skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do what you hate first, it does work
Growth Hacks are the One Weird Trick™s of HackerNews.
The unescaped inner quotes made me cringe...
How Voxis makes stolen credit cards more valuable
Bloomberg “Hungary scraps Internet Tax amid protest”
"Enterprise knows what their problems are, and you should listen to them slavishly. The issue comes in when you listen to them for what solutions to build for their problems."

So very much true. In the company I work for this principle applies to inhouse development as well. I.e the problems are obvious but the solutions not so much. We are an independent software vendor, but ownership of code is so scattered that essentially a huge portion of development is handled as if it would be done by external service providers - i.e. the driving force in development is business who know exactly what the pain points are but would want only quick hacks.

Except, those pain points are so acute that if there are ready solutions available they will authorize purchases of ridiculous amounts of cash to have them solved. I imagine this is the situation in most businesses.

Now, out of those problems some are really hard to crack, while others are just an artifact of lack of inhouse knowledge of the particular technical field. Those consultants that manage to offer viable solutions for these well known problem domains probably can earn their bread quite nicely.
as the article says, space != orbit. i don't see how you can get 8 km/s delta-v in a garage.

edit: doesn't mean it's not interesting, but orbit is so much more challenging than just space it's not funny.
Case Study: The Experience of Signing Go6.SI with DNSSEC
I recently purchased Kodak's SPZ1 camera as a waterproof and shockproof alternative to iPhone. I made few test videos and my conclusion is that the camera is mostly unusable due to the poor video quality that is a result of some poor choices in firmware settings (that cannot be adjusted by the user). The overall video quality (sharpness, colours, etc) is noticeably worse than iPhone's. I recorded the video in the same conditions using iPhone 4S and SPZ1 and noticed that the output video file is compressed by SPZ1 with really low bitrate. SPZ1 records a file at 10mbps, while iPhone does 21mbps in the same conditions, with the same resolution and framerate. 10mbps is way too low for the HD video.

The Fujitsu DSP chip that SPZ1 uses is normally capable of a wide range of output bitrates, including the higher ones. The bitrate could have been increased (and video quality improved) by simply releasing a new version of firmware, that utilizes the chip to its fuller capacity. On a positive side, SPZ1 is using H.264 High profile for the output video, whereas iPhone 4S uses just H.264 Baseline. My guess is that it's just the default setting in the Fujitsu chip and not a result of someone's good will.

Another note is about audio. SPZ has a great stereo microphone, but the audio stream is bundled uncompressed into a video stream, which means that of the 10mbps I mention above, 1.5mbps (15% of the total bitrate) is given to audio and only 8.5mbps to video. This is such a waste -- the same Fujitsu chip can easily compress audio as well. For comparison, iPhone 4S compresses the mono stream into AAC with 0.06mbps (0.3% of the total bitrate). This also could clearly have been made using another firmware settings, but it seems like Kodak does not care.

As a conclusion, I'm pretty sceptical about anything Kodak releases lately. They may understand hardware, but like Sony, their software choices are questionable.
>A wireless mouse always trumps a remote.

Absolutely not. I do not want a mouse being used at my couch. I do not want my movie interrupted with Windows Update. I do not want to fiddle with XBMC or some other hacked together, unintegrated system.

I subscribe to the Unix philosophy when it comes to my home entertainment. I have a stereo that only plays audio. I have a TV that only plays video. I have a set-top box that only streams content. I have a DVD player than only plays discs. The last thing I need is a computer sitting in my living room making demands of me that are not related to the function I need it for.

I can read ebooks on my phone or desktop, but a Kindle, as a dedicated device, is much better suited to that purpose. That's why I have a Roku. There will never be a mousepad on the arm of my couch.
temporarily creates or encourages connections between typically unconnected parts of the brain

Does this imply that you could potentially practice connecting those "typically unconnected parts" (through meditation or other) such that this substance would have little or no effect on you neurologically?
oo a wildcard CN? I thought that was considered bad form. Well this makes me feel less guilty now!
Modern historians.
Just as C++11 looks worlds different (and better) than C++ circa 1990, I imagine that the same dynamic will play out with Scala, which I tend to analogize as Java++. Certain idiom will develop, certain language features will be deprecated but by nature of the platform will not be able to be removed; &c.

I find some idiom used by the more experienced Scala devs on my team to be distasteful: I hate hate hate the semantic confusion between the Option type and sequences that leads people to map over Options (or the dual use of is/nonEmpty). I would always prefer pattern matching, or getOrElse, for instance.

I think I'm just a fan of smaller languages; I certainly understand -- and commend -- Dr Odersky's approach to a pragmatic extension of a (bad) industry language, just as I appreciated Stoustroup's; but given my druthers, I'd just as soon be working in something perhaps less pragmatic but certainly smaller and less warty.

If anybody knows what language that is, please tell me. Or invent it.
5 Awesome Books for Project Managers Reviewed
I did not include a signing bonus or equity in that number - I am probably an unusual case admittedly due to my speed of learning and speed of execution
> It's entangled with Java too closely (unlike say clojure)

In some ways it is saner than Clojure btw ...

For example Clojure devs pride themselves that their language doesn't have variables, but oh wait, it has Vars and function definitions must be dereferenced on call sites and those Vars can be modified wherever, whenever, as Clojure does not have the notion of "val" or "final". And of course you can do thread-local bindings for those Vars and that's why people have used it for things such as dependency injection, as a poor man's implicit arguments that do not appear in the function's signature. I don't even know if those persistent data-structures could be implemented in Clojure, as you need final's semantics for that and Clojure's data-structures are actually implemented in Java.

I also like Clojure's protocols a lot, but they've got limitations as compared to type-classes from Haskell or Scala. For example in LISP lazy by-name parameters are modeled by means of macros, which is OK, but then if you want a macro as part of an interface, tough luck (this is a LISP vs ML thing). Protocols aren't doing interface inheritance either. For example in Scalaz (a Scala library bringing in many goodies from Haskell) the Monoid type-class inherits the interface of Semigroup, because a Monoid really is a Semigroup, I don't think anybody can argue against it and it isn't "complecting" anything.

The process of learning Clojure has been very frustrating for me. I get it that the language doesn't have loops, I don't do loops in Scala either, but the absence of loops is the least interesting part of going functional - absence of local mutable state is not solving a big problem. The more interesting part for which I found little guidance is for modeling changes (in user input, or the various data sources that we use). In Scala we use more and more concepts and design patterns coming from Haskell, whereas I found Clojure to be maybe a little too pragmatic for my taste - for example Clojure devs aren't modeling Monads, a fact that is apparent starting with the standard "map", "filter" and "mapcat", builtin functions that work only on the builtin collections; Clojure doesn't even have some kind of Numeric protocol for building your own things that work with the numeric operators; and I hate things like the sorted-set using java.util.Comparable (what's up with the lack of abstractions in the standard library btw?).

Of course I could go on - and I'm sure Clojure developers will jump to rectify me - Clojure has a lot of cool things in it and that's why I keep on learning, because some day I might have an aha moment, plus everybody should learn a LISP, just like everybody should learn a functional statically typed language (be it Haskell, Ocaml or Scala).
Probably because the latter half of your assertion, that "Facebook turns over the information you provide to whatever government entity you are hiding from" is a lie. This protects people who feel they need to hide the fact that they are connecting to Facebook from an observer/ISP.
Ah, the freedoms of permissive licenses... better than proprietary at least.
That is the intriguing question in this type of situation.

Is it okay to lie to someone that's taking advantage of you?

Is it okay to lie if you and your family benefits with no real harm done to the second party?

Is it okay to lie in response to a lie?

I guess the real self-judgement has to be based on whether one knew the nefarious behavior of the other party beforehand or not. It's a tough one.

But I understand your point, I often wonder if law enforcement officers ever feel guilt over the fact they can, and do, outright lie as part of their jobs.
escape speed is technically correct. you need to go fast enough, direction doesn't really matter.
NBA star player.
"A space vehicle that's an air-breather while it's in the atmosphere and transitions to rocket mode once out has been proposed many times, but making something that's both a rocket and an airplane is hard and adds a lot of weight."

For those interested, these people are working on it.
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/ (They're the Skylon makers mentioned in another comment here)
Watsi is looking for an engineering intern
Why Email and Cars are heading down the same road
On my first day at one job, HR called me into a conference room to review my compensation package and everything. The HR rep wrote a number on a Post-It and handed it to me, saying, "This is your salary. Here at BigCo we hold salary in confidence between you and the company. In other words, please do not discuss this number with any of your co-workers."
I responded, "Don't worry, ma'am. I'm just as ashamed of that small number as you are."
[low 6 figures, 28 years experience, Upper Midwest]
By this authors definition, a community's primary function is to exclude others. While you are free to exclude whoever you want in your own life, it says something about you when you have a problem with others wanting to include the rest of the world.

Whether you or anyone else likes it or not, we are in a time where we need to learn to adapt and include, not hide and exclude.
Russia's downward spiral never ceases to amaze.
This reminds me of Mirage OS[1], which is written in OCaml. Although they call it a Unikernel and it runs on top of Xen.

[1]: http://www.openmirage.org/
GCC 4.9.2 Released
Twitter Replaces Product Chief Daniel Graf
Crash-Only Thinking
It is not only out of guilt. In sports or music, many people are ashamed of being white. In the U.S. it is nearly a foregone conclusion that you will not be a good musician or athlete if you are white. White kids who desire to pursue those things definitely can feel shame which has no feeling of guilt attached to it. I'm not trying to make some grand statement about racism or the effects, just giving a pretty cut and dry counter point to the idea that white people never feel shame about their skin color aside from guilt.
British Pounds or USD? If most of the people are talking in USD, then you're making roughly 76k USD.
There's plenty of intolerance and meanness in the US, and population density isn't a factor. We're good at hiding it in casual interactions.
As it's been pointed out, the title is a bit misleading.

That said, one should keep in mind that, technically, everything you experience changes your brain -- it's called learning.
If by "soon" you mean November of next year, then you are correct. There is also a RFC in process to get .onion and a few similar pseudo-tlds recognized/protected.
Andy Rubin, Former Head of Android, Departs Google
You might prefer Kotlin?[0] It's going in the same direction as Scala, but not quite so far.

By the way, I'm curious what you mean by "the semantic confusion between the Option type and sequences that leads people to map over Options". Mapping and 'flatMapping' are very general things in Scala, and apply to many types that are not collections, like Futures / Observables / etc.

[0] http://kotlinlang.org/
If you consider exponential progress since 1970 or so to be "little success," you're right. Fusion has a very high threshold before it becomes useful, but we've come a long way, and we're not that far from the breakeven point now.

NASA is currently working with John Slough's company on a fusion rocket for interplanetary travel.

http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2012_phaseII...

http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/04/rocket-powered-by-...
overtime is normally $hourly * 1.5 or so depending on the company
That's an outrageous reason to discriminate against someone. A man also might take leave after their child is born. A woman might not get pregnant. Someone might be predisposed to sickness, but you still wouldn't be justified in using your crystal ball and tarot cards in order to pay them a lower wage.
Exactly, not sure how much code has been written to take advantage of this fact. Taking day 1 is a much safer option definitely.
New Outlook for Mac available to Office 365 customers
IBM Teams Up with Twitter to Give Business a Gauge Powered by Social Media
The title is wrong and misleading. It should be "YogaGlo Patent Dropped." They did not patent yoga; they patented a method of filming yoga classes.
Government elections are pretty close to the free market in the real world for many things. The better funded candidate wins 85% of the time which virtually guarantees every political seat is bought [in the free market]:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/...

Simply because you don't personally have the wealth to purchase a congressional seat of your very own doesn't change the fact that when 85% of them are essentially decided by the money spent that they are basically "buying" the win at that point.

So to claim the free market doesn't create an Orwellian total surveillance society is pretty much false across the board.

1) In the "free market", you have Google, Amazon, and a number of other businesses that try to build that sort of capability to profile their customers for advertising and sales purposes.

2) In the "government where majority power is purchased through the application of money", we have the NSA which engages in both commercial and military espionage.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...
http://www.bbc.com/news/25907502

etc.

So when you say the NSA is divorced from the free market, I think you are delusional and/or ignorant. I find it scary that people don't seem to understand that the majority of power in government is essentially paid for and if your sponsors don't like you...the money dries up. So unless you are independently wealthy [on the scale of being a billionaire] and can just self-finance every single campaign, you aren't really an independent agent but instead doing your best to balance who "bought" your vote to minimize the damage.
Slack raises $120M on $1.12B valuation
> Which section are you referring to? 2.1, 2.2 maybe?

Much of section 2 and 4. Also, I'm not using Play, Akka, or any other web frameworks (since I don't do web stuff), so those don't apply to me and I don't have a basis for evaluating them.

> Wouldn't avoiding a destructive update give better performance?

No. In the absence of destructive updates, you either need to copy matrices or use a data structure that typically incurs a log(n) overhead with a fairly large constant.
Congratulations. Salary negotiations is not an area I am good at, and I guess I don't need a constant reminder about that wondering what if because the benefits a job gives us is a complex issue.
Whatever happened to transmitted power designs, like using a ground-based laser to lift a payload? If you can leave the powerplant on the ground and only send the power, you no longer have to lift the fuel, just reaction mass.
Lamborghini cravings? This is how much it will cost you
Not sure why this was downvoted, I kind of agree. We're supposed to be defending rational choices made by informed consumers, but I too question whether current regulation adequately safeguards either one of those principles.
Also worth noting that the organization intends to continue a second application under a slightly modified set of parameters. http://www.yogaglo.com/blog/2014/10/yogaglo-update-2/
People don't generally voluntarily use a service unless it is beneficial to them in some way. It's not like millions of people are being forced to use Twitter for conversations.

Edit to add: also, I didn't try to "prove that it's the best tool imaginable tool for the purpose or thats it's the pinnacle where evolution in such networks stops." I just said it's ok.
The Two Pillars of JavaScript
I dislike Twitter because so many people try to be clever, or think everything roaming through their mind is of interest to the world, and sadly because of retweets you can't 100% avoid them.

But what I hate the most is useless articles filled with random twitter posts. It's the new and lazier street interview and it's as stupid as those "X number of people started a petition / created a facebook group about [random outrage of the day]".

Twitter is OK to know when something is down, or when your favorite artist has a new album but it has weakened journalism.
Agree. I never understood why onion names are so short; they're not even the full SHA-1 hash:

> The .onion name is computed as follows: first the ​SHA1 hash of the ​DER-encoded ​ASN.1 public key is calculated. Afterwards the first half of the hash is encoded to ​Base32 and the suffix ".onion" is added. Therefore .onion names can only contain the digits 2-7 and the letters a-z and are exactly 16 characters long.

(Source: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/HiddenServ...)
Mysterious new Java EE 6 server shows up at Oracle certification pages
Oh wow, that is a pretty bothersome trouble. I don't know nearly enough about databases and generating reports to understand this, but that link is saved. Thanks for sharing!
There is nothing natural about an income tax. However, personal income is a relatively easy thing to tax. Land-value or real-estate-value is also easy to tax, because it happens in the open.

I think taxes are an infringement on freedom; but society needs taxes in order to fund the essential features of government that secures freedom, so I tolerate them.

To that end, "total taxes are too high" is an entirely separate argument from "we are taxing (and therefore discouraging) the wrong things."

Something has to be taxed. As people communicating online we are biased to think taxes on internet traffic are wrong, but dispassionately I don't see much of a difference between taxing traffic and taxing gas (and boy do drivers hate gas taxes). You can argue that gas taxes fund the roads that are being used, but the internet is not entirely self-funded by private enterprise.
NASA did a study on space elevators about a decade ago, and found that it would require carbon nanotubes several centimeters long, bound together by a realistically strong epoxy. Launching their design would require seven space-shuttle flights to deploy a minimal elevator, which you use to pull up additional construction material.

They addressed a lot of other practical issues too. Here's their final report (pdf), it's an interesting read.

http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/521Edwar...
Um, there were a few helpers along the way:

1) Linux, from Torvalds onward. Android used Linux as the hardware abstraction layer and still does. How many developers there?

1B) The ARM Linux developers, especially. Russell King is an unsung hero in this space.

2) The sea of subcontractors that helped with device drivers, subcomponents, integration, and manufacturing. Remember that whole "Open Handset Alliance"[1] thing? Those were all companies doing work for the Google/Android either under contract or gratis in the hopes of getting future work thrown their way or increasing their handset sales with the Google monolith behind them. I was one of them.

3) Webkit. How many developers worked on that (including Apple engineers)? OpenBinder (started at Be)? OpenGL?

[1] http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html
What we should expect is that facebook has enough computing power to bruteforce 12 to 13 characters in a reasonable timeframe.

Did you ask NSA for a full 16-character bruteforce? :)
they wrote launchd. Even if they released it under GPL, as the copyright owners, they would have the freedom to make future releases closed source.
This is a good idea for other tor services too as that 1024 bit RSA is looking pretty shaky these days. Hopefully the tor devs will give it a bump to 2048 or move to Curve/Ed25519 soon, before this becomes a real problem.

Progress: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-August/0...
Yeah thats true. There is a small penalty for that. Been trying to figure out what I can write off cause my overhead is low , can't do car, or office stuff cause I dont buy any and all the normal stuff you would write off.
I'm not worried about weather proofing, I'm worried about the sensors going out of calibration under minor changes in temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure.
Interesting, I've been thinking of expanding on a current website i have http://www.sososwift.com into a general tutorial site. I was thinking more of focusing on crowd-sourcing the free tutorials, similar to my current site, and then having the pay tutorials act as the revenue generator for the site through partnerships. It seems this is mainly focusing on the partnerships, though not all paid?
Tail Recursion with Dynamic Scope
Show HN: File Permissions Ninja
No offense, but this seems specious because it presumes that a majority of consumers are making a rational choice from a well-informed position, which is not necessarily the case. They're currently making the trade, yes, but that doesn't mean they fully understand the implications of their decisions.

* Edited for grammar
sorry, that was my bad. I can't change it now, I don't think
I never have understood why the space elevator gets so much attention, and the launch loop is almost unknown. The elevator obviously had some high-profile proponents (like Arthur C. Clarke), but given how realistic the launch loop seems (only 8 billion dollars??), I would think it would be the thing everyone talks about.

The fact that it is not makes me think that it is less realistic or more constrained than it is made out to be. I certainly don't have the skills necessary to evaluate that, but I bet someone here does...
Show HN: “Install on DigitalOcean” button for open source apps
I would love the ability to put in as input my delicious bookmarks or Pocket and have the ability to search just those inputs.