skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So the hip software stack of 2014 supports no concurrency or very limited concurrency on each and every level.

NodeJS's asynchronous approach is a concurrency (but not parallelism) approach. Your reference to "Pentiums" (which I assume is intended to be a reference to single-core nodes) suggests that your concern is actually with parallelism rather than concurrency.

But, sure, a not uncommon usage pattern for an IaaS like GCE might be to have lots of single-core nodes cooperating, rather than running individual processes on larger nodes with lots of parallel threads.
Five Thoughts on Privacy and Security
http://www.twelvesouth.com/product/bookbook-for-macbook-air-...

Cue infringement suit in 5, 4, 3...
This looks a little different than Bejeweled. There are several new mechanics and play systems. They both use similar-looking gem graphics, but that's not particularly egregious.
A system to retrofit an appliance into a smart home.

Example: My AC has its own remote. With my device I can record the wireless signals it outputs, similar to a garage opener in a car. Then with my mobile app I can create my own interface to power on/off, set temp, etc. I now use just my smart phone to turn on my AC. I press power on the custom UI I created in the app, it will send a packet to the hardware in my LAN, and that hardware sends the matching wireless signal to the AC.

Some things might still need physical fittings and cannot always be wireless devices such as power switches. New power splitters with this functionality would also be a good way to control appliances that just need to power on and off.
Modern web development with Python3
Very interesting article.

> Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of "African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates.

I thought about this as well some time ago. It's odd that the child of a black and a white parent is black, and not "neither black nor white" or "both black and white".
So would her husband also be under the kafala system?
Thanks for starting this. It's currently making my life much easier.
http://gcc.gnu.org/codingconventions.html#Spelling

"Front end" when used as a noun, "Front-end" when used as an adjective.
Ask HN: Modern Acme/Wily editor clones?
After spending a few days fiddling with Plan9/Inferno, the Acme editor/"IDE" has grown on me somewhat (it's an acquired taste, but exceptionally handy to, say, run a command from inside it with a click and have the output on a new buffer).

So I started asking myself if there were modern alternatives that could be used with a trackpad, had syntax highlighting and other niceties that the Plan9 zealots consider "unfeatures" (and are thus absent from Plan9 in User Space or Acme-SAC).

After all, with a new fancy Webkit-based editor coming out every month, someone would have thought of that already, right?

But, alas, no. There's http://jakme.googlecode.com (which seems little more than a PoC) and https://github.com/fmoralesc/plan9-for-vimspace (which is promising, at least for me), but nothing else I can find.

Is there anything else out there?
Congratulations on releasing Mjolnir!

Here is some feedback: I have never heard of Mjolnir, or Hydra, before. I visited the page you linked and skimmed through. Here is what I learnt:

- That it's a "Lightweight automation and productivity power-tool for OS X"

- How to try it out

- How to uninstall it, or install it to $HOME

- How to install it's doc sets

- How to work with modules

- FAQ on some very technical questions

- Some high-level phylosophical comparison with other apps ("Mjolnir is more modularized, Slate is more all-in-one")

- Thanks, technical changes, license etc.

I still have no idea what is it, what problems could it solve and what are some typical examples of automation, apart from a single paragraph"start writing some fun staff" in "Try it out" section.

I'm certainly interested in automating tasks on my Mac, but after reading the landing page I have no idea what kinds of tasks it could be. Is it better that Automator? How does it compare? Is it better then writing shell scripts? etc.

If I were you, I would spend 70% of the page to explain what someone can accomplish with Mjolnir and why they should care, and 30% (or less) on the technical stuff. May be I'm not an intended audience.
I'm really happy this position was given to a chick. Hopefully inspire more girls to enter tech and help to mitigate the sausage fest that is the technology industry.
actually he worked for Twitter :) 2 different people under discussion here.
Can you help explain what you mean by this comment?
Title edited to preempt confusion with the other computer-pioneery Kay.
> Paper can be made from renewable hemp instead of forests

Hemp may have a greater sustainable yield per acre (or some other constraint) than other fiber sources for paper [1], but forests are quite obviously also renewable.

[1] I'm not saying it does, just granting that this is possible as I haven't looked into it.
I've never owned a Dyson because a) they are silly expensive, and b) all my friend's Dysons rapidly deteriorated as you described.

To me Dyson designs novel items that kinda work but rarely quite live up to the hype.
There's a lot you can do today as a non-technical founder
> 4. There is such a thing as girl power when we talk about email

The data presents a correlative link between gender and email activity, but not a causal link. (I would expect that the user's profession, which likely has a biased gender ratio, to be the more pertinent factor).

Additionally, the phrase "they have a higher response rate, of 15% compared to 13% for men" does not make it immediately obvious if it's a statistically significant difference. (at n=5000, it may be, but it would be better with the math present)

As a whole, the analysis could use confidence intervals, because email activity in particular has a very skewed distribution between normal users and power users.
"Dude, give me a Kaypro 64 and a live dial tone and I can do anything!"
There was a rather famous incident with a trader nicknamed "London Whale", who accumulated a massive position in the CDS market, which then led JPMorgan Chase to lose immense amounts of money on the trade. The money went to those people that correctly figured out what was going on in the market.

In general, if you know important information about someone else's positions, you can sometimes use that information to profitably trade against them.
4 Simple Steps to Secure Your Express Node Application
Twitter CFO says a Facebook-style filtered feed is coming
Newly found asteroid to pass close to Earth Sunday
I did something similar ...
No integration with NPM though...
http://www.reactjsx.com/
Because the status quo is changing.

ISPs are suppressing Netflix not because of traffic asymmetries; the relatively small dollar amounts involved reveal it as an excuse.

Their real concern is that services like Netflix reduce the value of both traditional streamed TV content, and whatever value-add on-demand services that ISPs create and operate. Their worst nightmare is being reduced to dumb pipes, because that's a revenue growth dead-end.

At one point cable "on-demand" was a hot new technology that people were excited about (i.e. willing to pay for). Now people just get a Netflix subscription. Cable companies are not psyched about that.
> You force companies to carry all traffic equally

That is not a solution, it is an intention. The solution is how do you go about "forcing" companies to carry all traffic equally. This is utterly unenforceable and unmeasurable. Also, I have a moral problem with your willingness to "force" someone to do something because of your worldview. That kind of solution does not scale (you either think you could have a monopoly for every market and force them to do what you want, or you think we're all better off through the natural competition for paying customers).

> What's the solution to the problem of a lack of competition?

Stop government from interfering with the market. This solution is much clearer in my opinion. Monopoly comes from the government as it gives particular rights and benefits to this or that corporation. Let corporations fight against each other for the customers' money and you'll be enabling people to choose what they want, by voting with their dollars.
It's better than a downvote, if you ask me. A downvote is an anonymous put-down, and that's why people use it to punish anyone that disagrees with them, or if they don't like someone's opinion.

Perhaps if down-votes were displayed, and people could respond. Dunno, perhaps we're over-complicating it.
Because they sold the company. The decisions aren't theirs to make. Tis the nature of acquisitions.

Nonetheless, congrats to their team.
> So you think anyone would think it was totally cool if someone released things called 'Standard Excel' and 'Standard MacOS'?

I don't think anyone would dispute that both Excel and MacOS are, in fact, trademarks established through bona fide use in commerce and which have not been genericized, and which, therefore, currently serve to clearly designate the origin of particular commercial products.

I don't think the same consensus exists with Markdown. In fact, I suspect if there was a general consensus that "Markdown" had some clear meaning, whether or not it was to designate the original of a particular commercial product, the "Standard Markdown" project wouldn't exist.
I have used something like this for years: http://www.amazon.com/Folding-Shopping-Double-Basket-Capacit...

It doesn't let you check out from within the cart itself (is that really necessary? If that is what you need, why not just create an app like the Apple Store has?), but it does let you use the same cart both in and outside the store. I bought mine since it makes it a lot easier to walk my groceries home.
Not so ESXi? Open sourcery could help VMware win virtually
Which technology company would you prefer the U.S. government recruit from?
Looks pretty similar to MGRS (Military Grid Reference System) and/or Maidenhead Locators. Yeah, this proposal produces names which are pronounceable (in English), but that's the only advantage I see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System
Generally with language standards though, the major players involved are all part of the standardization process. A slightly different example might be Microsoft developing an incompatible version of Java and calling it Java (until they got smacked into calling it J++ instead).

Honestly, I'm of the opinion that they can call it Standard Markdown if they want to and there's nothing wrong with that. Gruber's opinion is worth something for sure because of his authorship of the original, but there's a statute of limitations. He doesn't think Markdown needs anything more than his Perl script, but the rest of the internet has disagreed pretty strongly for long enough now that it's fine to treat him as absentee.
Ask HN: Source for College Admissions Data
Thanks for reading! I am looking for a collection of college admissions data. For example, by college: SAT ranges, percent admitted, location. Does anyone know of a collected source for this information?
Why this weird API? I dunno, I would expect exactly two functions, one for sending a "file", and one for receiving whatever is new in the inbound queue, with the abstraction taking care of delivering the enqueued files to their destination!? And maybe a callback API so I don't have to poll for new inbound "files". Also, I'd expect the abstraction to provide an ordered, lossless stream, rather than some weird "file sync" which seems to lack all reordering and replay protection?
I'm not sure I see the benefit of plugin discovery or separate namespaces. Loading a plugin gives you a Plugin struct, which is a namespace to lookup symbols (functions + globals) from that plugin.

Most plugins would I think by necessity be application specific, so I'm not sure how much gain there in in some sort of plugin discovery. But the process of loading a plugin would also allow the plugin to call into your code to register handlers & data structures in the main application through init() functions.

From a security perspective, executing arbitrary code in your address space in order to discover the contents of a plugin sounds ill-advised.

To me, it looks like they're building the low level building blocks that allow a number of different higher level APIs to be built, which is pretty neat.
The Classical Cloud
Scribble and the Failings of Tech Journalism
Can you really validate a product without taking risk? By the time you think through, develop, pitch and launch an MVP, much of the hard work is done.
I'm really happy this position was given to a women.

Can we please not use a term like "Chick" to refer to a person who holds a position in the white house?
Interesting to see WordPress (the software) to evolve better in a new world of competitors like medium, svtble, vix, squarespaces, tumblr etc.

The fine balance between the hosted (Wordpress the SAAS) wordpress.com and the open source version running in thousands of hosting providers still works with no big problems.
"Validation is often oversimplified."

100% agree. It's very difficult to get "honest" feedback without getting a product in the hands of users.
A downvote is a tool to provide community management of the signal-to-noise ratio on HN. Encouraging noise to trigger more noise would not be an effective means of serving that purpose.
This is a clever idea, but I don't think it will fly; at least not in most places.

Human phonemes exist in a continuous N-dimensional space. There are two problems to defining a universal phonetic set:
1) different populations use different areas of the space. For example, some cultures use hardly any vowels, some hardly any consonants.
2) different populations quantize the space at different boundaries. So even two cultures who both have 5 vowels may find that what is unambiguously 'e' in one culture is 'a' or 'e' in another.
And those are just the major problems.
The usual solution is to have a set of glyphs that the are labeled in a locally distinguishable way. We have those - digits.
they still ban alcohol for Muslims (but allow it for tourists, because money)

I don't see what's wrong with this one. If Muslims don't drink alcohol, yet don't try to stop other people from drinking it- well, that's how it should be IMO.
It's still within reach, sure. But it's pretty much an entire person's lifetime. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average lifespan is currently hovering around 70, no? That's pretty much how old some of the newer images are in this catalog.
Wow - perfect timing. My copy of Clojure Programming should be delivered tomorrow, and this looks like a nice way to complement my learning. Plus, I love Tetris :)
I'm referring to the LogMeIn Ignition drama, the mobile app, not their free subscription.

LogMeIn had a $29 or $39 (I forget) application called LogMeIn Ignition that was sold as a method to connect to your computers. The expectation, rightfully so, was that this extremely expensive (for a mobile app) app was all the user needed to access X amount of computers using LogMeIn Free. There was never, back then, any mention that you needed to ALSO pay a subscription fee to access devices.

Then out of the blue the users were told that they had to pay for a LogMeIn subscription to access their computers.

That is scummy as hell and plenty of corporate customers (myself included) have migrated away from them and now use paid services at TeamViewer, etc.

Some users, like myself, bought LogMeIn Ignition for emergencies. I don't think I ever even used it. I bought it specifically to remote in to my mediaPC and my desktop at home in the event I needed to retrieve a file or fix my Plex server.

I'm totally on their side about making MSPs and IT consultants who used it as a jumping point to their clients computers pay. They should have done that a long time ago - the difference is they didn't pay for an app at all. I paid more than I've paid for any mobile app for Ignition.
Just to give some idea of the scale of things we're talking about, there's a Federal CIO council[1], with scores of memebers. The Feds have tons of agencies spending hundreds of billions on IT. Most all of these agencies were created by Congress, not the president, and although they report up the executive branch, they're also accountable to various and sundry legislative committees. Many times the decisions around tech and contracting have been legislated in some fashion. They just aren't made off-the-cuff.

The CTO is truly a stupendous job, even for someone working at Google scale. I would be very surprised if this turned into an operational role. I imagine it would be advisory and policy-based only. There's simply too much to get your head around and not a lot of levers to pull to make things happen like it does in the commercial world.

Still, I am very optimistic that there is much goodness to be done here. It's just not a CTO job in the way most of us would understand.

[1] https://cio.gov/
I find walking incredibly useful when programming - for those moment where a bit of lateral thinking is required, to think outside the box a little box, or step out of the function and look at things anew.

As the article states, it's not very good at helping you solve a particular logic problem though.
I'd be surprised if a login feature was in her spec, to start with.
I've found that this kind is very common; a company will build a good reputation on high-quality products and then slowly lower the quality to make more profit.

It's a bad deal for consumers.
Starting a new project with Django 1.7 and Python 3 :D
Personally, I don't work in the REPL much, but write the analysis in a script file, so that it can be re-run if something changes upstream.
Been reading BusinessWeek? http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-03/college-cons...
Check IPEDS. You can also license or buy this type of data from private companies. The publishers / entities that release school rankings are who you would license it from.
It would be much easier to do shared wifi if we weren't trapped on a fraction of the potential wireless bandwidth that is not owned by some big business. Our communication demands are only excelling as time goes on and most metropolitan areas have intense spectrum clutter while we still have the current infrastructure. Imagine trying to route most of the Internet around wirelessly on just the 2.4 and 5ghz bands.
http://spotting.meteor.com/ by design will be more up to date.
Yelp can manipulate ratings, court rules
Geospatial Search Engine for Library of Congress
Library of Congress has a solicitation request out for a geospatial search engine that will crawl books, images, etc and extract geographic info even if it is not apparent. This appears to be setup for Google and is the link between their search engine, Google Books, and Google Maps. ESRI (ArcGIS) would love to have the contract, but it looks like Google is better positioned. Original solicitation is here: http://1.usa.gov/1qgXdAW
> I don't know why we haven't built bathrooms that can be sealed, towels/art put in a cupboard, and then a button pushed to pressure spray the interior and blow dry it.

I recall that Buckminster Fuller tried to build that sort of bathroom: the idea was that it'd be basically a one-piece metal thing with no seams or cracks for mold/dirt and all rounded corners, so one could just spray it down. I guess it didn't work for the same reason a lot of his ideas never got picked up.
WINBOT http://www.amazon.com/WINBOT-W730-Cleaning-Frameless-Windows...
You're a fire hazard. Do your thinking inside your box.

Edited to add: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-09-09/
That's not been my experience with downvotes here so far. I've regularly had meaningful comments, that would have been seen as "conversation" in a normal context, get downvoted here. Now I don't know what "noise" that got rid of, but it sure did serve a pretty powerful way of signaling others to jump on board with the downvotes and/or ignore my comment.
Should be fixed. My current setup doesn't really support the load of HN + ProductHunt
I too have used that, but it's clunky & unwieldy. Need something more senior-friendly, better ergonomics e.g. something that folds up into your car trunk like a stretcher for ambulances. Make it fashionable to bring your cart to store.
Honest question: why should I care about your moral problem?
Awesome job Nick! I've been meaning to get into Meteor.
6 digits are less secure than 100 characters because when asked to generate a 6 digit password, many many people will pick their birthdate, wedding anniversary, or childrens' birthdate.

With an alphanumeric password, many people will still pick a variation of "password12345" or "letmein!!", but at least then their banking password is not literally posted on their public Facebook page. :)
I didn't realize mowing robots had become so practical! Have you considered doing a writeup? Laying out a map of the garden, photos of how rough the terrain is, some video of the robot doing its work, maybe a full layout of all costs vs the time & cost of a regular lawnmower etc? I'd definitely upvote a submission of that.
note: You could do this entirely "live", and use JS to pull the data live in the page; but I already had the YAML all working from before the GSheet existed, so I chose tojust dump it into the files!
OpenStreetMap Tags for New Dads
Well most of the computing power is in the GPU, so for some sort of specific application you could take advantage of them, but for this sort of thing, yeah, it's not a great fit. I'm not sure about laptops. You could probably do it, but there was an article on here a while ago about using chromebooks for ARM native compilation, and the result was that the machines weren't quite up to it. The load would kill the machines and cause their batteries to swell up alarmingly. I'm not sure if a macbook would fare better.
Setting up Munin on multiple nodes on EC2
It seems that this school is still being built. I wonder if they will have finished construction and if the workers are getting paid.

Despite of all the efforts from Supreme Education Council and our school administration we haven't been able to prepare our school to the point where I would feel comfortable as a principal to invite your children to begin their school year on Sun 7.9.2014. The safety of children in our school is of paramount importance and unfortunately we are not able guarantee that because of ongoing construction work and missing ministry level documentation for school insurance. We will postpone the beginning of school till Tue 9.9.2014. Our staff is still available for you at school and you are more than welcome to meet them. Looking forward to starting a safe school year with you. I am truly sorry for this inconvenience.

Mr Juha Repo, Principal, Qatar-Finland International School

http://qatarfinlandschool.com/
The money transfer between customers' accounts consists of two steps: The communication of the transaction records (who to debit or credit and what to print on their statement) and the settlement of the resulting total money transfer between the banks. The latter is what usually happens through the central bank, where both banks have accounts that are used to settle the total of all money movements between the two banks within a given period, in a single transaction between the two accounts. The transmission of the transaction records is independent from that and can happen in any way the banks see fit, including SWIFT (and sometimes the central bank, if it offers that service).
meow-meow?
Sounds like geohashing
Why on earth does the school have to start at 7.30 in the morning, especially if they aren't intended to have organised activities all afternoon?
Don't like this one. mapcode.com ftw.