skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are three areas where I think R is the clear winner:

1) An IDE for data analysis/programming: RStudio

2) Easy way to turn your analyses into reports: knitr

3) Easy way to turn your analyses into interactive webapps: shiny

(I also think R wins on visualisation and data manipulation, but I'm biased ;)
Here's a port of inferno (a Plan9 derivative idea) running on android phones called HellaPhone:

https://bitbucket.org/floren/inferno/wiki/Home
I love checking out very early versions of projects. You often get to see the essence before the real world came in and ruined the beauty of it.
Things that are likely to trip up new R programmers:

* Function arguments are always passed by value. Objects are copied if they are modified in a function.

* Function arguments are lazy evaluated.

* Watch out for automatic factor conversion when importing data. R will display your string data as text, but behind the scenes it will treat it as an integer.

* R is slow. Really, really slow. All your intensive calculations should be handled by libraries written in C, Fortran or some other compiled language. Your R code should be mostly for glueing things together.
Spring brags about having 1.3 million lines of code. That's a security nightmare right there, and that amount of code is nowhere close to being necessary for a web API. No one person can get a handle on all that code.
Yes, but after having felt that drive several dozen times and actually implemented over a dozen of them, I've learned that:

1. It will take about an order of magnitude more time to implement than I expect. Always.

2. I will end up hating my past self's decision-making abilities roughly 60% of the way through.

3. The eventual reaction will range from "WTF? Who wants this?" to "Oh, that's mildly interesting" to "Wow, that's pretty useful, or at least really cool", with each category having roughly an order of magnitude fewer instances than the last.

As a result, I've gotten much more careful about what I actually start implementing, and really try to sleep on ideas and see if I (or someone else) really needs them before I dive in. A lot of the time, I get a great new idea that I'm crazy excited about, and then after a couple weeks I'm like "Meh, that's not really all that great an idea after all. I can solve the same problem in a much simpler way without writing any code."
If I had touched any of this stuff in years I might treat it that way in part (after expressing annoyance), but I'm not currently involved - my ssh key probably doesn't even work anymore, but if it did I'd still go through the current maintainers like anyone else because I haven't been keeping up with the latest.

The current people doing this kind of work deserve non-abusive informed criticism. It isn't OK to post a long diatribe of BS and then expect people to take it as if it were a helpful bug report. It isn't helpful. It's jackassery and unacceptable and this kind of abuse has done more damage to Linux than anyone knows.

It is entirely OK to ask questions or file bugs without sending patches. Just don't be an ass about it like this article was.
I think R is a well-designed language. It definitely has its quirks (what language doesn't?), but by-and-large they are problems with the standard library, not the language. This is admittedly a subtle distinction, but it's much easier to fix problems with the standard library than it is with the language.

Three aspects of the language that make R particularly well suited for statistical programming are:

1) Missing values built in at a fundamental level.

2) Metaprogramming capabilities. The best way to solve many categories of data analysis problems is to design a domain specific language which allows you to easily combine independent pieces. R's incredible flexibility is great for this.

3) Fundamentally vectorised and functional. This allows you to elegantly express many common data analysis tasks.
The Dancing Traffic Light [video]
If you're still using Google Code for any projects I'd really recommend moving it to another service at this point unless you have a compelling reason to stay. There's some good evidence at this point that's leading me to believe Google Code is next on the chopping block for dead Google services.
I'm pretty sure an HTTPS GET request to http[s]://iweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/handbrake/0.10.0/HandBrake-0.10.0-MacOSX.6_GUI_x86_64.dmg would be pretty easy to identify as a HandBrake download. The resource requested is not hidden.
I'm seriously considering Go. One of the reasons is that it's very simple, and the other is that I've noticed a lot of the best developers are chomping at the bit to work with it.

When you're trying to draw talented people to your project, it's a lot easier if you're working with something they consider to be a "well-engineered" technology.
Geologic Atlas of the Moon
Great to see the original command set, and the title of course: "GIT - the stupid content tracker"
It's not a random choice, it's a well established practice, even for non-European regions.

al-Kāshī was born in Persia in 1380:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamsh%C4%ABd_al-K%C4%81sh%C4%AB

That period in Persian history is in Wikipedia named "Middle Ages (652–1501)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#Middle_Ages_.28652.E2.80.9...

That name ("medieval", meaning simply "middle ages") is also used to denote a period in the history of Japan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan#Medieval_Japan...

"The medieval or "feudal" period of Japanese history, dominated by the powerful regional families (daimyō) and the military rule of warlords (shōgun), stretched from 1185 to 1573/1600"
Or try "Advanced R", http://adv-r.had.co.nz. It's my attempt to explain the language in such a way that programmers from other languages can appreciate the beauty and elegance behind the quirkiness.
3rd Eye on the move! Our home page just got gloriously remodeled!
"It's far from perfect but so's OS X."

That's a ridiculous comparison. One is "imperfect" due to open source failings and a wildly divergent UI, the other is "imperfect" due to (I suppose) some design decisions and the fact that Apple charges money for things and provides restricted hardware support.

Please articulate your perceived problems with OSX.
"Nobody has found a reliable metric to determine the quality of art, not even close, other than what others are freely willing to pay for it."

"You've never met people whose stated opinion did not match their behavior? I find that rather normal."

Are you retracting the freely paying method as a way to determine quality then? You're claiming then that there's no way at all to determine quality?
The closest equivalent to virtualenv for R is packrat: http://rstudio.github.io/packrat/. It doesn't (yet) support different R versions for different projects, but that's on the roadmap.
The real questions to answer for each idea are

"who wants this?"

"how are they going to hear about it?"

"does it have any sort of viral push?"

"do participants have some sort of incentive to participate?"

I keep spending months building "great" ideas that don't have good enough answers to these questions.
Why not just use lynx/links/w3m?
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Following the tradition of sports, I propose that commit id e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290 be officially retired.
Representing trees in SQLite
> The resource requested is not hidden.

Your GET request, and the server's reply, is encrypted.

The hostname of your request might leak in SNI, or if your DNS lookup was insecure.

It is also plausible that an eavesdropper could make a solid guess as to what you downloaded by counting bytes, but that's obviously not worth much.
I would be really tempted if I can find a computer capable of running it on the cheap (student). I think my current desktop may work, if I remove the video card and use the integrated graphics...
Six-State Memristor Opens Door to Weird Computing
>>It will take about an order of magnitude more time to implement than I expect. Always.

That is very true. I'm really trying now to hone the implementation time down. How rapidly can I get the core built and out there?

The problem is, as I become a better programmer it is not decreasing implementation time because I simply creep out the scope.
Imagine playing chess while blindfolded. Now imagine playing against 33 people simultaneously while being blindfolded and winning 29 games and losing none. This was done by American Grandmaster Timur Gareev, see: http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12187/709
To do this you have keep 33 chessboards in your mind simultaneously, and track the movement of 32 pieces on each board.
Node.js going mobile
> Perhaps most programmers have an above-average talent for programming

I believe "average" was in the context of all programmers, not all people, making this logically impossible.
>tl;dr: how does elm work?

;)
How does one view the actual conversation between the two? All I see is one tweet from ELon to johns and a bunch of random people commenting on that tweet
This post seems to be hinting that this is potential security issue, but I'm not sure how it would be. All I can imagine this buying you is the ability to serve JS from someone else's domain, but the domain JS is served from doesn't change its security privileges; that's based on the domain of the HTML file the JS is included in.
So it's organic and ill-defined . . . and people are parsing it. Lovely :-)
You clearly don't understand how HTTPS works.
Rails's initial commit
Can you tell me something which dbus solves but something over http cannot? By this I mean in practice and not what it can possibly do. I have used it KDE and network manager and the like. They are all better off with rest style APIs actually.
VirtualBox 4.3.20 released
You may find the work of Kerala mathematicians on Taylor series of sin, cos, and arctan quite intriguing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_school_of_astronomy_and_...

They happen to be at the center of a minor controversy and semantic games of what exactly is Calculus because they were doing these series approximations routinely about a couple of centuries before the European recognition of the Taylor series or calculus for that matter.
I wouldn't call 2013 a blowout, considering that it ended at the most likely final score based on their ratings at the time. Carlsen was 95 points higher than Anand, and 50 points higher than Anand's best ever.

Assuming a 70% draw chance, there was a 22.6% chance of the match ending 3-0-7. 17.9% chance of 2-0-9, 13.6% chance of 4-0-5. There was only about a 15-18% chance Anand would win a game.

I think people overestimated Anand's chances last year because he had a positive score against Carlsen going into the match, and that underestimated Carlsen because it included games long before Carlsen reached his present level. Or they thought wrongly that Carlsen would not perform as well in match play as he does in tournament play.
https://www.youtube.com/user/React

They give kids, teenagers and elders things to see how they react. Oculus Rift, old NES, computers, cameras. Pretty entertaining.
The article is talking about a specific "string" cheese packaged in individual serving sizes (frequently seen in children's lunches) and specifically references it being originally based on another stringy cheese (mozzarella) with a much longer history.
Seeing things like this, and others in the thread, honestly depresses me. I've wasted months of my life building in Minecraft, huge structures that I can do nothing but look at, alone. Months where I lost social interaction and self maintenance. Nothing good ever comes of these worlds, and they are self destructive to their creators.

Minecraft, Reddit, Imgur, Facebook, all things you will eventually have to block from your life if you want to achieve anything real. Don't let it consume you. The only winning move is not to play.
Or maybe do things in moderation? A little HN is great, a little Facebook is great, unwinding during lunch on Reddit is great for a laugh... but if you let things consume your life it's like watching TV for days on end.
How about a surface pro 3?
Is there really a notable portion of HN users who are living in blissful ignorance of Google's business model?

I understand writing such articles for general interest, but not sure, like the parent said about serial re-hashing of the same for the audience here.
Why Quality Assurance Matters in Software Development
No, that's not too obvious. As has already been pointed out, you're going to need a circle the size of a building if you want to get more than 2-3 digits of precision (assuming that you can make your measurements with millimeter accuracy). How are you going to verify that your inscribed circle has no serious imperfections? Try making a building-sized circle on the ground using string -- it will be off of true by much more than a millimeter, I assure you.
Scroll up. The conversation is above the linked tweet.
Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret: AngelList is disrupting the hiring industry
I might stand corrected, BUT:

"The Middle Ages was a period in Western history spanning the time from the 5th to the 16th century"[0]

and

"Middle Ages, the European historical period from the 5th to the 15th century (476-1453). By analogy, the term is also used to refer to periods in nations outside of Europe having similarities in social and military development"[0]

Iran, even during that period of Islamic rule , is far from similar to Europe on both the social and military level.

0.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages_(disambiguation)
Paulson's brother worked for Lehman Brothers, and it doesn't take a lot of reading between the lines to see that this was a strong factor in why the company did not receive any support.

In contrast, concerns about nepotism didn't apply to the relationship between the Treasury and other banks, although the Treasury seemed sensitive to Goldman (JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon got better treatment). Personally, I think the Treasury and the Fed did a good job in response to the crisis, and that Congress abdicated almost all responsibility for dealing with the crisis, leaving the financial response dominated by monetary policy (which by definition favors the financial sector by promoting unequal access to terms of credit) instead of a more egalitarian process.
I've run into similar issues. It seems to be the draw speed that is very slow. Each 80char line takes a good 10ms to render, which when working with a fast command that outputs a lot of text... The command will have been done for thirty seconds while eshell is still sputtering along showing output.

This is especially noticible with my on-modified-run-tests script - if there is a long stack trace, often times it's faster to kill the task and start it again rather than letting it finish.
Go vote for the DartVM to be implmented
Starfish are dissolving up and down the West Coast
That's because I made it up. I'm just trying to narrow in - talking about the idea of material but not necessarily the type or color palette.
I'd say you're both right; it was a blowout, and people should have predicted it based on their ratings (and of course many did).
This is really frustrating. "venturedlife.com" links are now less trustworthy to me, because as far as I can tell, there is no direct route to the content that was supposed to be shared via link.

"Please use the password we sent to your email when you followed us and you will be able to access this episode." Cool. So I just sign up real quickly, and will have the password? Nope. No password sent. Just a confirmation email. Clicking through that confirmation, I'm able to access some content (not the content linked to here), but only the one about the Food Pantry in the Bronx. Which I'm sure is interesting, but isn't what I clicked through to read. And I'm still being urged to add my email, with a banner and "Sign up to read" button, unable to access any other content (none of which is about coliving in the bay, as far as I can tell).

Having watched the quick "about us" video: you're right, design matters. And the most important design is for the content (at least your free/viral content) to be available.
‘Serial,’ Podcasting’s First Breakout Hit, Sets Stage for More
If someone who pretty much exclusively uses IDLE for Python code editing isn't the target audience, who is?

And a text editor for Python code isn't "perfectly good". There are things that IDLE can do that text editors cannot. Name completion based on modules loaded, that sort of thing.
Strider Open Source Continuous Integration & Deployment Demo YouTube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whVH24yQSHI
I'm all for your contempt of corporate network security policies honestly, but I think they're typically trying to stop most users that are not particularly sophisticated and basically assume that anyone with half a brain will get around eventually. That's why audit policies are much more rigorously enforced than network tunneling restrictions, for example.

I regularly defeat most policies if I really have to get work done but the real deterrent, sadly, is for employees to be fearful of getting caught and having to deal with the immense mountain of bullshit paperwork and training that is likely to follow. Completely meaningless paperwork filling is a form of disciplinary action in my opinion.
On the very page you link at the moment ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages_(disambiguation) ) it is also explicitly stated that the term is used for other regions too:

"Medieval or Mediaeval (the adjectival form of "Middle Ages") may refer to: Middle Ages, the European historical period from the 5th to the 15th century (476-1453).

By analogy, the term is also used to refer to periods in nations outside of Europe having similarities in social and military development."

So using it for other regions is common. One of these regions is actually Iran. I already gave link that the term is actually used in history of Persia (today known as Iran, the page in Wikipedia is named "Iran," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#Middle_Ages_.28652.E2.80.9... ) for the period 652–1501.
The word choice "blowout" is arguably strong, but I do agree that this year's match was much less one-sided than last year's. This one was even until the very last game, while Carlsen had a good lead after only Game 6 last year.
Thread from 829 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4395014
Servo by Mozilla: https://github.com/servo/servo
Nobody needs this correction, I hope, but to be clear, it's !== -1 that we're replacing with ~. Then again, maybe this stands as a valid reason to be explicit in the first place. ;-)
Similarly for How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, which is an article I want to link to people, but when I check that it actually applies I often abort.
Is a mozzarella stick basically just a deep fried string cheese? If I lived before 1976 would I have been deprived of this artery clogging wünderfood?
We used the Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD by Wertz, Everett, and Puschell for my senior capstone project.

It's pretty comprehensive about all things involved about space missions.

You would specifically want to look into its chapter about launch vehicles since that is what SpaceX does (they're basically launch-to-orbit-as-a-service). Dragon is their payload capsule while the Falcon is the launch vehicle (the rocket).
I do this as well. It really should be more widely broadcast.

(I've also spent some time thinking about how it's kind of a hack, and what we can do to make it better: http://akkartik.name/post/wart-layers)
Jerry (ChessNetwork) will stream sometimes (typically once a month) and will normally get 3-4k viewers. He normally plays speed chess, vocalizing his thoughts as he plays. Sometimes he will play several timed games at once.

He's an interesting personality. I enjoy watching him. He did the same thing during the last grandmaster match of Carlsen v. Anand.
Every commit id is pretty much automatically retired. The odds of collisions in our lifetime are pretty small.

Or am I over-thinking it?
Please try the Github page instead, which stridercd.com should really be redirecting to anyway: https://github.com/Strider-CD/strider
21 lessons from Michael Jordan for entrepreneurs
It is quite easy to calculate how much energy can be stored and how much power can be generated for how long.

The potential energy of a mass in joule is simply

m * g * h

where m is in kilogram, g is 9.8 m/s^2, h is the height in metre.

So, for example, 100 ton lifted 100 metre gives 98MJ.

That's 1MW for 98 seconds.

To make this very concrete my house uses, in the summer, about 40kW-hr per day for water heating, cooking, and the rather large amount of computer equipment we have.

That is 40000 * 3600 = 144MJ. So assuming that your solar power system can supply that over a 12 hour period we need to store half of it, 72MJ, to keep
us going after dark. Your ten metre deep hole would need a 734 ton weight: 735000 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 10 m = 72MJ
Ipsin is most likely referring to the ubiquitous kraft string cheese or comparable products popular among kids.
Luxury Watchmakers Target Pirate Smartwatch Faces
If you've been tasked with leading this team... isn't this what you should be doing?

Also, care to let us know what requirements Node fails?
Quite a chess following in India. And likely that many were watching because of V. Anand.
Here's more recent Nakamura vs. computer play: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=84631

That was a four game match, played at G/45 with a 30 second increment. Nakamura's opponent was the latest developer build of Stockfish, running on an 8 core 3 GHz Mac Pro. Stockfish had no opening book or endgame tablebase.

For the first two games (which, for some reason, are listed as games 2 and 3 at the above link), Nakamura had the assistance of an older version of Rybka (about 200 points less strong than Stockfish on the computer rating lists) running on a 2008 MacBook. For the remaining two games, Nakamura played without computer assistance.
HTTPS works by first creating a TLS connection, then sending the HTTP request and response through it. Thus, the request (including the path) is encrypted.
So using it for other regions is common Given that these regions are "having similarities in social and military development".

I was suggesting that the use of the term may not have been accurate given the fact Iran was different from Europe.

Nonetheless, Al-Kāshī(1380-1429) lived under Timurid dynasty (1370–1507)[0] succeeding Iran's "Middle Ages" making him thus, not an "Iranian medieval" astronomer.

0.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iran#Timurid_dynasty...
I'm also in this boat - as a former co-oper, I'm quite interested in reading about "Coliving in the Bay" - but I haven't been able to figure out how even after giving them an email address.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was a joke.
I'd be careful about overvaluing the mystique of the human element. In classical chess computers are absolutely, positively dominating humans.

There was a time when perhaps the top, top grandmasters (2750+) could handwave about understanding positional motifs better and maybe, occasionally, have a chance of winning, but those days are over. Engines routinely get into the 30 and 40 ply (15 and 20 moves ahead) range in under a minute these days, running on off-the-shelf hardware. Whatever advantages humans could have once claimed to have are annihilated by the pure depth of vision an engine has into a position.

Nakamura's win, while amusing, was at 3 0 time control, shuffling pieces hoping for a win on time. You couldn't get me to bet on him vs Rybka (or Komodo, Shredder or Stockfish) at normal time controls.
The last sentence was the most important; the rest should be ignored. Have patience, perseverance, and you'll do anything.

Or, converge onto interesting problems and fail gloriously; the only way to do anything of worth.

The post comparing this to dentistry is precisely what I was thinking, except nowhere near as hilarious. I wish I was intelligent enough to write a Markov algorithm for logic that paralleled reasoning in such a way automatically. Thank you for that.