skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of my favorite topics! The basic process I follow is:

1. Imagine you are a use who knows nothing about your framework. What would you need to know next?

2. Write that.

Step one is really really hard. It takes a powerful imagination to pretend that you don't know something and hop the fence from framework producer to framework consumer. There's no easy way to do this aside from practice and talking to users lots.

In terms of just generally writing better, here's some basics:

1. Revise. Revise. Revise. That writer you love's first draft is just as shitty is yours. The difference is you never see their first draft, you see their eighteenth.

2. Reading out loud helps a lot. Yes, even for technical docs. Yes, it feels weird. Do it anyway.

3. Brevity matters: you want to distill your knowledge to its essence. But note that it's a distillation process. In your first draft, just dump it all out. Worry about condensing when you revise.

4. The written word, especially technical writing, by default, comes across as emotionally cold and unfriendly. Words don't have facial expressions and tone of voice. While technical writing isn't read purely for pleasure, you'll get a lot of value out of trying to make it a little more engaging and pleasant to read. Don't be afraid of a little emotional language. You'd be surprised how much of a different starting a paragraph with "I'm really excited about this feature..." makes.

5. Give someone a couple of examples and they'll delight in finding the generalization on their own. Going the other direction is a lot less fun.

6. Different readers have different learning styles. You may have to say the same thing in a few different ways or a few different orders to reach them all. Balancing this with #3 is an art form.

The fact that you're asking at all is a great sign. (See! More positive language!) If you care about your docs as much as you do about your code, that is, by far, the most important ingredient to being a good writer.
It's Official: California Just Entered 4th Year of Severe Drought
Understanding XOR: it's just a diff
What's wrong with a Perl CGI script?
Online Russian Roulette
Pykov implements the computation of some of the most common quantities related to discrete-time finite regular Markov Chains, namely: steady state, mean first passage times and absorbing times. The calculation are performed by means of the analytic formulas described on Kemeny&Snell, and the steady state is derived with the inverse iteration method. If you are interested on random walkers, pykov offers a handy way to generate them and evaluate their probability.
Sorry, I do not know PyMC well enough to say if the above quantities can be calculated also with it.
Ebola in Spain: Nurse 'infected in Madrid'
Torvalds needs to tone down nothing. The Kernel would be utter shit if he wasn't cracking the whip on people. I personally find his language on LKML hysterical and enlightening; he writes well too. I appreciate when people are honest and don't sugar coat things.

I wasn't aware Torvalds uses G+, shame on him for doing so. The comment was more about the absurd policies the user signs off on to use the service more than the lack of source code, not that that isn't an issue.

HN being closed source is a bummer. I respect a webmasters choice to refrain from publishing server side code. But considering most of the content discussed on HN, it is hypocritical. As unethical as HN is from a FOSS standpoint, I can't turn away from a site where the user-base falls on the right side of a bell curve for I.Q. Too good to pass up.
If you equate 'sterile' with 'not verbal abuse', I suppose that's true.

Given that direct words were ignored multiple times, I would suggest that the next action is simply to not merge, without comment, after a final "You are ignoring us, we can't the time to keep correcting you. Your bad merges will be ignored without comment."

Such a path will get a developer's attention, and it involves no verbal abuse.

A problem with flinging abusive words around is that it artificially and needlessly limits the diversity of your community. Though, it might be that that's t
he intent:

"The LKML is more like a dive bar than Applebee's and that's the way they like it."
The idea of still using Apache / PHP nowadays is pretty crazy if you ask me.
For what it's worth, Monit says it's not clean-room but Mike says it is (https://twitter.com/mperham/status/519165523473358848).
Nah, you don't have to answer—but they have every right to ask all the questions they like to you through your lawyer, and whatever response they observe to that "can and will be held against you" just as if you had volunteered to talk.

You can work it out through this equivalence: when you choose to speak without a lawyer present, you're basically self-representing in the interrogation. So your "lawyer" (i.e. you) can get you in trouble. The Miranda rights are sort of a "we will only assign mens rea to the return values from the public API of your mind" idea: by asserting your need for a lawyer, you're asserting that right now they're speaking directly to your private API—an internal version of yourself they don't have the right to know anything about. You-plus-your-lawyer becomes a full being again, and its words can harm it. (But it also has the actual right to remain silent—without invoking anything—and its silence cannot be held against it either.)

The critical thing about the lawyer right is that they actually lose the ability to interrogate you—to do anything at all that could elicit self-incrimination—until you get that lawyer. Whereas, both in the "I invoke my right to remain silent" pre-lawyer, and "no comment" post-lawyer cases, they can continue interrogating you all the like. in fact, if you're re-read your Miranda rights post-invoking-silence but pre-lawyer, your invocation goes away until you say it again! They can keep trying all sorts of things to weasel words out of you if all you ask is to allowed to be silent; once you ask for the lawyer, though, they're utterly locked out until you get one.
Another good strategy is DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE.
"Cool tools"? Needing ext#fs write support on OS X is a pretty niche application and I'm honestly surprised it's continued to be a viable business for Paragon all these years, especially with the rise of mainstream virtualization. I wasn't expecting to find them still selling it at all.

It probably wouldn't be there except I'm sure most of the expertise and code had to be developed for their imaging and partitioning products.

I think the only things I run frequently for development that don't come with OS X and aren't free or open source are Sublime Text and Paw. You can certainly use vim/emacs/TM2 and curl scripts if you want.

Were I using Linux, I'd be using Sublime Text, and, well, curl scripts again. I'd also be jumping off a cliff after about two days of dealing with desktop Linux's horrific regressions over the past decade.

OS X's native development tools (Xcode, llvm/clang) are free, and most of the tools you use in Linux are either already there, or a "brew install" away.
What do you do with your extra time?
Ten Companies That Are Disrupting Their Industries Through Technology
Golly. Who was this "they" and "all of us"?
> In everyday police interactions, a citizen should never have to assert Constitutional rights. The onus should be on the state's system to ensure they're granted.

Hear, hear!
Show HN: ScreenSlicer – Automatic, zero-config web scraping
Become Estonia’s e-resident
yes, it's only historical art (author dead >100 years)
Nobody was really working on yapache when I worked there around 2 years ago.
Even if that kid had Ebola (which is not respiratory intensive), the number 'about two' would still hold true on average.
yes, but it doesn't get transmitted through the air. You have to literally sneeze on someone not in their general vicinity
So, basically you might be talking bullshit here. There is NO correlation between being a verbal assh*le and being efficient. People can 'deliver' without insulting others. Linus is a high headed rude man, and there's no need for that. You can be straightforward and succinct without being insulting.
"Another study (also in Japan, which seems to lead this obscure field of research) in 2007 found that eating hard-to-chew foods results in a smaller waist size, but not a lower body-mass index overall."

Doesn't this contradict the commonly held belief that its not possible to redistribute the fat around your body (ie, you can't gain abs by just doing core workouts and ignoring nutrition) ? Is that belief just broscience garbage?
Yes, while I think he is culturally and emotionally toxic, he is also brilliant, and has led Linux to great success. I respect his achievements and his technical abilities. Do you think this excuses his behavior?
Evading anti-virus's script emulator
Automated CMS and forum migration
> Cuba is a brutal communist slave state

America is a country full of murderous racists who hate gay people, all of whom support their government's meddling in other countries' affairs, and other such ridiculous statements.
You're talking about the Linux Kernel, one of the most productive cultures of collaborative support ever created by humans. If you're going to argue against success, you're going to need to bring a lot of evidence.
In the US, if you're "agile", you're an employee, not a contractor, for tax purposes. Read IRS Publication 15-A, page 7. A fixed-goal, fixed price contract is a real contract. "Agile" puts you under the "behavioral control" of the employer at a more detailed level, which makes you an employee.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15a.pdf
I do like the work they've done with Phantom but the API is horrendous and I found myself wrapping the parts I used. Nightmare looks more complete and probably better tested than my wrapper. Well done.
I'm a developer who does just enough server management to keep my systems running, and Monit is an invaluable part of the toolkit.

However, the one thing I don't like about Monit is the pseudo natural language syntax that inspeqtor surprisingly borrowed, based on which Monit raises the DMCA claim. I wonder what the general feeling about this is in the sysadmin community, and whether people would prefer a different syntax instead.
I'm not sure that welcoming Cuban doctors necessarily means admitting superior medical education. Most countries like well-educated immigrants, no matter what their former nation was. The US welcomed Nazi scientists to help build rockets and bombs, too. That wasn't a commentary on the Nazi regime other than that they had good scientists that were willing to defect.
I could say the same about most of the supposed superior replacements.

Everything is dangerous in the hands of idiots. The technology is almost entirely irrelevant to the discussion.
It's certainly regulatable, though it isn't now. Since cell carriers lease public airwaves, it'd be possible to mandate that they block some people from using their service, only sell phones if the person's ID is checked, etc.. This is drastic and would disrupt (in the traditional sense of the word) pay as you go phones that are popular for various demographics, but it seems possible, and there certainly isn't a reason why it couldn't happen.

If felons can be denied the right to vote, I think it'd be an easy sell to deny them the right to cell phones. Any state could pass it as a "tough on crime" measure.
VitalsChoice, Activation and November Pearls
The servers compromised were more like content servers though, not user data servers? Yahoo says no user data was accessed. But could the affected servers be used to more easily get at user databases from 'inside'?
QS Access App: See Your HealthKit Data in a Table
Why You Should Start Taking Millennials Seriously
Marriott to Pay $600K to Resolve WiFi-Blocking Investigation
Google Summer of Code 2015
CSStyle – Automatic specificity and nesting etc.
Eve will be open source.
Contrary to this, I find myself envious of a person who can dress down another in a flagrant and creative way.

If I got dissed in such a hyperbolic way from a boss that was paying me, I would leave.

In a situation where I've toiled in a position of importance in a project I work on in my free time, and I screwed up, I think I'd be hurt if I was dismissed lightly and without creative ire. I mean, I want to know that if I screwed up, I screwed up enough for someone to admonish me creatively, since there isn't any method of management. Your tool is primarily shame, you can't suspend someone without pay from a mailing list.
Shameless plug: I maintain Node-huxley (https://github.com/chenglou/node-huxley), which accomplishes what this project does, but without the need for writing automation code. Also compares previous/next screenshots for you automatically.
How would you ever prove "perusing the original" conclusively?

Sure you could say "so and so downloaded Monit using IP address of 127.0.0.1 at this time", but I don't think that really is legally conclusive.

Unless the alleged violator actually posted public comments about "perusing" the original source code there's not a lot you could do. Unless you do discovery on all of his computers and he didn't delete the Monit source code. To go through all that trouble for a copyright violation on free, open source software seems hardly worth it.
This is, I think, a variant on the 'ends justify the means' argument. But sure, we can talk about that.

I concur that open source projects' primary and over-arching goal is and should be to produce good code.

When the leader of a project freely (though not so frequently in this case) uses verbally abusive language, that has the strong effect of limiting the diversity of potential contributors to the project.

I'm willing to assume that a more diverse project tends to be a project that will produce better code.

In this particular case, bad code wasn't included in the project. The abusive language did nothing to stop merge of bad code.

So did verbally abusing this developer somehow cause his/her future contributions to be of higher quality? I don't know the answer to that.

Or perhaps did this verbal abuse generally raise everyone else's code quality, because they didn't want to become a victim as well? Perhaps.

One thing I am certain of, though, is that such choices artificially and severely limit the possible side of the contributor pool, and that's bad.
I'm referring to the right to not self-incriminate. That is the issue at hand. What you said is untrue twice over. It's central to this issue and it does "need" to be invoked. The SCOTUS made some fateful rulings in 2013 and the gist ever since is that one must invoke the Fifth in order to be perceived as protected by the Fifth at that time. That's what the article is about.
The trouble I came up against is that a lot of the photos of great art are themselves copyright under UK law, even if the works themselves are in the public domain (e.g. those of the National Gallery, London). I see your website is registered in Poland, so I imagine this isn't an issue for you.
It is surprising how many 90s tools remain popular today: WinZip, WinRar, WinAmp, CCleaner, Icq, Real Player, etc.

People just get into using something and simply never stop. Then there's the comfort barrier to switching (e.g. I know how to use WinZip but 7Zip is new and unfamiliar).

CCleaner is still popular with low level tech support types, which is quite ironic as it damages the Windows Registry on later versions of the OS. There is also built in tools (Disk Cleaner, Recycling Bin maximum size, auto-Defrag/Trim, etc) which accomplish most of the same things.

Teachers use Real Player. Several nationalities (Russia?) use ICQ.
To me this resumes all: "I am used to rough discussions on mailing lists, and yes, when I was younger I did not always stay technical in flamewars, but nowadays I am pretty good at that, I am sometimes articulate, but never personal."

With all due respect for him but he is eating his own food. See this posts and you understand:

1 - https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...
2- https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...
3 - https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...
4 - https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...
This is a fantastic question!
50k is the norm at Berkley due to the high cost of living (minimum wage is $10/hour)
Show HN: Clojure in the Open – simple tasks from open-source projects
What exactly can one do with this digital identity?
I think you should be retroactively aborted due to your unrelenting pedantry which serves no one and isn't even amusing.

Just kidding, I hope you die in a couch fire.
Monit is wining this discussion because their DMCA notice has caused the code not be visible, since anyone with both codebases could easily look at them and see that Inspeqtor is not a translation of the Monit code in any shape or form.

Because of this, I have put the code back up, please consult https://github.com/evanphx/inspeqtor vs http://mmonit.com/monit/dist/monit-5.9.tar.gz
I was just discussing this the other day with one of my friends. We both grew up in the Seventh-Day Adventist church, a church that has made "medical evangelism" a big part of its strategy. The discussion was brought about by seeing an Adventist doctor we'd eaten dinner with a few months ago in California, being interviewed on CNN from a hospital in Liberia where she was caring for Ebola patients.

I have grandparents, aunts and uncles who were all trained at Adventist medical institutions, and spent time working at hospitals in 3rd world countries. The Adventist church has its own medical school, as well as a health system (though neither is directly operated by the church).

I took a "student missions" year out of college (somewhat like Mormon mission years, only typically more a religiously-driven piece-corps-type year of teaching, medical assistance etc. than direct-evangelism) and spent it in Belize volunteering at a hospital. 3 of the hospital's 5 physicians were Cubans, and I learned first-hand that Cuba and the Adventist church have remarkably similar strategies when it comes to training doctors, and using them as a PR tool.

In both cases it seems to be quite effective. In Belize, many people I met thought highly of Cuba, because their most direct interaction was through the doctors they sent. Even here in the states, when the Adventist church is mentioned I'll often hear, "Oh, I think my Doctor is one of those."
You might want to find a different example until it is settled. From the wikipedia article on the matter Oracle currently is currently winning From wikipedia: the judgement was released on May 9, 2014. The circuit court reversed the district court on the central issue, holding that the "structure, sequence and organization" of an API was copyrightable. It also ruled for Oracle regarding the small amount of literal copying, holding that it was not de minimis. The case was remanded back to the district court for reconsideration of the fair use defense
dogemmo.com
That's a $0.75 comment right there, folks.
The timing of this seems odd to me. Why now, of all times? Is Inspeqtor getting too big or stealing too many Monit customers?

It's also a little strange that the tweet Monit references as being demonstrative of intent happened six months ago [0]. If that was really the issue, shouldn't they have issued the DMCA takedown then, instead of waiting so long?

I think we have about 24 hours before the DMCA's version of the Streisand effect kicks in.

[0]: https://twitter.com/mperham/status/452160352940064768
no... he said he used the generic yahoo contact forms, they didn't respond. you're an idiot.
I got it. Since so few people are likely to see the conversation then I suppose it's okay for him to belittle someone in such a manner. If no one sees you behave badly, then all's good.

If someone involved in a public facing project open to the masses doesn't care in any way how they appear in public, then that's just a problem that will likely never go away. I suppose as long as people are willing to accept the abuse then it won't negatively affect the project that much in terms of contributions.

Another one, got it. As long as people still continue to desire to contribute then other people's behavior is totally acceptable.

So far, I have yet to see any one person's comment reach the level of the quoted statement. If you can't see that then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Also, you are assuming quite a lot about my level of tolerance for political correctness. Simply pointing out that someone behaves in a bad manner and suggest that maybe there was a better way is not political correctness.

Again, we shall have to agree to disagree. Projects will carry on regardless.
Adobe releases Photoshop Mix, a new image editor for iPad
Apple Supplier GT Advanced Technologies' Stock Dives 90% After Bankruptcy Filing
I've found XSS bugs that allow full account takeover being actively exploited on Yahoo! a couple of times. They have a lot of legacy crap that was written 15-20 years ago.
http://e-estonia.com/e-residents/e-residency/
I'm a big fan of this as a product category, but less so of Soylent itself. Recently, I've mostly eaten MealSquares, which have the same premise, but (imo) better execution. They're nutritionally better; they're solid, so people don't look at them strangely; they shipped at reasonable speed, unlike Soylent which keeps falling behind; and, because they're dry instead of liquid, they're more portable.
The title on your repro currently says "DCMA comparison".
Semi-OT. Having a b2c startup I have mixed feelings on this kind of services.

I totally value privacy (and security) and I support the existence of services like this one, even thought -as a user- I don't completely understand the difference between creating a random gmail address. The user's pain is usually related to change the address (i.e., notify all my friends), so a service like this one should actually resolve that pain specifically, IMO.

On the other hand, I also think this creates a mess with other businesses. Users register to services using username+password that they inevitably forget. If you just put the signup with Facebook + Twitter + Google, they complain that you're requiring a social account. Even if they don't complain, the sign up with Google and later they try to sign in with Facebook. In short, the email is the only way to come back via password reset. But what if they can no longer access the email they used to sign up?
This looks like baremetrics and bestunning.net combined. Sort of nice to have those two things integrated for what looks to be about half the price. Not sure it'll last though after baremetrics secured an investment from stripe itself. I also found out about baremetrics after emailing stripe (they recommended it). Hard to compete with that without some compelling differentiation.
Interview with Elasticsearch director
Thanks for sharing your numbers. At the moment I'm not too worried about the business model although it's good to hear some people are ponying up. I'm not open sourcing the app code but I am planning to use a lot of it in other projects and as examples in my upcoming book on the FAN stack.
"To apply for one, you need to make visit a Police and Border Guard office in Estonia – there you need to submit an application and provide biometrical data (your facial image and fingerprints) for background check."
Are there any rules or precedent preventing this? Or is it a chicken-and-egg not-enough-beacons-out-there-to-make-it-worth-it type situation?

One smells like conclusions are a bit premature, the other smells more like inevitability.
To this day I can't figure out how ICQ ever became popular, but yes I can vouch that there are still people who use it and probably always will.
iPhone Encryption and the Return of the Crypto Wars
I think this could actually be done if the container is run in "--privileged" mode.
A Better Android Simulator for Web Development: GenyMotion
I might have thought that as well at some point but after using ohlife I think email is the way to go