skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A majority of developers do fall below that threshold

Do you have statistics to back this up? Presentations at engineering conferences are almost always given by developers, often one's who have dual roles such as evangelists or sales engineers but sometimes by heads down individual contributors. I think this view in the tech industry that most developers are introverts or "lack the skills" to interact socially for business is myopic; perpetuating the stereotype might help for division of labor but I don't think notion is true at all. Engineers are overrepresented as CEOs in the United States (33%) and that is certainly a very public facing role.
I am not a functional programmer and I always find that when I read clojure it just looks like layers and layers of nested code. Personally, I find it visually hard to parse.

Can someone enlighten me why clojure seems to be the trending language?
> Does anyone else feel at least a little betrayed?

No. I bought the game (cheap), I played it a bunch, I enjoyed it. They have no further obligations to me.
I used to own a 2001 Hyundai Accent, with a 5 speed manual. It didn't have a tachometer. You learned what the car sounded like, and learned the shift points based upon the engine noise.

I could tell when it was idling high (for example on cold days) simply because I had driven it a lot. I didn't need a tachometer for that.

If your car is misfiring the check engine light should come on. These days a car misfiring can have serious consequences...
Less information doesn't necessarily correlate with simplicity. Now that you've got a clean product, figure out a way to segment the market so that there's more reason to use localmint. Maybe adding more information (in a clean way) is the answer.

As I see it, to use your site there's still the extra steps of

1. Having to remember the "localmint.com" name and
2. Having to type it in the browser every time I need to look up store hours.

When I open a new tab I'm already at a Google search engine. Why not just use it instead? You'll need to build a compelling enough reason to visit localmint, because right now it's not the easiest solution.
Seems to me like the most sensible tech purchase in a while, PE ratio is a bit more normal and it has massive and sustained traction amongst young people.
It remains to be seem if M$FT will fuck it up, but that's a different question.
Sorry, could you explain why? Because it soaks up parental time?
The console/mobile ports were a C++ rewrite, I think. The mobile version and previous-generation console releases definitely were.
> completely unnecessary

I'm not so sure about that - it's sure to help get the point across to the technically less savvy. Also, it got the BBC to devote an article to the subject that it otherwise probably wouldn't have.
Jira dashboard is actually useful. At least when you choose the right widgets.
Finally someone who gets it. Ideally, one could run YouTube on a $5 DO droplet.
How do you know he broke the law?
lol! So in the end the fisherman got a horrible toothache and there was nothing he could do about it.
Well, Project Spark certainly looks at least inspired by Minecraft.
Gates became the liberal do-gooder that Jobs initially sold himself as with his Eastern philosophy and anti-materialist pretensions. Jobs died cursing Google while building a super-yacht he never got to use. Incredible how things ended up. No one saw this coming, I think.
Have you actually ever spoken to one of the MS games guys?

I have. Granted it was around 5 years ago so things have probably changed, but it was around the time they were launching the XBox arcade dev kit and they seemed very genuinely interested in indie dev and supporting communities.

Meat Boy certainly seemed to come about in that kind of positive environment.

Not saying that I'm 100% confident that MS won't mess up Minecraft. I've never played it, but have always enjoyed following Notch and his epic trip with Minecraft as I was once a starry eyed indie game dev. I also have a young child who I know will be into it. Everything I've read seems like Minecraft totally failed to learn from id software and valve when it comes to modding. And still Minecraft mods are massive.

It blows my mind. It also makes me think that MS would have to try REALLY REALLY hard to mess it up. If Minecraft has been a success with all the hurdles so far, I figure it is basically an unstoppable cultural entity now.
Optimization in Julia using JuMP
Also, it's not just about the angles. It's about the number of connections between vertices too. There just aren't any other solutions.

To convince yourself, here's a fun game you can try with pencil and paper: http://ferkeltongs.livejournal.com/28364.html
(disclosure: that's my blog)
Being a community manager for a large project can require a full-time effort, so why shouldn't it be a full-time job with a corresponding title and description? Sure, that person will have be paid by someone, but that doesn't mean they'll always favor corporate interests or that they have no accountability. Where I work (Red Hat) we have many people who work both as developers and community managers on "upstream" projects. Sometimes they really do seem to be working at cross-purposes to each other or to their corresponding "downstream" (commercial/paid) projects, and that's OK because we as a company have made a commitment to give them that freedom. Those who are community managers are accountable to their own bosses for the results they achieve upstream. I don't see how any of this is problamatic, let alone some sort of fraud or farce as the rather whiny OP claims. These people do a valuable job that benefits the upstream project, and they get paid for it. End of story.
Ask HN: What is the best Windows Laptop in 2014?
Given the recent post on the best Linux laptop I figured we could expand the discussion to laptops for Windows as well. I'm really leaning towards a Macbook, all other laptops just seem inferior in terms of hardware, but is it really the best option for running Windows?
WHO: Floods – Technical Hazard Sheet
People are scared because the MSM is always there to give the war hawks, and their use of the comedic device known as hyperbole, airtime.

But no one is laughing except those with a very, very dark sense of humor.
What would be the benefit of a native application over using a browser extension?

I don't see the advantage of "do it native" here. Nor do I see the advantage of doing in the browser. They both seem like perfectly good places to write a BitTorrent client. And I can certainly imagine some interesting cases where I would want to allow my site users to send traffic between each other over a well known, advanced P2P syndication system (rather than cobbling up my own).
Compilation can be parallelized quite well if the code is structured properly. I used Xoreax grid engine (incredibuild) on Windows some time ago with C++ and it was great at speeding up our builds. Shame C# isn't parallelized in the same way.

Perhaps Go implementers could use similar approach?
An intro to open source datacenter computing with Apache Mesos
Co-work and live in Bali for the full month of November with awesome peers
An account created for the sole purpose of criticizing Snowden/Greenwald/company accuses others of being a controlled pawn. Rich.
This. The c-card companies have actuarial/mathematical models that make it possible to estimate the profitability of the debt/default/lawsuit process from start to finish - where finish can mean bankruptcy, a lien on property, or garnished wages.

Consumers don't understand that this is what they are signing up for, and the c-card companies certainly don't make it clear that defaults are a key contributor to their profitability.

There's at least one UK c-card company that charges interest rates of up 99.9% to high-risk customers. They know damn well that with a rate like that even a tiny debt is going to explode within a few months and give them the option to get a charge on someone's home, force them to sell, and pocket the original value of the debt, plus interest, plus legal costs.
> I have over 1.5 million invested, and I net over 140k

You're making 9.3% on your money? With interest rates as low as they are, I'm pretty impressed. What sorts of things are you invested in?
Could organisms have been carried to solar system bodies by human space probes?
Because the original codebase is Java and that's the dirtiest of words around Microsoft.
You can get student loans discharged. It's a misconception that many believe, even lawyers. It's just very, no, extremely, difficult to do so.

ADD: From the horses mouth: "However, certain circumstances might lead to your loans being forgiven, canceled, or discharged." ( https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellati... )
Massachusetts Supreme Court unanimously rules in Tesla's favor
Given the business use case, I doubt it is worse than for consumer oriented models.

e.g. http://www.okidata.com/drivers

Also, keeping in mind that dot matrix printers are old hardware, there has been a long time for someone to write a driver:

e.g. http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Oki/Oki-ML-520
Don't listen to that charlatan, you would be much better investing the money in my range of anti-viral mist diffusers. I've had one running for a year now and nobody on my street has Ebola. It also seems to work against tigers.
Well, it was fun while it was lasted. Being on OS X, I'm not going to pretend that Microsoft will support us for any longer than they have to.
Yep. HL2 was the first game to require it. You would buy the game at best buy and then you'd need to go download this strange program and tie the game to your account.

A lot of people were super pissed. Gabe Newell said "I know, I know, but trust me: this is going to be AWESOME in the future" - boy was he right :)
My probken with your "what avg programmer find easy to understand" stick is that this basiclly means, never add anything new.

Many thing common today where 'magic' once. So the line where something is magic is kind of meaningless.
"It's like Bruce Wayne deciding to spend the rest of his life playing with legos."

Better than dressing up in a gimp suit, and liable to get fewer people killed.
And was universally hated.
Why Reddit is mediocre: some scientific evidence
Nay. It isn't really about me, or what I communicate, rather that by discussing the detail it'd make it abundantly clear who I'm talking about - and I do not want to enhance either of their miseries.

Additionally, merely by dint of me being able to know these things about these people it would make clear who I am, as I dare say there are a limited number of folks who have these two in their graph, and an even more limited number who are publicly anti-establishment, and thus potentially negate my ability to do anything positive about this.

Sorry. If I do opt to go public with these tales it'll be via the Grauniad or somesuch, as only with significant clout, correlation and voice will there be any impact - otherwise it'll just be reburied in disinformation.
In a nutshell, map, reduce, filter, and function composition are all generic functions, in exactly the sense of generic that Go doesn't have. Lacking all those things, trying to do FP in it is a waste of time. Lacking this foundation, most higher-level FP stuff is also a waste of time, unless there is some other path to it. Even if Go some day picks up generics and gets map, reduce, and filter, my guess is that function composition will never be something you can do in Go.

Note that it does have closures, and makes heavy use of them. It just managed to pick up closures without picking up the rest of FP.

I think this generally fits into the spirit of Go being a really good language for working in a larger development environment, where you can't expect everyone to be expert FP programmers. And, honestly, an intermediate FP programmer is sorta dangerous to your source code, in much the same way an intermediate OO guy is. Go does a surprisingly good job of preventing the intermediate guy from messing up your code too much.

To expand on what I said about the principles of FP being helpful to me in Go even so, here's an example: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2923 In theory, there's nothing that prevents another OO language from doing that, but without the structural polymorphism that Go has with its interfaces it's so much less convenient that nobody does it, and, more importantly, nobody thinks that way.

In fact, in some sense I'd say Go is inspired by CSP, but to the extent that CSP involves the creation of these complicated networks of data flowing around, it doesn't really do that. On the other hand, I'm not convinced that's a very practical way to program... complicated networks just become one more source of "magic" in a program. Using CPS-esque tools to make it easy to connect components together is itself pretty powerful.
I got lucky. I went with Century Link when I found out the D-Mark is about 50 yards from my house and haven't looked back.

Dropped my bill by about $40/month and the customer service is a bit more. . .reliable than Comcast.
Some of those questions are answered in the article: the San Diego school district paid only about $5,000 to transport it

The district plans to store $20,000 to $30,000 worth of medical supplies donated by partners in the medical industry in the vehicle. The MRAP arrived in April, and students at Morse High School's Auto Collision and Refinishing Program got to work painting it.

$5k for a new vehicle is still pretty cheap. It will mostly be used for storage and showing off a big logo. And schools have free labor :p Since it doesn't actually come with guns, I don't see any reason for a civilian not to have one (aside from being silly).
Note that most lard you can buy in the grocery store contains trans-fat and should be avoided. Pure unprocessed lard must be refrigerated or frozen.
"If the user hits a URL directly, the HTML will first be rendered on the server for faster load times and easier indexing by search engines."

If I'm understanding this right, it sounds like an incredibly cool feature. Being able to use the same templates for both server-side rendering and a client-side SPA-like experience would be a huge win.
> Diaspora was one attempt, but what else is out there?

I've only read up on it, but the indie web (http://indiewebcamp.com/why) fits some of the bill, at least for things you don't mind making public.
Make sure you've defined your problem and desired outcome. What is it that you're really trying to do?

Here's a solid podcast on Getting Unstuck when things get tough> http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/ac-podcast-get...
"Minecraft is digital Lego . . . We only wish we had invented it." - Lego's marketing director. (1)

I think that's an interesting quote to understand both the generational appeal of Minecraft and why the deal makes sense.

Continuing the lego comparison, Lego was recently valued at ~$15b (2) and I think that also demonstrates the potential here.

Lego mastered the IP licensing biz (lego star wars, batman), merchandising (theme parks, etc), distribution (market specific sets etc).

I'm almost surprised that Disney wasn't the acquirer but I imagine that with a corporate profiteer behind Mojang we'll see significant expansion of the brand.

(1) http://www.atbmedia.com/lego-we-wish-wed-invented-minecraft/

(2) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-13/lego-builds-new-bil...
lol it's almost beautiful, in a way.
> It was an entirely accidental result of pretty much randomly hacking ideas together. He had absolutely no idea what the future held for Minecraft when he produced it.

That the game became a financial success is indeed somewhat accidental. But that the game was fun was certainly not. Since Notch was "just tinkering", he optimized for a fun and interesting game, not for a profitable game.

I think this is the distinction aeturnum had in mind and I agree with him. We need Notches, Wozniaks and Musks to have more say in where the future goes, because they care primarily about the problems they're solving, and not about the money they're getting.
I wouldn't say they have to do anything drastic, but just make sure that they have a reasonable buffer. Individuals that are in those sorts of situations have many more options available to them when unforeseen life events occur. However, much of the ladder below them is fraught with people that would be ruined if even a delicate imbalance in their lives occurred.

Those are the types of people that need to watch their actions, and count their beans carefully. They're the ones I was speaking of specifically.
MIT Cheetah Robot Bounds Off Tether, Outdoors
>Of course, denying poor people access to credit is going to be politically unpopular.

The real problem is that denying poor people decent wages has been popular for too long - which is why they're poor.

You can't run a sane, stable society by economically disenfranchising most of the population.
One reason is that it actually is just layers and layers of nested code. While that sounds troubling as written it's a relatively simple substrate for writing code in.

I'm not certain that it is the trending language, however. Many "advanced" functional languages are trending nowadays. These languages tend to include some subset of fast functions, good modules, strong typing, pattern matching, good support for concurrency, generics, higher-kinded types, ubiquitous HOFs, easy lambda syntax, abstract data types, immutability, lack of exceptions, encapsulation of effect, minimization of state, so on and on and on.

Clojure is one of these remarkable for its (a) lisp syntax (b) dynamic typing (c) well-spoken leader, and (d) austerity.
> it seems that people who are rejected by Kickstarter ended up on Indiegogo.

That's exactly the problem that motivated my comment: Indiegogo and other such sites need to be seen as first-class crowdfunding platforms in their own right, not "rejects from Kickstarter" or "projects not cool enough to get into Kickstarter".
Data Scientist here. Can confirm, most dashboards are shitty. Usually you don't need a dashboard, you need a human who knows how to analyze data to get useful information out of it. A dashboard is not an end goal, an informed decision is.
Truthfully though, their music is awful.
E19 is out
Interesting post. rhasselbaum said that "Multicast seems to be working fine for me between containers on the same host." https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/3043
Did you try this out with your install?
He comes across as a great guy, that made something great - so it seems that he deserves this, so why be bitter about it?

Sure, I envy his success and would like to make something great that will leave its mark on the world, too. I haven't, yet, but if anything, I'm inspired - and been so way before he sold his company.
Getting away from the computer with hydroponics
A sample has to be random to be valid, turnout isn't just like any statistical sample as it isn't random. Statisticians use turnout models to predict what polls (which do try to be random samples though have bias from other areas) say about election outcomes.
Bruce Wayne's character in batman is always thinking big. He tries to push things in the direction he thinks is right.

No, Bruce Wayne is incredibly myopic. If you have billions of dollars and you want to fight crime, the last thing you should be doing is developing fancy equipment so that you can personally go after criminals one by one. If Bruce Wayne truly wanted to use his money to reduce crime, he would be donating it to preschools and after-school sports programs.
Arse-Sum!
Conduct Usability Testing. Often
so you consider a 30 % difference negligible because you can avoid living in a poor house?

I want to do business against you. :P
I'm looking at this as 0.5 Marvels
8 hours and 262 points later this moved past page 2 on HN already? Behind the stupid motorcycle helmet? eh?
You won't be missed. Bye.
Using DPI or even just flow analysis (sizes, port numbers, destination addresses, protocol (TCP/UDP) bits, and timings of packets), it should be possible to distinguish between encrypted TOR and other encrypted protocols with ease.
As someone who is thinking about moving to opus for non-archival music playback, what sort of bitrate targets do you use for encoding?

I know opusenc uses VBR, but as far as I can tell there is no V0 equivalent that is accepted for high quality lame (MP3) encoding.
"Life is uncertain and variable. Demanding that people make choices based on unknowable futures is a bit silly."
And what about demanding that other people pick up your burden if the unknowable future impacts you negatively? It works both ways, you know.

You are 100% correct, life is uncertain and variable. And there is no way for anyone to fully anticipate the future with perfect accuracy. However, that right there is the most powerful reason that should be compelling individuals to be more careful and risk-averse. Especially when it comes to family, kids and health.
Seems like something from "Brazil" (the movie, not the country).
The Code: Single Div Drawings with CSS
Learn Cloud Computing with CloudAcademy.com's Courses
Community management by defintion includes "PR" in that it includes "Public Relations", but a good community manager is much more.

They're often there to help facilitate conversations, user group meetings, keep the community civil, agitate for better customer support, and so on. Yes, they're cheerleaders to a certain degree, but pretty much any customer/public-facing role at a company needs to have a bit of cheerleader in them.
JSON API Part 2: validation in Node.js with type combinators
WikiLeaks posts the software governments use to spy on dissidents
Ask HN: Securely storing personal hard drives?
I wanted to know if anyone has any strategies for keeping my hard drives safe. I have some old computer hard drives I'd like to keep safe in my home in case I need to come back to them. Ideally, I'm looking for a solution which is electrostatic-safe and waterproof. Are safety-deposit boxes a good idea?
Yes, but you're paying interest. Again, anecdotally, I've never carried a balance. I've had two loans (student loans, paid off; auto loan, almost paid off) and never carried a balance on my CCs, my credit scores (across all three) are fine. It doesn't make sense, to me, to pay more interest than you have to on something you can afford to pay off (the auto loan is only still around because I'll lose another $100 to interest over the last year of the loan, and would rather keep my cash on hand in case I need it for medical or other emergencies).
As someone who took my lifelong fascination and turned it into a "job", I respect the hell out of this.
Granted, not everyone is financially capable of just coding small experiments and getting by, but that's where the magic is.
yes, on the same host it's fine - we're mentioning that in our dockerfile readme (bottom): https://github.com/crate/docker-crate
The hygienic C macro is broken. It breaks if your variable happens to already be named "tmp": swap(x, tmp). This would work however:

#define SWAP(x, y) { \
typeof (x) x##y = x; \
x = y; \
y = x##y; \
}

Also, you can be tricky and "co-recurse" in macros, which is explained here: https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,...

Regarding each-it, I think its pretty doable in C. Right off the top of my head, this seems to work:

#define eachIt(myArray) typeof(myArray[0]) it; for (int i = 0; i < sizeof(myArray)/sizeof(myArray[0]) && (it = myArray[i], 1); ++i)

This can now be used just as in the example:

struct test_ { int one; double two; };
typedef test_ test;

test array[17];

eachIt(array) {
it.one = 1;
it.two = 0.2;
}

However, I believe(?) that it depends on the version of the C standard whether this is hygienic or not. When I compile in GCC it certainly works fine because the i is counted as internal to the for loops scope, but I'm not sure that's always the case. There is also the separate question of whether "it" should be hygienic or not.
Agreed! But what this means is that when you decide not to apply DRY, you need to have a reasonable justification. Code duplication in general is a bad thing.