skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not all dashboards are shitty or useless.

New Relic comes to mind, and it's a tool I've found hugely useful.

While it doesn't instrument full system monitoring (though it's getting there), it provides numerous system and site metrics, monitoring, and a useful degree of logging, that's hugely useful.

One of the biggest gains for us came when it implemented JVM heap monitoring. This is possible through jconsole, but jconsole is a steaming heap which if it were actually made of sht would be useful as it might provide fertilizer. It's a Java app itself, has no persistence, must be running to tell you what you need to know, presents its own security vulnerabilities (if you can attach jconsole to your JVMs other JDK hacks can as well), and more. Given the critical nature of heap and GC operations to site performance, having the insight through NR, and not having to rely on desktop jconsole sessions (for each member of the admin team individually, oh yeah, forgot that one) was a huge boost.

And the NR team both understands the tech they're monitoring and works with clients. So many of the stats provided are* actionable.
Go doesn't let you build abstractions - it offers what it does, and if its not enough - tough luck.

What I dislike worst is the denial of the Go community and creators, claiming that generics are too complex and that you don't really need them.

I dismissed Go not because of its lack of abstraction power, but because its authors and community is incapable of admitting problems when they see them. A similar problem with CoffeeScript (conflation of declaration and assignment + scope rules) and the authors' refusal to admit that there is a problem also made me dismiss it entirely.

Every language/platform has problems. But not every language is in denial of them. We should all avoid those that refuse to acknowledge their problems - because that points to a much deeper, much more serious problem - a problem that cannot be eradicated with technical means.
Requires Flash to watch :\
This would be more helpful is it was indexed to inflation, the numbers are quite misleading otherwise.
Styling with Sass
"I want all this <-done synchronizations and select sacramentals to be entire hidden"

Then perhaps Go is not the language for you. There are a lot of design decisions in Go that seem arbitrarily restrictive at first but are there, AFAICT, to (as much as is reasonable) force programmers to write code where what is happening is explicit and obvious without having to dive down into layers and layers of abstraction to find "the magic".

This is, IMO, a feature and not a bug, but YMMV.
> Does it have AC, airbags, comfortable seats, audio system, power windows, ABS, etc?

How do any of those things affect aerodynamics? Maybe power windows require a slightly different window design...but even that seems unlikely.
There wasn't any personal attacks or character assassination, he or she was just stating what his or her interpretation of their reactions was.

I actually thought the same. I kept thinking the whole point of the clip would be that they would see their own names and how they had been recruited. I, too, thought 'tasked' meant bribed/coerced.

... that's not character assassination, that's just like my opinion, man.
I'm not sure if I follow. I'm currently only looking at the value for content attribute for a value. Are you saying that specifically 'nam=...' should work or it should respect any attribute name?
There are heuristics in the piece which are useful.

The most critical piece though is: is the data being presented actionable?

Can I do something with it, do I need to do something with it, does it tell me when I need to do something?

Think of the most common dashboard: a car.

It tells you how fast you're going (speedometer), how much fuel you've got, how far you've gone (trip/odometer). Indicators for services or features enabled (lights, hi-beams, turn indicators, hazards). Problems (engine temp, problem lights). Maybe a tach. Automatic transmission indicator, if applicable.

Other chrome is possible: outside temps, compass, and comfort/environment controls (heat/AC, sound system).

But essentially it's a few crucial indicators which either give you current status or tell you there's a problem.

It's not a bad model to start with.
Ask HN: What is the best channel to reach developers, as a audience?
Guys, we are building an online service for coders to prove their coding skills, share knowledge with other developers and learn new coding skills/methodologies and it's called Skilleo (http://skilleo.me).

Now, our biggest challenge, like the rest of SaaS or mobile apps is getting user growth/traction.

Right now we are focused on the user acquisition.

So, in your opinion as a techy guy/developer/coding aficionado, what do you believe is the best channel to reach you and how the approach should be made? (no, not the 90's way of the "Try Now!" approach...)

Thanks and cheers
Joao
There seems to be an attitude throughout the article of "users are too stupid to understand dashboards", and maybe this is true to some extent, but that's really not a good reason to dumb-down interfaces (which seems to be what it's calling for.) E.g.

You have no idea what your users will decide based on the data you are showing them. But you somehow assume your users will know.

My eternal gratitude to anyone who can tell me what to do with session duration at the hourly level. “People at 4:53AM on Monday stayed longer on the site than at 11:36AM”? So what?

Just because you don't know what to do with the data doesn't mean the same applies to everyone else...
Can be done with H264: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316396
I am still waiting for a customer to tell me they don't like my application because it uses a common UI framework. Not holding my breath. Tech people care about this, but only barely and only very few.

A fresh and engaging UI with groundbreaking ideas and techniques could possibly win you lots of fans but for the vast majority of applications (especially lob or ent) this does not make sense.
OP says he goes to U Winnipeg, which isn't in the US.

OP, you probably see Klinic every day on your way to school. They have trained counselors 24/7 at:

Manitoba Suicide Line
1-877-435-7170 toll free 24 hours

http://www.reasontolive.ca/about-us
I think the author could use a technique like this to build the higher level abstractions they want: http://commandcenter.blogspot.nl/2014/01/self-referential-fu...
What exactly do you mean by "magic"? Most of the time when I hear people talk about "magic" they usually mean a theory or abstraction that they don't understand or don't want to understand. Are generics magical in your opinion?
People don't need to be experts to recognize flaws in tools aimed at consumers.
Desire: Connecting with what customers want
Imagine how much information they could get on these engineers, who, as foreign nationals, are free game to warrantless surveillance. Facebook photos, emails, Android phone location history, MasterCard records. It would be easy to find something incriminating such as "You were at a hotel room for 4 hours in the middle of the day, how about you help us or we'll tell your wife?" or "You've got $25,000 in credit card debt and we can make that disappear if you change a few config files."

This isn't crazy movie stuff, this is exactly how people are recruited.
Usually I agree with Eliezer, but this is one of the cases where I don't. Randomness is a useful tool that you can use to make algorithms more efficient and harder to exploit. In fact, there are several examples in the wikipedia article [1].

A more practical example: suppose you are writing a poker bot. It looks at the game state, and outputs a single move to make. After you complete the bot you will publish it, and an opponent will analyze the source code and make a counter-bot to play against yours. Access to randomness is clearly a huge advantage here! Without it, your bluffs are less effective.

That being said, I do agree with the general sentiment that in most cases randomness is a quick simple hack that can be improved upon.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_algorithm#Where_rand...
No you're not. I don't get it either.
Not just his, but the names of all the company's engineers are on the slides and marked as targeted persons.
Skycure releases mobile security global threat map
I went to a security conference about a year ago, and not being a security guy, I was surprised to see about half the people using Windows.

This being said, I am a little sad to see the prevalence of OSX-based laptops in 'hacker spaces', partly because I don't like Apple's practices, but mostly because diversity is one of the things that makes a hacker to me; the ability to make anything turn tricks. To see a monoculture starting to emerge is a little sad.
I live in San Diego and this has been big local news for about a week.

Obviously this is insane, not only because the militarization of domestic police is a serious issue and their justification for getting one of these is obviously a completely impractical use, but mainly because the reason the military is dumping these things in the first place is because they cost too much for them to maintain

TOO MUCH FOR THE MILITARY (budget: nearly 1 trillion) TO MAINTAIN!

Also... what's next, police getting all the Abrams tanks that the Army no longer wants but which keep getting built due to pork-barreling Congresspeople?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-th...
Financial support and the violation of territorial integrity are two very different things. As far as I can tell the financial support did not even come from other governments but NGOs and the like. It is also wrong to call it a minority, according to the numbers I have read it was more like 40% against the government and pro association agreement with the European Union, 40 % the other way around and the rest undecided with support for the movement dropping when things became violent.

And toppling a democratically elected government by its own people is completely okay when the government does no longer follow the will of the people. Admittedly it is not that straight forward in the case of the Ukraine with the opinion split almost fifty-fifty but at least it seems to be absolutely reasonable to me to demand reelections.

Your second point seems to assume that I am a US citizen and me being hypocrite. I am not a US citizen and I fully acknowledge that the USA has done worse things in the last decades. But that does not even matter at all - the misbehavior of other nations is no justification for the behavior of Russia.
I second drinchev's comment. You have no way of knowing what all potential contexts people are going to want to use buttons for. Applying styling to the bare element means frequently resetting those styles. It's always better to extend than to reset. I use button elements for any control that is handled via JavaScript. Only a minority of buttons I use are actually for form submission.
For flies it is, but that doesn't generalize to other species. It's an incredibly stupid adage.
Here's an article about Polyus from Smithsonian Air & Space:

http://www.airspacemag.com/space/soviet-star-wars-8758185/
At the end of the article he notes that algorithms designed to work against an intelligent adversary are a specific exception.
It can also come on for no apparent reason. Mine is on right now. Gas cap is tight, car is running fine. Starts right up, runs smooth, power is good, fuel economy normal. So I'm not going to take it into the shop.

In this day and age we can have something more informative than a check engine light. Tell me what's wrong, or at least have a "verbose" option I can enable that will let me see WTF it thinks the problem is.

I think the check engine light is a giant scam to get people to take their car in for service when there is nothing wrong with it.
Its extremely rare and costly to produce enough power yourself to go off-grid.

If so, then the law seems unnecessary. If not, the law seems harmful.

Why should the individuals who do not need utilities be obligated to purchase them?
There is a third kind who still have Facebook accounts, but those are just the nature's way of saying that Darwin got it right.

That's a non sequitur.

Having a facebook account or not
is an almost negligible factor in
the grand scheme of things.

The kind of information commonly
exposed on facebook can be more
conclusively inferred from
other information sources.

Do you use a smartphone? Skype?
Any search engine?

Does your home internet come out of a plastic router? Do you click on the little lock icon every time you go to a SSL site, to verify the certificate hasn't changed? Do you know the fingerprint of the legitimate facebook SSL certificate?

Think about what any one of the above
devices "knows" about you in comparison
to what facebook knows about you.
I actually agree, none of my code has #IFDEF, except at the top of the C file that decides if that C file will be built or not. (This simplifies having different C files per platform in the build system, adding new projects in our system is complicated enough as is! Right now it just builds .c, .cpp in every directory)
I can understand what most of the code does and I am really an amateur. So I think it is more along the lines of "fairly straightforward code but not built for easy extension and lacking proper layout/architecture then a few days is enough."

Thanks for the input! I appreciate it.
Emacs Tip: Remap Return to Control in OS X
Practical Kleptography [video]
As stated in the article, the point is to give an intuition for how energy appears to "move" from troughs to peaks: by going everywhere.

This coincides with the Pilot Wave model, where particles travel along paths modeled by the peaks of mathematical waves.
Show HN: Brocast, chrome extension for live streaming your desktop
http://xkcd.com/1319/

Or maybe http://xkcd.com/1205/
Check out the new traction book by Gabe Weinberg et al. Tl;dr: run lots of little cheap experiments and see what works. They also run through the 19-odd ways startups generate awareness.
Could not agree you more.
OP (and also Richard Feybnan) believes that QM provides a more intuitive explanation for the elusive "why" waves (interference) exist. Commenters here don't like that.
Running a Digital Development Agency- the Pros and Cons of Fixed-Price Projects
From what I've seen is that th Go team has no desire to change the core language syntax at this time. They are spending most of their time on toolchain and runtime improvements.

Go does have generics for map but you can't create your own. I think they will add user generics at some point, but it may be a long while before that happens.
I'm getting an error after running it:

[INFO] Users' LoginItems
[INFO] 's LoginItems
[INFO] /Users//Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist
[INFO] Cannot parse /Users//Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist (Binary or JSON plist may FAIL)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "osxauditor.py", line 1702, in <module>
Main()
File "osxauditor.py", line 1651, in Main
ParseStartup()
File "osxauditor.py", line 550, in ParseStartup
if "SessionItems" in LoginItemsPlist:
TypeError: argument of type 'bool' is not iterable
If the NSA is in bed with US based network gear providers

If ^^that^^ is true, then I'd argue your first sentence is not. There is simply no way to truly protect yourself if the gear manufacturers are complicit.
> That is demands often are perverted and sometimes it just comes from an exec wanting to see some "action" or gaining "visibility".

Yup. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time lost on executive or PM useless whims (and how much good could have been achieved with that time and resources).
I think Eliezer is failing to consider a very important set of problems--those for which the set of dumb things to do is small, but delimiting that set is extremely difficult. An example given in another comment is Monte Carlo integration: you know that the set of points at which the function is ill-behaved is small, and that you want to avoid these points, but it is computationally unfeasible to determine which points they are. These examples abound in mathematics, where it is often easy to show that the set of "trouble points" in some generalized sense is small, but very hard to determine where these points are.

In a more technical sense, whether randomness gives algorithms more power is still an open question in computer science (depending on interpretation, the question is either whether RP=P or whether BPP=P). The answer is widely believed to be that it does not, but this is on the basis of the hypothesized existence of strong psuedorandom algorithms rather than randomness being useless.
recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8260733

I'm a Thinkpad fan myself (T61/X230), although that comment by 'zanny isn't wrong. If you're going to go the Thinkpad route, make sure you read reviews of the screen options for the specific model you're interested in.
Important take-away I've found from building monitoring software: find a way to determine what data your users don't care about and de-emphasise or all-out hide it.
CarsGuide Maps Out Strategy to Overtake CarSales in Australia
Like some others here, I wondered if "task" could mean to recruit.

I basically agree NSA could pwn anybody they want, but there are probably other considerations such as how obvious they want to be, whether the target is valuable enough to reveal zero-days nobody else has seen yet, etc. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I'd like to believe if you don't do things like open unsolicited email attachments, you're still pretty safe.

But, perhaps as the lead engineer of an ISP "interesting" people use, nothing is off the table and he has been pwned repeatedly.
It's _QED_ (Quantum Electrodynamics), which is both a book (compiled lecture notes) and a video series. It's on YouTube. It was a non-science-major informal lecture series. Very little math.
Thanks for sharing mgirdley.

Also checking here: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237189
Show HN: Quickly tag and classify gifs for dogecoins
From the standpoint of the NSA you are the most dangerous adversary in the world. You are the only real danger to the US establishment and no effort will be spared in spying on you.

EDIT: thanks Mr krapp.
I’m guessing that’s probably happening because of the double slash after /Users.
This car would have the same problem as early Saabs that had covered front wheels: when driven in the snow, the snow thrown off of the wheels will pack in and fill the cavity around the wheels and you won't be able to turn when you need to.
I had the exact same reaction. "Neat! Wait, this sucks to an extent that I'm dubious on the actual merits of the product, and the attempt at plain-faced profundity is misplaced. Show, don't tell."

Also.. isn't it within the realm of storage/speed these days for "interactive voice agents" to use sampled audio phrases for such limited sets of vocabulary as "Turn left", "Call from", etc. This would be way sexier if it didn't have synthesized speech.
Very refreshing.
That video was so cheezy lol
There isn't any shortage now; plenty of known cheap reserves exist. New fuels in upcoming fission reactors like thorium are also very abundant.

Also, breeder reactions can extend the current supply of nuclear fuel effectively indefinitely and reduce the amount of waste to dispose of.

Meanwhile by comparison natural gas supplies are set to peak within two decades and oil production peaked in 2005. Coal won't peak for a while but the most desirable anthracite is already exhausted outside China and Vietnam. Filthy lignite production is twice as high and bitumen is ten times as high.
? What narrative? What does efficacy of a criminal have to do with it?
On the other hand, centralized circulation data is an incredibly valuable tool for determining the shape and direction for the collection. This is why some university libraries explicitly do not want you reshelving books, even correctly - they want the record that someone looked at it. The bottom x% of books by frequency of circulation can be culled to make way for new purchases.

Of course, it is not necessary that the record of usage be in any way related to the patron's identity, but a permanent record of the fact that a patron pulled the book is essential.
Not to mention that the government has trusted signing keys and can generate SSL certificates for any site, that your browser and other apps will accept. Combined with control over the Internet level 1 infrastructure makes MITM attacks trivial. Gotta love our brave new fascist state, soon to go global.
What makes things magical or not (the way I think of magical) isn't about the theory of the feature but rather how they are implemented and how much is hidden from the person using them in terms of code complexity and just overall work being done relative to what they think they did.

I'm perfectly comfortable with the "theory of generics", but when generics first came on the scene for C++ back during the time period I used to program primarily in C and C++ they were very magical. Not on the run-time side where the eventual result of any sane compiler is easy to understand, but magical on the compile-time side where when using them it was nearly impossible to determine how much time they would add to the overall compilation and how complex and unreadable the error messages would be if you had a problem. When you make a single simple syntax error and the compiler presents you with an error that is 2 pages long that is the result of an implementation that is, IMO, very "magical".
Show HN: Automatic Ghost Blog Hosting
Adversary. I think the word you wanted is adversary.
Lack of generics != lack of abstractions.

The Go community freely acknowledges that generics are a nice feature, and that lacking them is a pain point of Go sometimes. Although many Go developers will tell you that sometimes turns out to be not that often in reality, which has also been my experience.

Rob Pike has outlined the tradeoffs inherent with generics here: http://research.swtch.com/2009/12/generic-dilemma.html

The bottom line is it's not a feature that comes for free, and if most of the time you don't really need it, maybe the costs aren't worth it. That's a bold statement for a programming language these days, since generics is a central feature of every popular, modern, statically typed language. Whether they are right or wrong I won't attempt to say. The language may well get generics one day, but it's early days still and the team is rightly focusing on more important features for the moment.
Go doesn't prevent "magic", it just makes you hide the magic in ugly places.

Can't have a flexible iterator system because it might introduce complexity? Better just hide complexity in a next() function.

Can't have generics (except for the google-approved map, slice, chan...) because it might introduce complexity? Better just shift that complexity to unsafe use of interface{}.
Yeah, I'd bet in a few years the breaks in her car will malfunction or she'll get the wrong drug or murdered some other way.
> compile my own UI components [...] when you use the whole of Bootstrap (or just about any other framework) you just can't differentiate yourself.

If a person isn't able to very easily customize Bootstrap with a minimal amount of CSS, I wonder if they're able to competently create their own front-end framework that works perfectly in every browser on every platform.

As someone who navigates the web primarily with a keyboard, sites that use Bootstrap tend to be more usable than sites that use front-end frameworks that were built from scratch. For example, in my experience, most designers and developers don't use :focus selectors when using :hover selectors because they only think about mouse-based navigation.
I guess I could have been more exact:

If you don't have a statistically significant sample size and a control group, and you think it proves something, you are conducting bad science.