skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's not so much a great programmer as a productive one (not that those are concepts that can't coexist, he just isn't both).

He's very good at taking an idea and making it work, then building new stuff on that, but less so at actually making things robust in an architectural sense. Moving on to the next thing that interests him also doesn't help that.

A lot of the biggest hiccups in Minecraft's stability are more-or-less directly caused by having to work around stuff that was coded in a way that made sense at the time, but gradually fitted less and less well to the game as it now stood.

I'd say at this point a lot of Notch's original code is outright gone, and that's a good thing. His vision is still at the core of it, and that's what he really brought to the project.
Might also recommend Functional Javascript by Michael Fogus. He uses underscore.js, and avoids re-implementing classic functional patterns (map, reduce, filter, etc).

I understood a lot of functional concepts from Lisp before reading the book. There might be something else you need first if you've had no exposure to FP, But if your basic FP-fu is good, this is a really nice book to read.
Gcloud-node – A Google Cloud Platform Client Library for Node.js
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil ;)
Europe's a big place. They're banned in Spain: http://www.thespainreport.com/4617/spain-bans-civilian-drone...

Apparently they're writing specific norms for what and how they'll be usable legally (and most likely it'll require a license), but for now, it's a full ban.
text editors is srs bsns.
HN who's hiring thread, wfh.io, angel.co
Telenor Group Brings Firefox OS Smartphones to Bangladesh
Doesn't the setup of that incentive strike you as perverse? Years of someone's life versus government operating expenses? If the goal were efficient government, there are much more straightforward ways to achieve that.

If the defendant is guilty and deserves the punishment they stand to receive at trial, then the prosecutor is doing society a disservice by letting them off easy for expedience. On the other hand, if the plea sentence is adequate punishment/rehabilitation/etc, then why are they being threatened with a much larger sentence?

It seems to me that the feedback loop on sentences operates on the time specific criminals spend in jail being deemed too short during campaign season. As such, the plea sentence (ie "worst case") reflects what society deems appropriate (modulo the problems with democracy). Everything above the offered plea really is just an added threat to encourage a defendant to forgo the trial and submit to the judgment of the prosecutor.

If the case is really so open-and-shut, then it should not take terribly long for a proper court to see so as well.
Thanks for your feedback. To be honest, I wasn't here when you gave your advice, but it was clearly well founded :)

We haven't run any issues with using EventMachine yet, but will consider other alternatives here if the need arises.
ScholarsAd: Student to Student Marketplace
That is exactly what they are doing. It is infuriating to watch our potential US drone industry developing in Canada, Australia, Japan, etc., but not here.
Stunts?! Every now and again I try to figure out the name of that game. So many late nights making tracks.
I find it interesting that they list ad blockers under "largely unused, resource hogging" features. I'm pretty sure that preventing countless JavaScript files, images and (admittedly very rare) flash files from loading and bogging down the rendering engine improves browser performance?

Other than that I really like the idea of this browser, and it looks decent to boot! I'll definitely have to check it out when I get home.
How to Hire for Cultural Fit
Dogs have specifically been breeding to perform these tasks, while dolphins just can do it "out of the box". Also i suspect killer whales would out do dolphins in many tasks, especially those requiring social intelligence and language. Maybe elephants wouldn't do much worse either, but they were probably too difficult to study because of their size.
This is awesome! Commander Keen was my very first PC game on my very first PC (a 386DX with 2MB ram and a 80MB hard drive).

And it was a great game!
You can't do diddly with an off the shelf install. They get you on the Implementation Ninjas and Support.
> it's not an example of someone using the term "verbal contract" to mean "written contract".

A verbal contract is simply a contract that uses words.

How is that not an example of a use of "verbal contract" to mean a category which includes both written and oral contracts?
The only thing that title makes me think of is Ms. Splosion Man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms._Splosion_Man
Bitcoin to be used to facilitate money transfer to Africa(Ghana)
Show HN: Minecraft map of Alcatraz in WebGL
I never understood why the politically correct crowd happily accepts that athletic ability is heritable, yet when it comes to intelligence suddenly all bets are off.

As soon as we accept reality for what it is, we can begin adapting our societies and policies to maximize opportunities for individuals with the knowledge that our talents and limitations vary quite drastically.
Dating my own UNIX use to about the time of the Morris Worm (which exploited a Sendmail vulnerability), this is somewhat poignant.

Though I haven't touched a Sendmail.cf in well over a decade.
Because its a press release and Boeing is a partner.

They didn't mention the Atlas V is built using RD-180[1] (aka Russian engines) even though much of the discussion is about not begin dependent on the Russians for access to space. Or that the expected cost per launch is not cost competitive. But the good news is that doesn't matter, what matters is how well both companies execute against the objective of a reliable manned launch capability.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
I wondered that too. She's written 8 articles for Bloomberg and 7 of them are about Boeing - all in a positive light. Imagine she has the ear of Boeing PR.

http://www.businessweek.com/authors/2763-julie-johnsson
> Any more details on why SNC got passed up?

Because they had enough money for one or two, but not all three. And they want two so that they can spread the risk.

SpaceX are almost finished and are so far ahead in development that it would be an outrage for them not to get part of the contract.

And Boeing because there would have been a lot of political backlash if they didn't get the nod, due to their political influence.

Although this may not be the official reason, I am pretty sure that this is the real reason.
For folks who've never seen one of these.

132-33 - Price for a Palantir server, priced per core. $141k per core. Includes 1 year of "maintenance" (support and software upgrades).

132-34 - This is the maintenance for second year on. $28k per core.

How many users can a core support? I dunno. But let's say you can serve 50 people off of a 4-core system (you can redo the math for the number of users).

You initial purchase is $564k. Or about $11k per user.

Each year after that, if you want software updates, it'll cost you $113k or or about $2.2k per year per user.

So let's say you use the system for 3 years. That's over $15k of software per user over that time.

Plus there's training ~$2k per user. Or another $100k in training costs.

And then who knows how many hours of engineering and "ninja" services. But a CONUS (within the U.S.) FSR is billed at about $300k per year for a full-time person on staff. Let's say you need two of them to support those 50 users.

Added up for 3 years of Palantir: $1.5million

I'll let you decide if that's good value, but that works out to around $30k per user partial TCO (not including power, security, networking, local IT staff support, etc.).
Problem for octopi are that they are not social animals, so their intelligence consists mostly from problem solving.
From what I've observed, quite a few people on HN have read "On Intelligence" and are receptive to these type of posts.

I'm guessing this is the same Scott that gave the presentation at OsCon? I wasn't physically there, but watched it online. It was one of my early exposures to NuPic, CLA, HTM, Jeff Hawkins, etc. Thanks for that.

Have you had a chance to play around with NuStudio (by David Ragazzi)? I don't think I've seen you comment on it via the mailing list.
On your marks.
Get set.
Compile to JS using LLVM in 3...2...
https://github.com/keendreams/keen/blob/master/id_us_a.asm#L...

> baseRndArray	dw	1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,54,75,129,204

Hah he got the Fibonacci series wrong (it's supposed to be ...13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, unless he did this on purpose).
Nothing useful for me. Way off.
Same here! No idea what the PC specs were (someone built it for me) but I'll never forget booting up, seeing DOS, and typing keen.exe to begin hours of fun.
GPU Raytracer in HTML5+WebGL
Did anybody manage to build it?
'Windows 9' LEAK: Microsoft's playing catchup with Linux
I am working on it, got quite a lot of plans but there is also quite a bit of general usability work to do... will announce some stuff in a bit...
Docker, Inc employees have popped in to make an offhand comment at various points, similar to the one you made "On the other, providing strict guarantees about context ensures true portability of Dockerfiles." but actual participation is nonexistent.

This has been the case on other issues I have seen as well, either things languish, or they get magically swept into the project, with the decision happening elsewhere.

Stewardship would mean actually explaining the position above, and discussing with the community how the issue affects them in order to gain an understanding of what we are talking about.

Yelling "repeatability" with no context and then disappearing is pretty frustrating.
> Which is why Golang has exploded recently: it gives you static typing security of Java with a coding workflow of an interpreted language.

Sure, it has similar static typing to Java, but it also has the same coding workflow as any other compiled environment, not the workflow of an interpreted environment.
Progressive JPG Checker
This is really handy. If the creator is on here: would it be possible to add more filters to the search? For example looking for models with (or without) bones, animations, textures, etc. defined?
I recently came across a language called Factor that works very similar, if not identical, to this.

Here's a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0QlhYlS8g
Start Integrating Static is never good,
>Thats not true of course, its LGPL licensed and so can be used for commercial software as long as the license obligations are adherred to.

What are those obligations? Can you summarize or give a link? Thanks.
GPU Fluid Experiments in html5
The idea that "they deserve whatever they can get" is one of the criticisms of modern UK/US culture made by Michael Young who actually coined the term in his satirical book The Rise of the Meritocracy:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

[Edit: I don't know about the US but here in the UK it is fairly common to define "merit" in ways that don't actually seem to include "performance" - though I think this is a far bigger problem in the public sector than the private].
I think they get you on the off the shelf price too..

$150k/core...say you run it on a cluster of relatively puny machines ...($150k * 4 cores) on a 4 node cluster is already above $2m.
I listened to the post-briefing audio feed where reporters called in and asked additional questions.

A very common question people have is about why the money is broken up between Boeing and SpaceX as it is. Why does SpaceX get a smaller amount?

The awards were based specifically on the estimates that each company submitted in their proposals. In other words, Boeing said they need $4.2 billion and SpaceX said they need $2.6 billion.

This is very telling because the proposals are for the same NASA requirements. SpaceX is saying they can do it 1.65 times cheaper than Boeing.

NASA is not currently commenting on their decision process for choosing to award these two companies.

My personal supposition is that its a best-of strategy. NASA has a high priority to get human launch capability back under our control. They also have competing requirements. Do it as inexpensively as possible. Use multiple partners to fulfill the commercial spaceflight mission. They also need the assurance that the companies they work with can actually complete the contracts.

Boeing is an old dog and partner to NASA. They have decades of experience behind them. SpaceX is relatively new and while increasingly successful with delivering launch vehicles, they've not yet built human launch craft. It makes sense, when you think of it as a way of hedging NASA's bets, to choose these two companies even though their award amounts are vastly different.
Frofront-end coding started to be pleasant thanks to SPA
good point! it was very gratifying indeed to see minecraft explode purely via organic growth.
Not More Important, More Urgent
I don't know if there is any truth to this, but I have heard that octopus have a "different" sort of intelligence than we are used to. It's more innate to them, so they are capable of learning much less but they have some very advanced "pre-baked" capabilities.
That site looks really nice! I signed up.

One thing, how do you get testimonials when you haven't launched...?
As a result, quasicrystal coatings have found their way into nonstick cookware.

I remember reading about these pans back a decade or so (Sitram Cybernox). At the time I tried to find a place where I could actually test one out (they got mixed reviews), but wasn't able to, and eventually just got good at cooking on stainless & cast iron. It looks like their site is still up but I recall seeing something a couple years ago about the pans in question being discontinued or unavailable.
Nested virtualization
This would be relatively difficult for Manhattan, some parts of the outer boroughs though are a different matter.

I was concerned when this first hit HN because I have a friend that lives in a fairly sparsely part of town and his (now ex) girl friend has a possessive ex-husband that doesn't like her seeing other men. He isn't going to be able to make sense of the data himself, but if someone weaponizes it the way you are talking about it could be a real problem for people with stalkers/psycho-exes.
I thought that was a very well written article, with code examples and results. It was describing an interesting approach to a classification problem in a way that you could follow and reproduce.
with 90 days warranty :) Can it rot?

Anyway, from their Gotham page https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/

"Working closely with the customer, our engineers integrate and map all of the relevant source data—regardless of type or volume—into a single, coherent model.

...

Once the model has been created, data flows continuously from its sources into the Palantir Gotham platform.

...

They can search across all of their data sources at once, visualize relationships, explore divergent hypotheses, discover unknown connections,
"

Pretty much my 2009 pitch, and in the hindsight i see that my main weakness was that i couldn't even imagine $150K/core. Man, it is imagination what separates losers from winners! :)
>It is the blind spot of the Web/Silicon Valley/Startup world that not all programming is web programming. ... there is a stupendous number of developers working on good old-fashioned desktop applications and embedded software.

I've always thought that myself. It would be interesting if there were some statistics on that.
A lot of the "mutual friends" numbers are incorrect for my friends. Maybe a permissions thing?
Neato. How about an option for global pitch, local roll on the objects? I can't stand the way it's implemented now.
And if a society values intelligence, they should encourage smarter people to reproduce and offer as much birth control as possible to less smart people. Following this line of reasoning and policy is sure to ignite all kinds of flame wars ;-)
Get off the internet and talk to an attorney.
Mathematica Online
Same for me. My PC was a 8086 running at 4.77Mhz, with 640Kb memory, 20Mb HDD and EGA graphics. Surprisely Keen Dreams ran perfectly well on that very slow hardware...a testament to the software engineering back then.
That's a point I've always wondered about.
Given that most (all?) md5 collisions consist of appending or prepending data, how much more difficult would it be if you encode the size as well.

Surely the difficulty is much more. And then add the fact that it has to be semantically/syntactically similar enough to fool whatever ingests it...
Indeed, the Dragon seems pretty close to ready to transport people:

"Technically, if somebody were to stow aboard the cargo version of Dragon, they'd actually be fine. I mean, hopefully." -Elon Musk
Where did you get that this was a press release?

FTA:
"To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Johnsson in Chicago at jjohnsson@bloomberg.net"
> Imagine she has the ear of Boeing PR.

Seems more like vice versa.
> the politically correct crowd happily accepts ...

I don't think I've heard anyone serious say that there was no heredity of intelligence. Could you be more specific about who says what? Perhaps you are writing quickly, but these are imaginary statements from imaginary people.
I guess the fear is that seemingly harmless feedback could be twisted by an unscrupulous candidate (or his/her lawyer). For example, "we need someone with .NET experience" in an extreme interpretation could mean "we want people who can afford Microsoft licenses, not poor programmers who can only afford free software", and now you're looking at discrimination based on economic background. That is obviously an absurd example, but it is better to say nothing at all to the candidate than to have to waste time and money in court or on a settlement.
I suddenly had a flashback to selecting soundblaster as my audio device..
Great. 1 step forward and 2 steps back.

Loser: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/05/16/nasa-dream-chaser...

Winner: http://ronvanderende.nl/?p=513

Oops I'm sorry I meant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CST-100#mediaviewer/File:CST-1...
Curious why someone who still uses CVS in 2014 would cheer about dropping sendmail support.
Are there instructions for compiling this somewhere? I don't see a makefile or configure.
Would someone decode what Nature means by "open" and "expert review"? What is "open" about it? Is this settled science, one person's hypothesis, or something in between?
For those that don't know, Kyle was responsible for helping to resurrect bitcoinjs-lib (https://github.com/orgs/bitcoinjs/people) and developing one of the first self-hosted Bitcoin (HTML) wallets - Coinpunk (https://github.com/kyledrake/coinpunk), so he's clearly a talented developer.
Selling the Soul of Star Wars
Good catch. She's in Chicago too, which is where Boeing is headquartered.
It's not a cost-plus contract.
WL is similar to Python: it is predominantly an interpreted language. Where that becomes a problem, we wrap other libraries, or move small chunks of code into a VM to avoid the cost of the evaluator, or to C and then compile that (a rather roundabout way of doing things that will improve when we move to LLVM).

But as I said before, CPython is a close analogy for where we are at. What we don't have yet is the equivalent of PyPy. Still, if you were to make this kind of dismissive critique against the maintainers of CPython, I think most people would find it kind of silly.

Also, one should note that this documentation was written during an era when perhaps most of Mathematica's user base were people doing math, for which the primary use for compilation was things like plotting, numeric solving, and so on. The language of the tutorial reflects that heritage. At this point we should probably rewrite it.
Ask HN: “Entrepreneur”, feeling like a solution in search of a problem
I'm a software engineer by trade, having spent the last several years studying the craft and making a decent living by consulting, generally for small to medium-sized companies. My ultimate goal is to launch and grow my own B2B SaaS company, but I seem to have a case of writers block.

I constantly hear and strongly believe in "scratching your own itch" and organically developing a solution to a real problem. However it seems in every direction I turn there are 20 products and 10 startups in a particular niche (project management webapp anyone?). And for all of these I'm failing to see the opportunity for 10x improvement to make it worth competing in.

I can hardly even see a burning pain point in my own consulting/hacking experience. I use plenty of various products which I'm generally pretty content with.

This is a really disparaging position - I feel like a solution in search of a problem. Perhaps being a developer is skewing my perspective? Am I searching in a saturated market? Am I not an entrepreneur after all? Any advice is greatly appreciated.
All right in line with just about any sort of "Enterprise" software. Training and implementation services are downright cheap. Maintenance is the standard 20%.

The last big vendor PO I had to look at put every professional services line item at $300-360/hr with $320 being about average.
> What am I missing?

Boeing's advantage in years of experience extracting the most possible money from the government?
I have been using Factor for some time. It has some drawbacks related to readability, but it is a real-time saver.
What not to write on Landing Page
There's a class called E245 that's only for graduate students, no undergrads
Yes, rss2email.
RINGR
And it sure did ignite flame wars and the topic is not openly pursued anymore in scientific circles, regardless of how objective it might be.

Luckily we don't have to go there. Technology is going to be the great equalizer, and might end up offering you off-the-shelf intelligence upgrade (I'm talking about a time-frame of next 30-80 years).
The Rise of Open Source Hardware
Windows has had multiple desktops since before XP. You just had to download a PowerToy to do it, here's the latest version (XP+, sorry):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881.asp...

It is SO popular nobody knows or cares. There are also tons of third party "desktop managers" both open source and paid for Windows, again -- nobody cares.
Take a look at the insides. The CST-100 is extremely cramped for the astronauts. The Dragon 2 looks like luxury in comparison. If there are astronauts that get to ride in both modules, I'm pretty sure they are going to be pro Space-X far and above (assuming both perform normally).