skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey everybody. I built this small Sinatra app because I wanted a simpler way for people to install my software OneBody[1] on DigitalOcean.

I'm not sure my little VPS will hold up under the strain of HN, but you can see the app in action at http://installer.71m.us and even use it to install itself (how meta!) on DigitalOcean.

This uses the new MetaData[2] feature of the DO API to pass a config string to be processed by CloudConfig[3].

Once that is done, there is a small bit of code running on the VM to tell this app when the install is finished so you get a progress bar while you're waiting.

To be clear, DigitalOcean is doing all the real work -- this app simply acts as a hand-off between your app.yml config file on GitHub and the DigitalOcean API.

[1] https://github.com/churchio/onebody

[2] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc...

[3] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc...
Thanks, I think I get it now. Helps when I actually read the API's :)
Inbox by Zendesk
Sounds similar to Amazon's patented white background photography.
> I cannot envision a circumstance in which this "feature" was not put in at the direct request of law enforcement.

I can. In an eCommerce app we were thinking of building, we wanted voice search and voice "buy" so that people only had to tap images of what they wanted. We weren't planning to give them an option either. It was scrapped because of a lack of budget and it seemed like the gimmick wouldn't be enough for anyone to care.

The technical limitations of the TV market makes sending the audio data to a 3rd party [e.g. Google's voice recognition servers] a necessity.

That said, I fully expect this feature is capable of remote activation for "tech support" purposes and that it can be enabled at the request of law enforcement. But honestly, if you are getting pissed off about the TV over law enforcement concerns...they can do the same damned thing with your cell phone. Are you keeping it inside a fridge or something? No?
It was a stupid proposition right from the get go. What surprised me what the time it took to drop it and the amount of attention it gathered, I mean, it was just a matter of time before it flopped.
Tests that relied on date (especially involving getting the current date) are usually hard to get right. I had an assignment in school to build a To-do list, and had lots of problems trying to test it. I think I solved it by having methods take 2 dates, initial and relative date, rather than just getting the current date.
I know you are, as Hanselman says, "helping people fall into the pit of success". I guess the question is, can this list really be highly opinionated and canonical and remain practically useful?

The criticism of "best practices" lists is that everything becomes a "core principle". By which I am suggesting that "best practices for Scala" encompasses both Scala and everything in programming. Everything except, unfortunately, the prime directive: get something working first. Which in the moment often means ignoring best practices and just writing code.

There are places where Java date/time are appropriate because that is both sufficient and the convention...and because the ways in which JODA time can accommodate obscurities derived from esoteric abstractions are manifest. JODA is a best practice for people who know JODA well and who can reasonably predict that future maintenance will be done by qualified persons, ie. people who know Java well, and not necessarily Scala.

Being a library on top of Java, Scala inherits best practices from it. Acknowledging these as such and handling them with a pointer will keep the list it DRY...or rather DRO [don't repeat others].

I am thinking that in programming, the form in which best practices are embodied is not a list because lists evolve to wiki's as corollary to Greenspun's 10th rule [1]. I think best practices are better implemented as frameworks because frameworks can be highly opinionated without being open for debate.
If the optics and resolution is right, might this be Good Enough for crowdsourced StreetView?
Apple’s Cool iPhone Fingerprint ID Means You’re Screwed
That explains why a new user would choose Twitter today. It doesn't explain why people started using it for conversations in the first place, years ago when the network was new and small.
Not trying to complain here, just sharing and interesting feature
There's very little you can do (afaik) to keep your cellphone from connecting to a stingray. It's essentially the same as being way out in the boonies with only 1 (unecrypted) tower within range. Here's one of the android apps: https://secupwn.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/.
Not really, we haven't written about anything yet, but we probably will in the next year or so.
Mods: Can you fix the URL to drop the #disqus_thread target?
There's another binary that does the processing and the data is sent to the launchd daemon over a Mach-specific IPC channel that FreeBSD doesn't have.
Muslims in Pakistan regularly kill minorities and is that due to butterfly effect? And still you are more worried about fascism in India!
There are security considerations if you run multiple services on sub domains with the same certificate, but it's frequently done for convinence.
> I hate hate hate the semantic confusion between the Option type and sequences

Option is a Monad in Scala and could also be modeled as an Applicative Functor - which are very generic abstractions that transcend sequences. Don't let the naming scare you, you can view them as design patterns, it just so happens that people aren't familiar with them.

In Scala mapping, filtering and flatMap-ing are generic and for example Scala's for-comprehensions work on all things implementing map, filter and flatMap including things that are not sequences and for good reason.

And most importantly - `Option` would be completely useless without mapping, filtering or flatMap-ing on it. Because often you have to combine multiple options and what happens in practice, without an easy to use API, people would just do "Option.get" and trade a null pointer exception for a NoSuchElementException, which would defeat the purpose of using Option.

The semantic confusion between an Option and a sequence is the same confusion between a sequence and a Set - none and if there is, then you need to go back to the basics. First of all, because Option really is a collection of zero or one elements and second because all of them are Monads.

> I imagine that the same dynamic will play out with Scala, which I tend to analogize as Java++

I don't know what makes people say things like this. Scala is nothing like Java and I worked with C++ and with Perl too, in production. Scala has some warts in it, but such comparisons are unwarranted.
As far as I know, you can't yet compile Rust to Javascript.

I don't see why not--Rust uses LLVM as a backend, and LLVM bytecode can compile to Javascript with emscripten.

Although, I don't really see why you would want to, either.
Yes. But switching providers isn't that simple and doesn't cover everyone.

Idk about you but I'm paying about $0/year now and I know that coverage would cost me $XXX/month via cobra or the like. I'd have to start over with Medicaid (due to different providers taking it) combined with the fact its a minority expense less than my food or rent.
Here's How [Facebook] Messed with Your [Voting] Feed in 2012
Terence McKenna, someone who knew a lot about both hallucinogens and shamanism, didn't think so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spdxWhKxpF8
How would the remaining cartel members cause harm to the defector by badmouthing him?

If the guy is selling X for half the cartel price, and can point to the cartel members and tell people how they've been screwed by them, what do people care aboit what the cartel scum is saying anymore? Nothing. They'll just buy X for 50% cheaper. You know you would too.

Who are trashing the planet? Ordinary people, or big corporations who've paid politicians off to let them pollute? What about militaries all over the world? Do you really think ordinary people are the problem here, or govts the solution? Really?
I have loved working with this chip because the paralelism is so simple. Each processor works at a consistent speed no matter what. In low level robotics, timings is crucial. You can have one core positioning a bunch of servos, another core sampling ultrasound, another doing serial connections etc. For a cheap, simple chip it worked very well for a lot of robots I have built. I have used an Ardiuno Mega on a robot and while Arduinos have a lot going for them, it is difficult to control many things at the same time.

The problrm is that this chip hasn't really improved in seven years. Now the alternative is things like a Raspberry PI or other boards with cheap ARM processors which are much more powerful. A Prop is still great for I/O.
> 'Preposterous'? Really? It's - what - 6 years since Prop 8 went through; evidently a debate on this matter was not preposterous to Californians then. And it's only 18 years since DOMA, which made this tortuous state-by-state guerrilla war necessary. And it's only 28 years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM. That's just the States - see elsewhere in this thread re India; in Britain we had Section 28 on the books until recently, and got equal marriage (sort of) last year.

Don't forget gay sex being illegal in the US up until 2003.
We've seen how separate but equal plays out.
> The biggest step is admitting to yourself that you're different.
I'm straight, so I probably don't get it. So I might be wrong. But it feels like that's the wrong way to go about it. I see gays and lesbians regularly in public places and they don't seem too rare to me. Instilling this feeling of being different may only make it harder for people. Your sexual orientation shouldn't make you feel different. No matter whom you're attracted to, there are a lot of people out there who are attracted to the same.
> I can't believe that anybody would be so naive to believe that Brendan wasn't forced out.

I'm using facts to reach the conclusion that Brendan Eich wasn't forced out of his job. Your argument boils down to "Ahh, come on!".

Guess who wins? (SPOILER ALERT: Not you.)
I was wondering about this. Is there the potential it could cause the TV to throw an error?
Honestly Kotlin has 80% of the complexity of Scala, 20% of the functionality, almost no library ecosystem and 0 stable releases. I don't know why so many people consider it a serious choice.

If you want java with type inference you can use Xtend they have had many stable releases and it has excellent tool support.
Another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8536412
A declaration of love to emails! Original but very true comparison. Mail will always be the base and the best way to communicate
Somehow you failed to address my point about rulers, by the way.
Easy to understand, really like the help walkthough style too. Nice job.
Almost. The phone can do the TTS on the fly, but it can't calibrate itself without server-aggregated data. So it needs to send off SOME voice captures to central in order to work at peak performance.
Yeah, nothing good has ever come from people and groups acting out of self-interest. All societal advances have been due to people acting from their souls.
Pretty smart generalization!
I've noticed Google Maps has been getting really bad recently too. It seems every quarter I notice features I used disappearing, it taking more clicks to do anything, and basic functionality like loading the search points on the map barely working (since they moved to these new card search results and you have to scramble to get the map you want).

There are some good replacements out there, at least, like City Mapper.
Would this be useful for viewing pictures in the oculus?

Could it be combined with some kind of depth sensor like the kinect then you could actually move around in your pictures.
Douglas Hofstadter-Intertwined Patterns of Integers&Patterns OfThought Processes
Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday
Rather than the mushrooms causing your depression, they may have exposed it, allowing you to continue to develop and be aware of parts of your experience that you'd previously not been able to feel. That you went through that, came out of it, and now feel whole, sounds like a wonderful thing.
The Apple-Samsung War Is Over
We've been working on https://github.com/scala/scala-abide. Our aim is to provide a nice platform for others to develop and distribute style checking rules. We (the core scalac devs) intend to focus on keeping the abide platform up to date with the compiler, letting the community evolve the set of rules.

Due to resource constraints, we haven't made a big push in advertising it yet, but we're happy to work with you if you'd like to start implementing rules. Have a look at recent PRs for some examples.
> Currently there is definitely a case where there are too many calls in Rust that will just panic.

So, as a newcomer to rust, how can I identify which calls could blow up my single-task app? The docs on println! (http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/macro.println!.html) say nothing about this.

I could use task::try everywhere (http://doc.rust-lang.org/guide-tasks.html#handling-task-pani...), but I'd prefer to have an indication of which functions are pure and cannot error (modulo bugs).
Swift optionals made simple
I agree that this is Twitter's best feature. It's very easy to find and reach out to almost any person or organization.

It's easier than looking up a phone number, because you don't need to search through piles of "contact us" pages. It's also lighter and less cumbersome than email.

I just wish it was easier to send private messages. Often I don't want my customer support communications to be massively public.
I think I'd be more interested in Haskell-- than Kotlin; I am not a fan of statically dispatched OO language implementations. I am (perhaps unsurprisingly, given my employer) much more a fan of Smalltalk derived languages when writing in an OO style.
How is this not a false dichotomy? The author presents it as "We can either have IRC communities and Facebook groups where everyone agrees with each other all the time or gets banned or we can have an uncontrolled twitter where people might disagree with me in ways I can't control" Both have existed very comfortably for a significant amount of time.

I think (along with hundreds of millions of other users) that there's a lot of value behind a broadcast platform like twitter, and I've made some really important connections on it. It seems arrogant to dismiss that because it doesn't enable the exact types of communication the author wants to have (that are addressed by the other platforms he explicitly mentions).

This is a clickbait article headline for the author's blog to get more attention, if he felt this strongly about communities, conversations, and against twitter he wouldn't disable comments, and tweet about the article.

"This screwdriver is so bad at putting nails in the wall!! We should get rid of screwdrivers!"
Right, the point is we still have a choice in who represents us, or what appears to be the illusion of a choice.
Why did you not address a key point of the comment you were replying to, which was that income taxes allow taxation to correlate with how well one is able to carry the burden? It would be nice (and helpful to the overall signal-to-noise ratio) if we all here talked to each other rather than at each other.

Two points on the topic of gas taxes: (1) While it is perhaps still true that the internet is not entirely privately funded (is it?), I'd be interested in actual numbers. Most likely, the public spending on cables is ridiculously tiny compared to the public spending on roads. (2) In some (many?) countries, gas taxes are also justified by environmental and sustainability concerns: they provide an economic incentive to reduce fuel consumption. I don't see a similar concern with mere bandwidth usage. An environmentalist may bring up the power consumption of data centres, but that is a slightly different issue: bandwidth used does not always correlate with compute power used, and so it is still no justification for an internet tax.
“In particular, Facebook has studied how changes in the news feed seen by its users—the constant drip-drip-drip of information shared by friends that is heart of their Facebook experience—can affect their level of interest in politics and their likelihood of voting. For one such experiment, conducted in the three months prior to Election Day in 2012, Facebook increased the amount of hard news stories at the top of the feeds of 1.9 million users. According to one Facebook data scientist, that change—which users were not alerted to—measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout.”
The chinese manufacturers (huawei, xiaomi, lenovo) are eating everybody's lunch, but Apple's.
It's a shame to see Sony these days. Growing up Sony was the cool/cutting edge electronics company. Now it's so disjointed. I feel they need new leadership at Sony hq
We keep having to tell people that having no ruleRs doesn't mean having no ruleS. If by "no system" you mean "freedom", that's fine with me. Sure, we need rules and negative consequences for breaking them, but that does not require rulers.
ISPs Shouldn’t Block Content. Yes, That Includes Ads
Nice, but better to link to the canonical (and more lightweight) URL for arxiv entries:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.7921
Escape from Corporate America – Be an Entrepreneur
I wonder about a fusion rocket drive, like Larry Niven wrote about (not the Bussard, the reaction drives).

There are two big problem in fusion energy research: plasma leaks, and high-energy neutrons. It seems to me that a fusion rocket answers both questions: just throw it all out the back. And hydrogen is abundant and cheap.
Last I checked, Facebook doesn't work at all unless you are logged in.

So I can now tell Facebook my personal information and a list of associates securely, which it will then promptly share with any government interested.

I guess its the best way yet to illustrate the basic problem with Tor (no technology in the world can protect you from giving the bad guys your home address), but can't shake the feeling that this makes an utter mockery of the idea behind Tor.
> The essential confusion regards the nature of marriage. It's not about a couple (or group) and their feelings towards one another; it's about the formation of a family and the production of a new generation.

I bet you're hard at work trying to deny infertile couples the ability to marry.

Even if you were right, which you aren't, tradition is not a compelling argument. We've done away with a lot of stupid traditions, like slavery and dowry.

Even if you were right, which you aren't, gay couples can adopt.

I could go on, but why? Your arguments are tired and baseless.
This is a good example of why patent law is broken. I can understand patenting manufacturing process or designs, but you shouldn't be able to patent and idea such as an online shopping cart or a certain way to film something.
> Your phone doesn't have the processing power to do speech-to-text on the fly, so it sends it to a server to do it.

This is what I don't get. I used to play with Microsoft's SpeechAPI back in 2007 and it was pretty decent at real-time speech recognition - almost perfect, if you limited your program to a pre-defined command grammar. It was all done completely off-line, real-time on a machine that had much less processing power than your average smartphone of today. I don't see anything inherent in speech recognition that would require so much processing power that the phone can't handle it real-time. The only reason I see is that continuous moving of everything to cloud because it's easier to capture revenue stream that way.
Millions of websites hit by Drupal hack attack
I’ve Got All This PHP. Now What? – Parsing PHP in Go
Less roughly 38k GBP ~= 61k USD. It's been a good half-decade since it was two dollars to the pound.
"Users may have the ability to disable data collection, but it comes at a cost. The device will not function properly or allow the use of its high-tech features."

In that case, the best thing to do is to return the TV to the retailer explaining exactly why you are returning it. If the result of disabling a possibly intrusive feature is as bad as this person suggests, it's a broken TV anyway.
Yeah, my first thought was, "Surely, someone can make an emacs wordstar-mode for this guy".
You're not looking in the right places. If you're looking at something that is a boring part of the business where reliable, predictable outputs are the priority, you'll get nothing.

In areas with high impact areas where transformation of the business is a priority, enterprise moves fast and can drive innovation.
> But, These days those couples who have the morality of not committing such inhumane acts don't even bother to have a second kid if the first kid is a girl. While I see couples who have boy as a first kid generally go in for a second kid.

I think you switched "boy" and "girl" there.
Hackers and Founders Mumbai November Meetup
Yup. I have many happy memories of working in HyperCard as a child—it's what got me into programming. I don't know what a kid nowadays would start on; JavaScript really is too much for a beginner IMHO.
The failure mode of a launch loop is really bad though. The constant power requirement is a pretty big problem and the solutions to loss of power aren't that promising. Compared to the elevator where there's a larger safety margin.
Official: New Office for Mac
Vainglory
Is it not selling in the US? Z3 compact looks like the only phone that kinda doesn't suck, and not too huge (like all the other modern phones today). What is the situation with alternate ROMs for this phone?

I was going to buy an older Nexus 4 (cheap, fast enough, not so huge, updates from Google, no extra crapware), but reconsidered when I tried the original HTC One mini in store: it felt actually nice, even if just a little bit on the biggish side (Nexus 5 is much bulkier). Alas, unlike its' bigger sibling, it's laggy with HTC's own software, doesn't come in Google Play edition, doesn't have stable CyanogenMod ROM and battery life is inadequate (I haven't bothered to learn mad battery saving skillz yet). So I'm considering 'upgrading; to the original HTC One GPE, as a stopgap measure.

How's your experience with Z3 Compact?
You can not expect them to understand the ins and outs of every purchase. You judge a society by how it looks after it's people. You are arguing to leave them to the wolves.
That is a failure of marketing agreements. I just ordered a z3 compact, from the UK. Sony just doesn't have any marketing partnership with the major US carriers (though that is changing with Verizon, somewhat). Years ago, everyone carried sony-ericsson phones; now you have to go to one of seven stores to even see the products.
And how about older couples, past the childbearing age? Should they not be allowed to marry? Should couples be forced to divorce after 50?

This preposterous argument about 'its about producing a new generation' is sophomoric and lazy. It doesn't stand up to a few seconds of reflection. Yet I hear it again and again - its even part of the Mormon official line.
Income tax is the exception to that. We tax income not to change behaviour but to not change behaviour; if we need x amount of revenue, a progressive tax on income is the way to collect that that has the least impact on the populace.
Great looking service