin.

It serves google no purpose in Chrome -- why not just let me turn it off? Especially in an enterprise environment like at the office...
Only possible thing I can think of is them setting up tiers for number of integrations and/or more control over timing.
In 2009, he described his experience with ALS in a poignant post titled "Dying Outside": http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/ . I'm very sad to see him go.
Microsoft now supports Google’s Kubernetes
Wuala is user friendly enough. I don't know what magic Dropbox has that makes it more user friendly than Wuala.

But Wuala doesn't work without a network connection, which makes it pointless to me.
Microsoft baked IE into the OS, making it hard to temove IE and making it hard to install anything else.

It wasn't just that IE was the default browser that caused MS problems in Europe courts.
When I first visited http://codefund.io, I received nginx's default page. After visiting https://codefund.io, subsequent attempts to reach http://codefund.io do redirect to https.
You can now process recurring payments without a monthly fee on Shopify
Yeah SJVN is full of fluff. Hardly pens a word worth reading.
The AG doesn't walk home with an extra B in the bank after a settlement. He's not collecting the payout.

As far as drumming up charges and collecting windfalls.. you think these companies with their legal departments would just hand that money over if they liked their position in court? You think things like "polluted the whole gulf of mexico" is a case of charges being drummed up?

I would have liked to see these cases go to trial, too. But, from the DoJ's perspective, with the manpower they have, if they can wrap up a settlement and move on to the next case, that's a case they wouldn't have investigated if they were busy with litigation.

If you really want to be upset about this type of thing, you should look into how often it affects normal people with normal criminal charges.
Yes, yes, they now admit it because they got caught. That doesn't change the way they presented it when it was launched.
The thing that is a little hard to account for is the synchronized rotation: how could the splat happen in exactly such a way that the rugged far side remains out of Earth's view. Say that before the splat, the original Moon is already synchronized so that it faces the Earth with one side at all times.

The popular hypothesis that the Moon fragmented away from the Earth does contain an explanation for both phenomena: the synchronous rotation, as well as the different characteristics of the far side.

Since the Moon is small and has no plate tectonic activity, it would tend to "record" a permanent geological snapshot of the "gash" on the side where it was separated from the larger object. The larger object with plate tectonic activity would "heal" over many eons, since that activity basically re-surfaces it.

The Wikipedia article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis] does not say, under Difficulties, anything about the difference in characteristics between near and far side being specifically a problem. There are difficulties stemming from the composition of the Moon as such.
Bigger screen, faster processor, health, maybe a new color
190 members
Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone
I think exclusive contracts should be abandoned anywhere they can be. Why should there only be one monolithic Healthcare.gov? Every single company that wants to should be able to build their own solution to this. They can be rewarded based on how many users they get, or the best one can win a bounty.
Islamic State Tightens Grip on East Syria
The plan is to add more backends; we started with userspace encapsulation because it works everywhere and is easy to setup and control.

Initially we wanted to use an existing in-Kernel encapsulation format like a simple ip-ip encapsulation. However, IP-IP doesn't work on AWS. Then we looked at VXLAN but it relies on multicast which doesn't work on most cloud networks either. Most recently we started looking at the VXLAN DOVE extensions and are getting a prototype together for this.

tl;dr the initial goal is to show that something generic is needed and can work, we will get something that is performant and/or has encryption next.
First health app to accept Bitcoin
Someone built on in my neighborhood and it stood for about a year before someone lit it on fire. It was rebuilt, hopefully it was just a random act of destruction and it will stick around this time.
It was never hard to install anything else. The problem was that because it was default most people couldn't be persuaded of the point.

The fact it was low level welded into the OS merely made it possible for MS to argue it was necessary to be in by default for technical reasons as opposed to being a business decision.
Having developed a couple of "wearable" computing products, I can appreciate what IFTTT offers for early adopting consumers. Most companies making new products don't have the time to work on too many integrations (not to mention all the contractual stuff to even be able to start). They give the early adopter a way around at least some of that problem, and I know a significant number of users appreciate that.
I'm curious how D implements memoizing an arbitrary function. To memoize something, you need to be able to check if it's being called with the same arguments. But to do that, you need a definition of "same" (i.e., an equivalence relation). For example, if the argument is a dictionary, is it considered the same argument only if the pointer is the same, or if the keys and values are the same, assuming a recursive definition of "same"? Also, you need a way to store computed values, using the arguments as keys, which for efficiency would require either an ordering (for a tree) or hashing (for a hash table) on the arguments. Multiple arguments would further complicate things. How does this get automated? And for some things, memoization wouldn't make sense (for example, with function arguments in higher-order functions). Sensible defaults would take care of most of these things, but it makes me wonder how they chose to address these things. And is the memo recreated each time the (outer) function is called, or is it stored for the duration of the program? Also, how does the type system play with this? What's the type of `memoize!`?
Building a smarter home feed
I had to make one extra click to add a folder.

It's outrageous!
Why on earth would you transcode the recordings to mp3 -_- Flac is perfectly capable of decent compression and won't permanently damage these historical recordings.
I really really wish that governments would define some specs for what a patient record MUST and MUST NOT do; and what the software must and must not do, and so on, and then just let software providers sell software to medical providers.
Right. They just lose any benefits of associating with the convict. Similarly, employees of a "jailed" company could find new jobs or start their own businesses or whatever, but would lose what they got from the company.
Interesting that someone would choose to be cryopreserved somewhere where there's no legal assisted suicide. Wouldn't your chances of being successfully revived improve if you got cryopreserved while still alive?
Article cites cheap rent as a reason businesses are flocking there, but I don't buy it.

Houston's downtown, which has excellent office stock and is in the center of an exponentially stronger economy, has median rents at about $25 per square foot. Detroit's CBD median is $23 per square foot.

Plenty of cheap office space all around this country so I reject that this is the reason.
Even for more recent formats there is a need I think. For instance I struggled a lot for recovering Video8 and Hi8 tapes [1], in the end I had to buy an old camera. I think it's the kind of thing it would make a great Kickstarter project.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_mm_video_format
Not everyone has the same needs.

When I use Google Maps all I really want is for it to take me from point A to point B in my car.

I type the name of a place and It loads directions, time, traffic, and guides me there using the best route possible. One click. Quite literally the best UX I could imagine.

For most of Google Maps users (the ones who don't live in those 8 cities), Google Maps is almost perfect. It's not that Google Maps doesn't have a good UX, it just wasn't built for you.
I drive by one of these every day in Vermont. I thought it was a mailbox at first. I hope these are self sufficient and don't get taken advantage of. It's a great idea.
Your #3 is funny, since that's precisely the one thing that stops me from being able to use Citymapper on a daily basis. The way I use Google Maps in NYC is by typing in, say, "23rd and 3rd", and Google figures out what I mean. Because Citymapper is dependent on Foursquare for reverse geocoding, I can't really do that; it either has to be enter an exact address or moving the map around.
SWAT Team Raids Gamer While He's Live Streaming
I don't think user donations could replace $300 million a year.