skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are wonderful trends that are keeping more people alive and for that we should both be grateful and thankful to those who work on keeping them moving in that direction.

What effects do these trends have on poverty and food insecurity?
Time and Mindhacks for Saving Money
I was just reading this. Excellent resource, probably the first time I feel I am starting to grasp how all the different pieces of Bitcoin fit together.

There's also: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference - though I'm not quite sure how the two relate.
I liked, have only two criticisms:
Content seems sparse, maybe due to line-height and/or font-size.
I also get a "too much green" feeling in my eyes.
The overall change was positive, imo.
Ask HN: Know of any data only mobile plans?
I am very unhappy about ATT charging me 110$+ for two iphones. I want to decrease my cell phone bill. One way is to use a prepaid phone for voice and a data plan on a second phone.

Question:

Do you know of any mobile operators who offer only data plan and no voice plan?

Thanks
The future of U.S. innovation might rest on this obscure patent lawsuit
Looks good! Maybe I should start a new Django Project again.
Then pray tell, who is innocent enough to bring to justice and take care of the USA? Since they're obviously not able to do it themselves.
Thanks! I will give it a try!
I think it's been around for a while, but has been updated/revamped significantly since the last time I saw it.
Show HN: The Scarf – World's thinnest iPhone case
Google Earth Pro seemingly has a fair few customers at the moment so I would assume the free desktop version will stick around for a while.

https://www.google.com/intx/en_uk/work/mapsearth/customers/
10 Books Every Java Developer Should Read
I don't have an answer for you, but a simple DNS lookup at the ISP wouldn't get you the whole picture. Lot's of local/LAN DNS caching.
OT:

I know that Django 1.6+ can be used with Python 3.4 but is Django 1.7.1 written in Python 2.7 or 3.4?
I zoom the page down to 75% to browse the docs, it gives the same spacing as the old layout.
Exactly, and what does '40%' conversion mean in this case? Are you collecting twice as much light and focussing it on half the number of cells? Or is there a silicon junction that can convert 40% of the light energy that is incident on it?
> I can't quite grasp this - 40% to what?

It's power efficiency. Sunlight hits the earth with power density Pi (measured in, say, Watts/m^2) and the solar panel puts out Po for the same area.

They've measured Po/Pi to be 0.4
New World tuberculosis came from seals
I may just be noticing an old feature, but did the search feature on the prior site return source code in the results?

I think that is a great feature, but it's going to confuse beginners. The first three results for the query 'models' are links to source code.

Maybe the search results could be tagged with a type icon and name (Documentation, Tutorial, Source...) in addition to the document excerpt.
That's also something I've been thinking about, I want to reach a large number of job seekers and make it accessible, but I don't want it to be associated with low quality products. In order to solve this problem, I was thinking about having a free chapter as a sample and also have the table of contents so people can get a preview before they buy.
I don't honestly understand what is the point of this. How does time spent writing something have to do with the quality of it?

Tests are supposed to be simple and straigthforward, I would hope to spend less than 5% of my time actually writing tests. If I spend more then it means that my tests are too complex to understand, read and write and that my whole architecture is hard to test.

Are we trying to evaluate quality of code (yes, tests are code too) by the amount of time spent writing it? Should we go back to assembly because it takes us longer to write it properly hence it's more correct?

I honestly don't understand the point, enlighten me, please.
Wow, this is a great comment! Thanks for writing.
>> As a computer science grad student with years of industry experience under his belt, Karpinski was far from a programming novice. He knew how to build software.

Probably was coding as a kid. And according to his resume his first professional (money paid) part-time job was in 1996, coding in C/ALGOL/C++/Perl. That is close to 20 years. Reasonable enough. People tend to keep it simple and not design overly complicated things when they've been doing something for 20 years.

A style guide page here gives a good feel of the language:
http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/style-guide/

Compare with Python:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

And, say, Ocaml:
http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/guides/guidelines.en.html
My credentials are simply that I've done this exact thing. I currently work as a web developer and got the job with no degree using only self-taught skills.

Timeline I'm not sure. This guide is going to be mostly a short guide to reach as many people as possible, depending on how it does, I may look into a more detailed, larger course and coaching.
Kerbal Space Program: Beta Than Ever Is Now Available
Russia heading for crash as ruble plummets
Another great option. I'll try to get in touch with them today!
How Bitfountain made $1M+ teaching online in 2014
License4J Licensing API and Tools New Version
Having empathy is different that saying that my bad experience should make you consider a c-section.
Both.

It is possible, and not too difficult in fact, to write a single codebase that runs under both Python 2 and Python 3. Which is what Django has done. The same code runs the same under 2.7 or 3.3 or 3.4.
New ACS 5-Year Estimates: See How Young Adults Today Compare
Mini-interpreter implementations do not count, for performance reasons. You could have called a VM bytecode interpreter loop a "loop alternative to tail call" here.
I love it, I have a thing for pastels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_Media
Firebase Pianobar Widget- shows current song in real-time
Thank you. I'm planning to use Stripe for payment service.
The thing I am looking for is the practical implementation of adding a user to my application, and creating a subscription account at the same time without mixing Stripe code into my product. Do you have any experience with that to share?
# apt-get install python-django-doc

$ x-www-browser /usr/share/doc/python-django-doc/html/index.html

:)
It also may be because it returns nil if the user hasn't set up iCloud and the app may not have handled that case properly.
I thought it would be cool to use Firebase to add a widget to my blog to show what song I'm currently listening to with pianobar (a command line pandora client).
I think it is great! My ownly grief is, while scrolling in the accordion, I loose the minimize btn at the top... perhaps make those titles and + / - btns sticky? So if you have an abundance of sidebar content, a user may easily minimize that information once more. I also noticed you have categories, yet no category tags on your Article Details page... I think this would be pretty useful for your users to click through to the entire category from here, and it would make browsing a bit more smooth. So far, it looks really great from a UI perspective!
> Is there anything in place to ensure accountably of news releases in news organizations?

Who do you want ensuring accountability? A government? Another private entity?
I agree on Clojure. Rust I'd need to know more about, but I may study it now that it's post-1.0.

What do you think about Haskell's impact on the future? I think that static typing, although less popular as of now, could make a resurgence given the value it adds once one learns how to use the type system.

Most of the negative reputation of static typing, I'd argue, comes from languages that are falling out of favor (C++, Java) and that never did static typing right in the first place.
The site fails to achieve the goal of enticing contribution - the only option to actually contribute is a link to the 'missions' page that has only a single mission regarding Bolivia that doesn't interest me at all.

Furthermore, dedicated crawler isn't needed in many smaller (or more centralised/regulated?) markets where there are only a few players. E.g. in Latvia there are less than 30 credit institutions, and as the published data is freeform, not machine readable (http://fktk.lv/en/market/credit_institutions/banks1/ etc), then simply copy/pasting the info would be much quicker than testing a scraper.
Well he's under 21 and a Muslim, so can't really drop $10K on the goose.
Can someone who has a better understanding of BTC than me explain something? How do the escrow-like instruments and other contractual instruments built on top of the block chain work? How are they better than existing contractual instruments? How do you guarantee that something that is contractually agreed upon for money (ie: I will transfer you a file, upon me sending the file your funds will be released to me) actually happens? Or am I fundamentally missing something?

Edit: thanks all for replies, learned a lot.
The quote reminds me of the 'hairy arm' idea, which I quite enjoy. A quick Google gave me this: http://www.1099.com/c/co/in/insanity006.html
Good! This gives a much more comfortable visualization.
There's something about these that just feels incredibly human.
Visual memory, I guess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_memory
There are a lot of variabilities in labour.
It's amazing what a facelift can do to the perception of a project. There are some really great projects that look abandoned or the docs are really difficult to use that prohibit me from giving them a fair shake.
No matter what web stack I end up using down the road, I will always have a special place in my heart for Django. It taught me the fundamentals of MVC in web app context, and in some ways got me a job that led to many good things in my life.

Redesign looks nice, the old site was beginning to look dated.
It it was so it wouldn't be a big problem, but in reality it is bundled even with supposedly respectable software:

https://www.change.org/p/oracle-corporation-stop-bundling-as...

I'm always suprised when I open a browser of some collegues/friends with even moderate computer literacy and see the amount of crap they let automatic installers shovel into their PCs, and how they are mostly not bothered by it.
Tencent, Baidu? This seems to ignore obvious big players.
There are no journalists anymore. Just a bunch of social media junkies rushing to be "first".
You could almost say that Django has become... unchained.
ATTN: NEW PREMIERE: ONYECHI Feat YUNG SIMMIE “NECK OF THE WOODS” MP3
Yeah, there's a lot of whitespace - I'm not the biggest fan of all that padding on the blog / archive dates template, or the L-R padding on the home page, but I hear "more space" is all the rage :)

Mostly I noticed the difference in the Docs. The elements are called out more explicitly and it's easier to find things on the docs, which have considerably less whitespace:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/intro/tutorial01/
Another rite of passage is the "logger" library, where every Go coder I know (including me) writes a "better" logging library because the standard one is so terse. A few thousand lines of code later, everyone quietly discards their overcomplex library and reverts back to the standard log.

The same goes for most of the standard library "improvements" that people make. Http middleware is necessary until you grok the power of Handlers, ORMs are prevalent until you get that it's easier to write specific CRUD routines for your structs using the standard lib.

I don't think it's austerity any more. I think it's just putting a high value on simplicity, and I really appreciate that now I understand it better.

I'm happy to let the generics argument rage and smarter people than me resolve it.
I don't need generics in my coding, happy to work around the occasional time I'd use them, but I understand the "argument from make" - if the Go team needed generics to build the language, then surely they're a Good Thing and we should have them.
The screenshot shows it crashing on a method named "semaphore_wait_trap", so that does indeed seem to be an intentional trap for calls that can block the main thread.
Incidentally, if anybody is looking for a way to set up keys like twoodfin is describing, you might want to look at ssss. It's an implementation of Shamir's secret sharing scheme and works quite nicely for me.

http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/
this is interesting and really cute, but without context it's meaning remains cryptic. I.e. I'd really like to know where he was taught, what family he came from, etc.
The article mentions high degree of literacy in the population, but I don't think (public) schools were a thing then. So my best guess is about military service as a civil duty and literacy as part of early childhood military education. Not to say conditioning. I find that thought too pessimistic, anyhow. But jolly peasents engaged in vocational exercise doesn't strike me as very common for the time.
The longer I've written tests the truer this becomes. Nowadays it doesn't take me much time to write the tests. I'm not a TDD zealot but I often write tests in conjunction with a new feature. I've found that it makes the overall process faster, resulting code simpler and interface to the code more consistent.

A small investment of time writing tests before implementation yields the best overall results across the board.
I wish everyone would stop saying that PCA is about eigenvectors and eigenvalues... it's about singular vectors and singular values. The best way to compute PCA is NOT to compute the eigenvalues of A'*A. There are specialised SVD algorithms that should be used instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition#C...

Randomised methods have also gotten popular in recent years:

https://code.google.com/p/redsvd/

http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4061

This is one case where the machine learning community takes a numerical analysis idea and by giving it a different name also loses some of the insights associated with the other name. Normally I don't care if they call it "training" instead of "line search" or "features" instead of "dimensions", but PCA should be using better algorithms. Instead of telling everyone to just use the inferior method of using generic eigenvalue solvers, use better specialised methods.

I know that finding eigenvalues of A'A is "good enough", and I guess "eigenvalue" is already a big enough word for most programmers, but there's no reason to not relegate better methods to specialised libraries and make those specialised libraries available. If nothing else, LAPACK and ARPACK have bindings for almost every language.
A large part of this is discipline and knowledge.

There is nothing to stop you from writing a nice-looking, fast app in C++. I routinely do this kind of thing in a mix of C++ and Python because wxPython makes it easier to throw together a UI, but the development overhead for doing it in C++ is relatively small.

There are very few algorithms in Matlab or R that you can't find in decent libs for C++, so translating is no big deal given you're going that way anyway.

The question is: are we better to put resources into new special-purpose, highly-optimized-for-a-single-type-of-job languages like Julia (which for some reason the article talks about as universal, then admits at the end it is totally special purpose and unsuited for a whole bunch of applications)... or are we better off learning to use the tools we have with greater discipline?

I generally opt for the latter. Changing our behaviour as developers will produce better results than building new tools. We have the tools to manage our processes now (CMake, for example, rather than Makefiles). We need to be disciplined about using them. If we aren't, no new tools will help that much.
Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest #5
"If you can stomach some old-right cultural conservatism,"

Though just to make sure that doesn't overly turn off people it really shouldn't, bear in mind that this is the sort of 'old-right cultural conservatism' that, at least so far into my reading of the book, was unremittingly hostile about every aspect of the Iraq war, from its goals, how it was run, who was running it, and so on. It makes left-wing criticism of the war look anemic and bereft of detail by comparison.

I mean, I strongly recommend that a serious intellectual ought to with some frequency seriously entertain viewpoints that don't match their own anyhow, but I do feel it's worth pointing out that an anti-war left wing partisan will probably have less trouble with the book than that summary would indicate.
The announcement from MongoDB: http://www.mongodb.com/press/wired-tiger
PhpBB website compromised, users advised to change password
Alex, I dropped you an email with a private beta invite ;)
Shellshock Worm Exploiting NAS Devices
I'm genuinely surprised that Yahoo tops Google in 2013 and 2010. Especially considering Android, Gmail etc. proliferation on top of it's domination of search
iOS Developer here. This is pretty standard, I've been rejected for having a UIWebView (not even a main feature) in an iPhone App that displayed content that did autoscale correctly on the iPhone but when the user agent changed to iPad (still an iPhone app) it would resize the page to the iPad dimensions. I don't know how Apple can expect you to have control over content on the web but in some cases they do. So yeah expect to see "Rejected" a decent amount and this is indeed Par for the course. Best bet is to just fix it, suck it up and resubmit.
Treating product info as a social network
600613
WeWork: Now a $5B Co-Working Startup
The second motor and rotor provides vertical thrust and torque compensation only. It spins the opposite direction to the upper rotor. It does not steer the vehicle.
Architecture is out of touch with the public it serves
Thanks for the thorough review. All excellent points! You're right, we focused on getting everything as reasonably polished as possible before launching version 1.0, so that we could expand the audience and get more feedback (just like this). :)
The innovative technology of the blockchain is decentralized, provable consensus. As long as all nodes control less than 51% of mining power, the content of the blockchain at any given time represents the consensus of all nodes on the network. If a multi-party transaction exists on the blockchain, then by definition of it existing, all relevant parties have verified its authenticity.

Bitcoin exposes "scripting" of the blockchain to enable decentralized consensus for arbitrary transaction types. With scripting, developers can leverage the blockchain to store a decentralized consensus of their custom transaction types. Often times this is how escrow-like services are implemented. It's also possible to modify the proof of work scheme itself (as we did with torcoin, albeit in theory only thusfar.)

The extensible part of Bitcoin is the blockchain, which is useful because it's a decentralized, publicly verifiable, mathematically provable consensus.
>I will transfer you a file, upon me sending the file your funds will be released to me

In this case you would still depend on either a 3rd party escrow person to make the ultimate decision or trust between the two parties.

Bitcoin doesn't actually solve the problem of needing trust it does solve the problem of needing to trust your escrow agent with your money but then again if you don't trust your escrow agent with your money why do you trust them to make a fair decision.
haha I have never heard of a company getting to a series G round, what is the farthest down the alphabet a serious venture backed company has gone?
Indeed this was running on RHEL, though our client is a RHEL customer, and so far we aren't.
This is still closed in-house code - as much as I looked on the site, the code of completed missions isn't actually available to anyone other than the "opencorporates.com" company (Chrinon Ltd - https://opencorporates.com/info/licence), so this wouldn't be useful as 'examples of your work' at all.

They do claim on the legal page that "we agree to make it available via the world wide web or analogous means under a licence with at most share-alike and attribution restrictions" but I haven't actually managed to find any of the code for the completed missions.

Am I missing something?
Your second paragraph illustrates the issue with lumping ruby and lisp together.

Lisp is already fast, in some common lisps (e.g. sbcl) you have a compiler that gets within about 2x of a good optimizing c compiler, which is pretty good. So in some sense, it already has the best of both worlds (more powerful than a ruby or python, faster than most languages when compiled).

I think the reasons it did't take over the world have nothing to do with the technical core, and everything to do with ecosystem and network effects.
Physicists build a watt balance using Lego blocks to measure Planck's constant
We create a Stripe customer at the same time the customer registers. At that same time we assign them to a "free" plan at Stripe. Then once they decide on which plan and to stay on and be a subscriber we update their plan to the new plan. Stripe then charges them for it and sets the recurrence etc.

You can also setup the plans to have a grace period before they are charged with Stripe.

As for how we actually implement it, we create a small service around subscriptions and it is called by our create steps which then hides the calls to Stripe. This way if we ever went away from Stripe it would only require some small changes in the subscription service.

Also, we store the Stripe customer id and card id in our subscription record, and we do it using a generic data structure where we list vendor, vendor customerId and vendor cardId etc. This way nothing is labeled Stripe, except the vendor value itself would be Stripe in our case.

Lastly we also have a web hook active so we can get notifications from Stripe and update records appropriately. Again, a small separate service that handles only the web hooks.
That's usual for tablets. Have a look at http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-internet for example.
Show HN: Sesame 2-Factor iOS-SDK Released
Hi all,

We just released an iOS / OSX SDK for our Sesame hardware. It allows you to integrate 2-factor authentication with Sesame within your app or to automatically identify someone in a multi-user environment when they approach their iPad or Mac.

https://atama.io/sdk

Any questions i'll be about to answer
Thank you. From your sibling comment below:

> Bitcoin doesn't actually solve the problem of needing trust it does solve the problem of needing to trust your escrow agent with your money but then again if you don't trust your escrow agent with your money why do you trust them to make a fair decision.

So I'm still confused here. What new kind of contracts could I build using the blockchain? What existing contracts are made easier because of the blockchain?
I've just made a grunt plugin for this https://github.com/outpunk/grunt-evil-icons
Wow, I always love redesigns. But as another commentor says, I'm a bit worried how long it will take for my eye memory to adapt ...
Warning: A computer science degree may be a waste of your time and money