skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2014?
I debated whether it was too early in December to ask this, but I'm interested in what book(s) changed your life in 2014. I ask because I'm going through something of a personal and professional renaissance and my book of the year was the same as fraqed's when s/he asked the same question in December 2013 [1].

My reading list for 1H15 is a bit vague and wooly right now, so I'm interested in your responses.

For completeness, this could be considered an extension to a previous post of mine [2], but I'm not looking to solve any problem, either perceived or otherwise.

Thank you in advance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975638

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8673576

(Edited for typo and formatting)
The Infamous Spanish Pink Pigeon
I live in London and I love the rain & grey skies. I cycle 15 minutes to work, but sometimes take public transport too. I feel plenty productive in this city, and if I were to start my own business, I'd have no problems being here.

I think it really depends on who you are, not where you are.
Stock Trades at the Speed of Light
You might find this interesting:

http://vimeo.com/39346092
crowdsourcing is only valuable for a short period of time to my understanding. Excuse my ignorance to anything money related
Even most large game companies are supported by one or two franchises. It's always been that way. Activision was supported by Tony Hawk, then Call of Duty, then they bought Blizzard and did Skylanders. Without Blizzard (which is very autonomous) Activision is the Call of Duty / Skylanders company. They understand the principle very well.
How Brazil Plans to Teach a Million People English Before the Rio Olympics
Living in Detroit's Packard Plant
If you like this, check out the whole series here:

http://vimeo.com/thismustbe

Prime's pretty cool, too:

http://vimeo.com/35965635
Seems like the hipster solitude didn't work wonders for their proofreading: I stumbled upon http://www.thebluehouse.io/month-long-program/ only to be greeted by: "HOW MUCH DOES IT COSTS?". I only went there because the main homepage took ~20 seconds to load. Perils of seclusion...
It's not a one size fits all situation. Depends on your product (online/offline), on the stage your product is at, etc. The good thing is you can alternate being in big tech hub, isolating yourself in small village, challenging yourself in a city you don't know etc
I agree with you as regards consistency, but I would welcome a move away from tipping culture. If a taxi ride is going to cost x+10%, just charge me x+10% in the first place. Same for restaurants, barbers, etc.

With Lyft I suppose it makes sense since they are, supposedly, sharing rides rather than a taxi (though it sure feels different from rideshares on Zimride or Craigslist). Even so, tipping is annoying and confusing.
Klarna – Simplifying buying and invoicing
We built the v1.0 of our startup from Taghazout (we lived there for 10 months) so it's definitely possible ;)
Sounds nice and fun for a short break. I think the copy needs some work though, which might relate into tweaking how they target their market. For instance: "Getting far away from your family" <=== If you have a family, that's not how it works. You signed up for the responsibility.
Where's the battery? And how big would said battery need to be if this thing is running wi-fi in order to get "good" battery life?

What good are all of these "things" that let you not learn to program in C or care about low level details if they get poor battery life or if they are insanely expensive?

Why wouldn't I just buy an Arduino and a wi-fi/ble shield?
The tools i'm offering are directed toward those without a job i really can't expect much and won't ask them to donate money they need for the website. I was hoping there is a service out there somewhere that would cover the expenses of community service directed web applications
This is a great tool. I work on Unix (without X) from Windows and so often have to ftp files about just to use Meld, which is my usual preferred diff tool.

But I can use icdiff in a PuTTY session with a coloured xterm and get a sensible and clear diff comparison.

Thanks! I really appreciate this!
Or an ESP8266. My guess is that the board will be comparatively expensive.
Hey, I'm the writer :) We actually decided to open this space after meeting a lot of cool startups who did. In this village we had TechStar Seattle and Startup Chile alumi Maptia and media darling Chui. And there are more around the world. Check out NomadList, and Levels.io
Meanwhile, in Vietnam: Uber vs. GrabTaxi vs. Vinasun vs. Mai Linh vs. EasyTaxi
Here's[1] an open-source book dedicated to "this".

[1]: https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/tree/master/this%...
AWS’ New Reserved Instances: What They Are and How You Benefit
Zeds is an open source Windows application that quite simply helps you get to sleep at the most efficient time, based on the time you need to get up in the morning.

Primarily based on the 90 minute sleep cycle theory, Zeds will calculate the best bedtimes for you and allow you to select which one you'd like (while showing you how much sleep you'll get) - it'll then wake you up by playing an alarm.
Zeds will also take into account the length of time you need to fall asleep, notifying you in the task area of the Windows desktop 15 minutes (by default) before your bedtime so that you can get into bed and start your sleep cycles at the correct time.

All of this is configurable using the settings screen so that you can adjust Zeds to your exact requirements.

Source: https://github.com/woodss/zeds
Reporting for worship: http://pocorgtfo.samdb.xyz/
Another way of thinking about it is that it's kinda like Function.prototype.call is being used implicitly at the call site to set the 'context' (the 'this' value):

// assuming in each case
var o = {}
var o2 = {}
var fn = function(){}

// 1. bare function call
fn() // this == undefined in strict mode, global in non strict mode.

// 2. calling with Function.prototype.call
fn.call(o) // this == o

// 3. 'method' call (calling an object's function property)
o2.fn = fn
o2.fn() // this == o2
// equivalent to
fn.call(o2)

// 4. calling object's function property with Function.prototype.call
o2.fn = fn
o2.fn.call(o) // this == o

// 5. new
var o3 = new fn() // this = o3
// equivalent to
var o3 = Object.create(fn.prototype)
fn.call(o3)

// 6. calling function bound with Function.prototype.bind
var fn2 = fn.bind(o)
fn2() // this == o
// equivalent to
var fn2 = function(){ fn.call(o) }
fn2()

// 7. calling object function property which is a bound function
o2.fn = fn.bind(o)
o2.fn() // this == o
// equivalent to
o2.fn = function(){ fn.call(o) }
o2.fn()

Basically you should think of functions (and 'methods') as not being intrinsically bound (as in binding-of-'this' bound) to anything.

If you think of a 'method' (function property) as being bound an object purely by being 'attached' to it then you are gonna have a bad time. Instead, think of binding of 'this' as usually only happening at call time, to the thing you are 'calling the function off of'.

In reference to case 1 (bare function call), this is the same behaviour which occurs when as defining an anonymous function inside a function which has 'this' set. Just don't use 'this' in this case, it doesn't make sense. Defining a _this or self variable in the parent function is the standard practice to deal with this case, or in ES6, Coffeescript etc. you have the => fat arrow to implicitly do that for you.
You should use handicap. Handicap is absolutely normal in Go. Coming from South Korea, I was shocked to find that some western players avoid playing Go with handicap.
People from Delhi are searching for all sorts of reasons or way to make rape hard. They should instead understand why people are doing it ? It is sadistic mind of people due to which these crimes are happening not because of uber or police.

Instead of blaming the man and society, they want to blame everything else... Shame that Delhi is also becoming rape capital of India.
Uber should make a social media website, that way nobody would care. All kind of shady business or lack of ethics are completely forgotten, as long as people get to post selfies and show off their socioeconomic status to other losers lile them.
Interesting, certainly makes etymological sense.
I never realized that, in Israel the two terms are used pretty interchangably. Wikipedia says CVs are much more comprehensive in some countries, esp. North America.
Not documenting it makes it harder to escape the scrutiny by rewriting your patent applications. It is far easier to game such a system if you know precisely how it works.
it depends on the market share. Windows is the most used OS, that's why you see virus on it. I heard OSX started getting some after becoming popular once again a few years back.

As long as linux isn't too mainstream, it will be less a problem. But you could still use ClamAV if you share some files with other computers.
A mix of both is optimal IMHO and even somewhat dream-like situation but today (more than ever before) it IS possible.
We're in Canterbury and it's very much the same situation here. Small, historical, charming town, 1 hour from London on HS1, and large enough that we have a good few local clients.
Bounce Between Functions and Definitions in Emacs Lisp
I don't know how can you love cycling in the rain, considering that the bike needs cleaning afterwards.
Somewhere, buried deep inside this overwrought and pretentious article, is a much better and more insightful story. That story is probably The Bacchae by Euripides.
Those two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. Education is the way out of poverty. America provides more opportunities than most other countries.
Try using Google Scholar. Here's an example query for battery chemistry:

http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&q=battery+chemistry&b...
They seem to be selling a dystopia:

"Getting far away from your family, your friends, [...] Living close to the beach, and surfing or doing yoga, also helps decompressing after work, and avoiding burnout, and therefore staying productive"
Thanks for the article and sharing so much of your experience.
Hastings is also less than 18mi (or so) from the Long Man of Wilmington. Inspiration via hill figure? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Man_of_Wilmington
The Dot-Com Bust’s Worst Flops Were Actually Fantastic Ideas
Tackboard, Collaborate with Friends
“I’m not touching your precious robots!” you can feel the animosity in that one statement alone!
Living Like the Jetsons Closer Than Ever Thanks to Terrafugia
Apple’s Best Apps of 2014
Great book. I'm beginer in rails development and this is first book that geves answers to all my questions.
I'm not from Detroit so would it be possible for someone to provide references to any claims? People are just offering opinions. Having watched the news all my life, all I saw was that Detroit followed the auto industry, which did well when big cars did well.
You don't get to the airport an hour early? It doesn't take you a half hour to drive to the airport and park? No idea, I've never flown out of Boston, maybe Logan's closer to town than JFK is in NY. I'm just saying, because from my place in Manhattan getting to Penn is literally a five minute shot up 6th Ave.
Looks like nice cycling around there too...
All is perfect, until you need to hire more developers, and then find (almost) all of them live in big cites, and they're not willing to relocate to a place without theaters, bars, discos... probably a lot like the place the came from before living in the city ;)
> Reality is much too interesting to avoid it.

Some people do not take drugs to avoid reality. They take them to explore it. What one has to realize is that the experience we call "reality" is only a subjective image created by our minds. There is a chain of filters applied to everythings our sensors (eyes, ears, skin and so on) register. Drugs are able to influence those filters. Hence one might be able to see "reality" from a different point of view.
You could ask them to donate money after they find a job, as a way to keep the service running for the next person.
That's why you have -filter_script and -filter_complex_script options.
Math 101: A Reading list for life-long learners
Why we used Buffer's code, to copy their blog
I'm okay with this.

I'm in the process of getting a provisional patent for something fairly trivial, simply to make sure that the Principal Investigator for the project on this project doesn't take credit for it (before I get downvoted: the PI told me "I need a way to do this thing, and I have no idea how to do it" and I did all the R&D, paid for the prototyping, and I am volunteering my contributions in the first place).

I'm noticing that it is extremely unlikely that an actual human being will read my application, and would actually like to have it rejected for being trivial, because it'd mean some checking is going on.

I feel this is a mild abuse of the provisional patent system, but what can I do?

I wonder if anyone tried to patent the old Signetics write-only-memory, if it would go through? Someone patented the wheel in Australia a while ago...
BUT this allows for easier changing of the licensing.
Granted I'm not an expert, but I'm not confident that you could tell everything, at least not in the default configuration of desktop OSes without special auditing in place. Some stuff, sure.

> An IR firm would never tell you to just reimage a machine when you're dealing with an advanced attacker. They'd want to go through, use the tools they have to identify exactly what happened on the machine

Yes, I was talking more in the run-of-the-mill case sense, not regarding thorough forensic investigations. If you're actually going to investigate the incident deeper, you should at least get memory dumps, process dumps and an image of the machine and such. In my experience though, at most companies the SOP is just monitoring standard antivirus stuff and then when an infection comes up, it either gets automatically cleaned or someone goes over and fixes it with a manual scan or whatever. Which is completely inadequate.
Good to hear & good idea to make the range of days.
Tweeting Alone: Slacktivism and the Decline of Civic Engagement
Depending on what you build, you could get away with using free tier on a lot of hosting solutions, like Heroku.

In the past I've used Heroku for some charity websites, and they've been running well for years. If you do it well (caching etc), you could handle a lot of traffic with the free tier.
Shibecloud – the best from the comments of a Soundcloud track, dogefied
On this site they say there are 10 LISP primitives. The primitives are:

atom
quote
eq
car
cdr
cons
cond
lambda
label
apply

http://hyperpolyglot.wikidot.com/lisp#ten-primitives

Steve Yegge reckons there are seven or five:

Its part of the purity of the idea of LISP: you only need the seven (or is
it five?) primitives to build the full machine.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...

McCarthy had five:

atom
eq
car
cdr
cons

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf

McCarthy then added another four:

quote
cond
lambda
label

So according to McCarthy - the answer is nine.

See here for a more in depth discussion:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3482389/how-many-primitiv...
If that's the criterion, then move to Weymouth: it's less than 17 miles from the Cerne Abbas Giant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerne_Abbas_Giant
I've been using `dwdiff -c`, which admittedly doesn't do side-by-side: http://linux.die.net/man/1/dwdiff
Willing, capable, and nearby
I was actually wondering about something similar to this for a different venture (say something like Uber).

What we need to have is a constant source of income (through donations or other mechanisms). The expenditure will be of two types, Capex and Opex. Capex costs can be covered by the donations, as for Opex, the primary issue is of support and maintenance. For this, my thought was to use either something like MTurk for non-tech activities and something along the lines of open source software development for tech activities.

I think, the world may need such a kind of open model for businesses, a self-sustaining entity.
Casualties/war/violence did not start with the arrival of the Dutch as you are implying. Casualties/war/violence is part of human nature. For example there is clear evidence that the Bantus violently drove the Khoisan out of much of South Africa some 4000 years ago.

The long term trend is however that South Africa (and the rest of the world) is become less violent and more humane. For example slavery was abolished here in 1834.
For the prices: http://www.thebluehouse.io/month-long-program/

The white on yellow background isn't the best choice of colours.

Having been to Essaouira, I can only imagine Taghazout more relaxing.
In fact when Jobs first arrived back at Apple, "objects" was (apparently) http://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ still his intended way forward:

'The defining event of the Jobs 2.0 era relationship between Apple and Adobe was the creation and subsequent scuttling of the Rhapsody project. Rhapsody was Apple's original plan for a new operating system based on the recently purchased NeXT technology.

Rhapsody's proposition for Mac software developers was simple: write your applications using these NeXT-derived APIs. These are the APIs that eventually became Cocoa, and there was much to recommend them even back then. But for Mac developers with substantial existing code bases, the proposition was more aptly phrased, "rewrite your applications using these NeXT-derived APIs."

It was a hard sell, to be sure. The sweetener that Apple hoped would push the deal over the top was that applications written using this API could also be compiled to run on Windows. And so the complete pitch to the Adobes and Microsofts of the world was this: rewrite your huge existing applications using these APIs and end up with a single code base for both Mac and Windows. Alternately, just rewrite the Mac versions of your applications using these new APIs.

The answer from the Mac development community was, essentially, "Yeah, uh, no thanks."'
I live in Paris, and love it (the rain, the cycle, same thing here), but I really enjoy traveling when I, or the product need to.
By insuring they couldn't find better jobs elsewhere.
Special Forces’ $77M ‘Hustler’ Hits Back
How to Wrap a Present with Mathematical Precision (and Waste Less Paper)
Sounds more like a holiday camp
I agree that short breaks away from the "norm" is good, but this isn't really unique to startups - i'd wager that you could gain the same benefits by just taking a vacation than trying to relocate your startup + staff every X months.
Here's everything on one page:
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html
Should You Continue to Support Internet Explorer 8?
"Sharing some files" seems vague though: i'm not sure if i correctly understand the attack vectors, but apart from running untrusted binaries (and as a normal user even that doesn't sound too scary -- or does it?), i guess it'd be via things like targeted exploitation e.g. buffer overflows or somesuch? Other than that it seems unlikely (but far from impossible of course) that an adversary could simply make my machine do evil stuff like spamming or leaking my files. (edit 2:) Also, i have to trust my distribution... That's actually the part i find most worrying.

edit: Also, i'm not sure i agree with you that Windows being the most widely used OS is the reason for the proliferation of viruses for that platform. As i understand it (not wanting to start a flamewar here, i genuinely don't know), it also suffers from some poor security architecture -- but maybe my information is outdated. But sure, the fact that "everyone" uses it makes it a more valuable target, of course.
Sure, but how is that different from the TCP/IP world ? You select the protocol based on what your application needs.
Docker at Lyst
A story about an angry carrot and a floating point fairy
Just because you don't understand something is no grounds for denigrating it.
We Can't Trust Nytimes
GraphicsMagick also has fewer dependencies, I imagine because it does less things, but none is something I ever needed. I.e. within macports

$ port deps imagemagick
Full Name: ImageMagick @6.8.9-8_0
Extract Dependencies: xz
Build Dependencies: autoconf, automake, libtool
Library Dependencies: bzip2, djvulibre, xz, jbigkit, jpeg, lcms2, libpng, tiff, webp, zlib, fftw-3, freetype, fontconfig, ghostscript, libiconv, libtool,
openjpeg, openexr, expat, libxml2, pkgconfig
Runtime Dependencies: urw-fonts

$ sudo deps graphicsmagick
Full Name: GraphicsMagick @1.3.20_0+q8
Extract Dependencies: xz
Library Dependencies: libxml2, bzip2, xz, zlib, libpng, tiff, freetype, libiconv, libtool, lcms2, jasper, jpeg
I know it's a bit far fetched but another hypothesis would be that previous wars were deadlier for US soldiers and it was easier for a depressed soldier to get killed during combat (by being reckless for example). I know if I was both suicidal and a soldier, I'd probably just stick my head out of the trench a bit longer than my comrades or volunteer for the dangerous missions. Probably not the most likely explanation though.
> I'm in the process of getting a provisional patent ... would actually like to have it rejected for being trivial

Note that provisional patent applications are not examined, so if indeed you are applying for a provisional, it will never be "rejected".

Source: http://www.uspto.gov/patents/resources/types/provapp.jsp

> (from link above) provisional applications are not examined.
Thanks. I asked because it's written in C#.
Copyright Law Is Being Rewritten Right Now, and You Can Help
All Sorts of Retail Trouble – What Is Your Solution?
What's the best blog you've seen/used for data capture?
Contributor License Agreement.
Our E-Waste Problem Is Ridiculous
your linux could be used as a shared drive (samba), without executing stuff. It could be nice to scan files if they can be used on other OSes.

As for Windows being unsafe, sure, it's easier to propagate stuff since you have root access. But like I said, viruses on OSX do exist.
I can recommend my home village in North East Scotland for everything apart from convenient access to London. Not sure about internet speeds or whether they have coffee yet.

But certainly pretty, peaceful, cheap property, great scenery and fairly convenient for the Cairngorms for climbing/skiing:

http://www.portknockiewebsite.co.uk/

For a bit of history, here is a page describing the loss of my great-grandfathers boat the Evangeline with all hands:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/pirie/history/PFWv1-o/ui26.htm

[I traced my ancestry recently and its a bit of a shock to realise that most of my male ancestors for about 300 years had a connection of one kind or another with the fishing industry].
Well, with 200 million euro annually pumped there by Sweden alone I'd be surprised if we didn't see stuff like this.

While now we can't feed Syrian refugees because the UN is out of money. Not to mention the genocide on Christian Arabs, or kidnappings for sex-slavery of over 7000 female Yezidis by Arabic and Somalian islamists largely from Europe.

But hey... lets riot and collect money for Gaza.
Great setup you got, are you having any copy in the cloud as well? - I'm currently using Google Drive, but their interface is a bit heavy for having a good gallery overview.
Exactly. Once you understand underlying concept, `this` is not complicated or weird.

Small addendum to your list: "whatever is left of the dot at call-time" is a nice way to explain "base reference" concept, but be wary of non-trivial constructs:

(f = thing.someFunction)(); // this references global object
(function(){return thing.someFunction }())(); // this references global object
eval('thing.someFunction')(); // this references global object
Typhoon Hagupit Killing 21 People in Phillipnes
Some people I know quite literally have an issue transitioning to a busy populated city. Think its a personality thing