skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've taken to a rash practice of just tearing out tightly coupled, untestable, duplicated and poorly designed code by the roots.

That's not a terrible approach. Depending on the context the code is running in, that might be a worthwhile way to maintain it, especially if there's not all that much different between doing that and working on it as is. If it's taking you the same amount of time, why not leave it better than you found it? The important thing is that you finish the job, and it sounds like you're doing that. You're not making a three-year plan, not telling anyone about it, and doing a little bit every day. That way lies the lava layer.

Me personally, I have like four other projects I could be working on. Give me a choice between working on old legacy and working on new hotness, I'll band-aid the legacy every time and just get on with life. I didn't use to do it this way. I wanted to make my mark on the legacy codebase, prove that I was better than it. So I'd tell my boss I'd need the rest of the week to implement this and then dive in. I'm happy I don't need to do that anymore.
ntp authentication is broken:
http://zero-entropy.de/autokey_analysis.pdf
and it was the same guy who found the new vulnerabilities :-)
Where are you located? Rails is huge in Baltimore and Seattle. I haven't heard too much of a demand for it else where else. At least not in comparison to other languages.
That's more likely to go purple than blue. And it won't work if you have dark skin. Also it's really hard to will it undone later!
+1 for correct (even if inadvertent) use of the word "incredible".
Last time I was on an Amtrak train, for a 1000 mile trip, I was delayed by 24 hours. The published timetables advertise the trip at 18.25 hours. That was a grand total of 42.25 hours. By car, the trip is 14.5 hours. By plane, 2.5 hours. A competitive bicyclist with a crew van could have beaten that train to its destination that day.

The last Amtrak trip I made before that added 4 hours to a 5 hour trip. The same trip takes 3 hours by car or 1 hour by air.

From the anecdotes gathered from someone I know who used to make Amtrak passenger rail reservations, every last timetable is complete BS. Every single passenger route not on the east coast experiences a long delay, nearly every time it makes the trip. Sometimes, the train doesn't even get there at all, and the passengers are transferred to coach buses to be dropped off in a place that may be rather distantly removed from their intended destination.

The tickets themselves are not cheap, either.

I would say it doesn't make sense to have passenger rail at all, without some tracks completely dedicated to time-sensitive passenger traffic. In that sense, the freight lines are already being penalized.
Hey, I didn't say you should stop typing in QWERTY! Wink. My point is that people who want to learn it won't replace their QWERTY skills -- They'll just learn another one. A brand new superpower.
Quit my job to start a company. Failed, but learned a lot of important lessons. Got back to a well paid job. Probably most important - got back to a very good shape.
> you'll be sent an email with 3 generated URLs that you can to click to star, stop and delete your tracking

Emails look like this:
http://i.imgur.com/6kFqSnm.png

+1 noted!
Everybody forgot about Ebola :(
Do you do iron mans, marathons or lift over 1000 pounds in the 3 main lifts (dead, squat, bench)?
Looks like the response I would expect from someone who has seen tons of "Why not just compile it and see it get magically faster?!?!" queries.

It's easy to compile it, but making the compilation actually useful for a dynamic language is HARD. There's a reason that most dynamic languages will either interpret or JIT, and it's not because the JIT writers overlooked something obvious.

A naive translation of the code will remove a little bit of overhead from the bytecode dispatch, but the resulting code bloat will blow out instruction caches for any reasonable sized code. In small programs with one translation unit, analysis can sometimes work to speed things up, but it quickly becomes either undecidable or intractable.

Basically, on dynamic languages, you can often see static compilation being worse than a naive attempt at native code, especially once the hot path for the interpreter fits in cache, but the generated native code no longer does. Wanting to see results on real world benchmarks is entirely reasonable.
Questions Remain After FBI Charges North Korea with Attack on Sony Pictures
President Obama Slams Sony for Canceling “The Interview”
According to my understanding from the article...

Before:

* The wave-particle duality had its own set of formulas describing the various relationships between the wave and particle.

* There were also separate existing formulas on information uncertainty.

Now:

* Wave-particle duality can be entirely expressed within the already existing framework of information uncertainty.

What this means:

Usually, the realization that two mathematical concepts are actually equivalent leads to a better understanding of both. Concepts that were known for one can now be immediately applied to the other.

EDIT: I make no claim as to the novelty of this. This is just what I understood from the article.
Download SemiRestore 8 for iOS 8.1
My original point was taking medications to suppress symptoms. For example they'll open your sinuses in 5 minutes and keep them open for hours.

Typically food will reduce symptoms by stimulating the immune system to work faster. Attempts at immediate relief will be short lived. That's how people traditionally treated disease. It's still a valid approach for light ailments where modern medicine can be a harmful crutch.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.4687v2.pdf
I prefer to read and do projects. But I think it's important to mix learning modalities.

While the idea that different people may be more or less effective with different learning styles seems reasonable, I don't think you want to focus too much one method.

As an earlier poster said different modalities have different strengths.

But beyond that I think there's a synergistic effect when you combine modalities. There's insight you get by comparing what you learned via different techniques that you can't achieve by using one method alone.
Evolution does not have a purpose and the vast majority of evolution is barely affected by selection pressure and is more down to drift.
The wrinkle on "Use of Force (limited to taking out sites that were used to support the Sony Cyberattacks)" is that at least some of North Korea's cyberwarfare operations appear to be conducted on sites in China, such as the Chilbosan Hotel in Shenyang. (See http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/2013/1019/In-c..., http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-chinese-hotel-where-no...)

Obviously, striking facilities on Chinese soil (especially ostensibly civilian ones like hotels) could be viewed by China as highly provocative. So "use of force (limited)" might usefully be split into two options, one for further limiting the scope to facilities within North Korea and one without that restriction.
He specifically say "I had zero special requirements", so you should be able to give him an answer in less than 2 min. That's a low cost for potentially cultivating a lead.
You're right that effective B&M shipping cost is not always free. The brick 'n mortar cost of shipping is anywhere from a lot ("I'd have to drive into the city just for that and pay exorbitant parking garage fees, and I've got too much to do this afternoon...") to nothing ("I'll be in that store tomorrow anyway, and I won't need it until Thursday...")

In the former case, it's unlikely that the tip would impact my decision; in the latter, it very well might. In either case, it goes in the "con" category and, at the margin, changes some fraction of my Amazon-yes-or-no purchase decisions, always in the direction of no.
We're picking up where Vimeo left off
Not familiar with him, what has he reported on before?
This is a pretty shallow nitpick. The article outlines pretty well what kind of people they mean. Yeah, it's different from the common meaning of "troll" but so what.
An interesting analogy of the situation which didn't make the article is a good analogy of the cold medicine racket would be, imagine if liquor stores were not able to legally sell components of mixed drinks. So a liquor store could only sell tens of thousands of different ready to drink products such as screwdrivers, old fashioneds, rum and cokes, mint juleps, but it was practically impossible if not illegal to buy plain old vodka in a bottle.

And for marketing and trademark reasons you had to study the fine print to figure out what is in each bottle. So you can't buy a bottle of ready to drink screwdriver, you have to look in the fine print for "Slammer Canadian Lite Extra Dry Extreme" to figure out its a bottle of screwdriver.

I'm not suggesting I want bulk generic powder guafenisien but life would be a lot simpler if it was more like the produce aisle, OK I got runny nose and cough so take one of pseudoephedrine and one of dextromethorphan and call it good, instead of the "confuseopoly" system we currently have, which I'm sure reduces everyone's quality of life while increasing profits.
Ephedra tea contains pseudoephedrine and ephedrine in potentially inconsistent amounts. Someone who has an adverse reaction to pseudoephedrine tablets is likely to have an adverse reaction to such a tea as well, and just how adverse is harder to predict.
There's a somewhat legitimate case to be made for both points of view here. As a potential customer trying to gauge costs, what's been helpful for me is to ask about license structures and a broad range of per/user, per/server, whatever to make my own order of magnitude estimate. Or you can just come right out and ask "how many zeroes?"

Someone like IBM/Oracle will refuse to tell you boo, because they're planning to tailor the quote to match the value delivered. Just kidding, they need to measure your pockets first ;_)
Indeed. PHK noted that it's on the order of 100,000 lines of code. That's a staggering amount for something that queries a remote server and steers your clock.
Ask HN: When and how did you meet your wife?
so I've been starting to get depressed lately about if I'll ever meet a girl who I will eventually marry. I spend a lot of time behind the computer but I'm trying to work on that as I've been finding out that it hurts me more than it helps me. I think I'm beginning to pass the time in my life where I want to spend all of my free time working on side projects and learning obscure languages and frameworks just for fun. So I ask you HN, how and when did you meet your wife? Is she in to computer science as much as you are or is she completely opposite?

Did you realize you had to make a conscious effort to put yourself in situations where you might meet the future love of your life or did it just kind of happen out of the blue? I'd love to hear your stories.

Thanks
> Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist?

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Wittgenstein
The same as that for the Evil Iraqis and their WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, I would imagine.
Try to do it first thing in the morning before you blow your nose. I have found that blowing my nose drives the mucus two directions... out my nose and up into my ears.... this prevents the neti pot from being able to properly clear out your nose, since it can't reach the mucus that has been driven up into your nose.
Punishing defiance can be an ulterior motive. When the mafia send someone in to break the shopkeepers fingers they often risk their guy getting arrested, etc. losing more than the shopkeeper is worth. They still go through with it because that shop isn't the only thing in the balance, it's about keeping all the other shops scared and maintaining "credibility." You can hear war mongering politicians talk about "credibility" and "credible threat of force" all the time.
Perfect! Good luck with your project. :)
There's a problem I have with frameworks in general. They tend to streamline your thinking too, which is fine if you don't care about making something original or can't see how developing with new approaches can impact the outcome of your product.
just noticed to "star" typo, now I have to hotfix while in HN's frontpage, great.
"the only byproduct is water, which exits through the tailpipe"

How much water are we talking about and what effect is this going to have on a highway in the north in winter?
> This is a pretty shallow nitpick.

Yeah, I don't think it is.
I actually find those useful :O Guess I'm a hacker now.
Show HN: The problem with the epsilon greedy method
I decided I wanted to roll my own AB testing app for Django (https://github.com/crobertsbmw/RobertsAB) when I was finished, I came across this:

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=132

Which is a very convincing article on why AB testing sucks and with a few extra lines, you can improve your algorithm to select the best test so you never go back and update your code (yeah right.)

I then thought, how many tests does this thing have to run to truly figure out which is best?

I made 4 tests with probability of success equalling 1/2, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6 and found that for this algorithm to settle on the best success rate (1/2), it took 91 hits on average with a max of 876 tests.

I ran the same test using a standard AB algorithm. Picking whichever test has been tested the least and run that test. It took on average 32 tests to figure out which performed the best with a maximum of 363. On average 3 times better than the greedy epsilon method.

I then tried tweaking my success ratios to something a little less dramatic. 1/10, 1/11, 1/12, 1/13. Which just made everything take a LOT longer.

The only problem is that in reality you don't know what the best solution is, so you can never know if you have gotten to the "actual" solution. The epsilon greedy method will eventually get there (although you will never know when). And if you are using the standard AB method you will never know if you have arrived at the best option either, especially when we are talking about the difference between 1/20 clicks versus 1/21 clicks.

Moral of the story -- AB testing is probably a waste of time.

Here is a link to all the tests I ran (python3): https://github.com/crobertsbmw/EpsilonGreedy
Ephedra is a meager little shrub that doesn't have a lot of needs and has been drank as a tea for thousands of years. Ephedrine is also much safer than pseudoephedrine with fewer side effects.

I grow a lot of medicinal herbs and have never had to worry about dangerous impurities or quality control, except for the occasional spider web. I'm not a homeopathic nut, but certain things (mint, ephedra, thyme, sage, peppers) are easy to grow and provide tangible, scientifically confirmed benefits.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.4687v2.pdf is the actual preprint.

I'm finding it pretty hard to parse. It seems to be a reformulation of what we already know about non-commuting observables in terms of entropy/ignorance. I might need to read some of the cited papers to understand exactly if that's significant and why.
The eternal high-touch vs low-touch debate...

Atlassian's whole sales system is to display the prices upfront and have no rebate. Last time I checked, their competitors (resp. IBM Rational and Microsoft Sharepoint) didn't grow by 35% every year for 10 years in a row.

I needed an office for 2 people. With Regus you need to plan a call. I ended up at a coworking space, mildly satisfied with the noise, with a bill 70% higher, but at least I don't have a 90-days commitment and I didn't sit with a salesman.

There are number of situations when you dodge providers who are just a dead weight.
What does meteor have for you? Well, not so much right now. Crud applications talking to SQL isn't its focus point.

You want to build apps quickly that automatically sync up between uses (think google docs) and like using mongo? Then there is a LOT of goodness to be had with meteor.

I've written a lot of meteor apps. It is really really good, but not for everything.
The town in China that makes the world's Christmas decorations
This. My native language is Spain's Spanish and one of the things that shocked me about the Anglo worldview (when I was proficient enough to realise it) is the fact that things do happen because of a grammatical agent all the time (BTW, worldview comes from Weltanschauung, it's actually nice having German around). This makes intentional any unintentional action for all intents and purposes. Then you start to understand the preposterous plots in some movies, e.g. as a result of an accident someone dies, then it comes consequent revenge because someone "killed" them, no matter any hopeless "but it was an accident!". You can imagine the moral and political implications, and the friction between cultures as well. I guess you can't translate grammar... or even grasp the alternatives without learning another language.

And then there are the terms/concepts/ideas particular of a language or their lack thereof. I learnt from a Borges essay, Ancient Germanic Literatures, about the Ulfilas/Wulfila Bible. As I don't have the English translation of this book (and there's no excerpt in Google Books), I'll try to translate Borges (but not his semicolons) myself:

"The Gothic Bible is the oldest monument of the Germanic Languages. Wulfila had to overcome vast difficulties; the Bible more than a book, is a literature; to reproduce that literature, sometimes complex and abstruse, in a warriors and sheperds dialect is a job that would look impossible a priori. Wulfila achieved it with pluck and sometimes with sharp wit. As is natural, he lavished barbarisms and neologisms on it; he had to civilise the language. It holds surprises for the reader. It is written in The Mark Gospel (VIII, 36): "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (translator's note: KJV). Wulfila translates world (cosmos, order, in the original) as beautiful house (t/n: fairhvu). Centuries later, Anglo-Saxons would translate world as woruld [wereald, age of Man], that sets human time against the infinite duration of divinity. The concepts of cosmos and world were quite abstract for the simple Germanic peoples."
Watch Douglas Crockford's video series that he made at Yahoo. Get a copy of his book and read it.

Make sure you understand the prototypical nature of Javascript as opposed to the class structure in other languages and how to use it effectively. Also make sure to understand scope, how "this" keyword relates to scope and finally callback functions.

That is pretty much it. JS is very powerful once you get comfortable with it. It was designed in a very short time (~2 weeks) so it has some quirks but do not let those get to you.
No they don't, you just said something. This time try actually expressing yourself instead of making a non-statement that just says "I'm offended by you".
And if they are, they probably aren't in the business of distributing precompiled binaries.
Problematic generics seem to come up often about extended release formulations when hanging around ADHD communities. Judging from this latest one I remember, it takes a big push for the FDA to start looking into it and ask questions:

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/ucm422568.htm

As consumers, we don't really have much of a way to test for placebo effects or when generics are actually subpar other than complaining until someone listens... so... it's a bit of a chicken/egg problem.
The mythical "wave or particle" interpretation of wave-particle duality is oddly persistent, and is not only pervasive in popular science but I've heard it repeated by serious physicists also, even though it's unsupported by the very math they work on.
Cask Data Application Platform – Namespace Support
The Unexpected Ways Apple Watch Will Crush the Competition
I don't think this sort of empty, dismissive comment helps anyone. Besides, is there even that much difference between someone who is genuinely hateful and someone who's just saying hateful things because they enjoy making other people upset? If it looks like a duck...
How 150 data scientists gathered to hack for social good
Yes, the symptoms are primarily the immune response. Hence my point that it's probably not smart to interfere with the immune response just because you don't like the symptoms. The immune response is the only thing that will actually get rid of the virus. That sentence from wikipedia doesn't mention anything about an "overreaction".
Really? Alanning says the opposite. So it's not clear at all.
I finally finished an SaaS product that I plan to start selling in early January, once I get back from a holiday break.

Pretty excited to have a side-project that I think can generate revenue.
Project A119 – Plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon
Lifestyle, Inc. (2004)
These days, "troll" just means "anyone I disagree with".
Your right, the title really doesn't go with the article. Its like seeing a title "Flooding issue on the Japanese coast" and then reading about a tsunami.
It seems fairly simple.

Extraordinary claims are often made and publicized widely today just because they get attention, grab eye-balls and so-forth.

Most of these ordinary claims are at least unproven if not wholly fallacious for similar reasons.

This is why "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Once a claim has made that rounds and gotten some pretty thorough debunking, it's reasonable to say that it's water under the bridge and move to the next claim.
Please describe in what way CAHSR is a boondoggle.
One of the points made in the article is that you can buy single drug generics and combine them as needed.

So for your analogy, the liquor store would have to have a small shelf of mixers and giant coolers full of premixed stuff. But flavor is easier to deal with than medicine, so people won't put up with it, so liquor stores mostly sell ingredients.
It is production ready. We use it a lot. Mongo? Well, yes, you are stuck with Mongo - there isn't good database support outside of that, and as for Cordova? I have no idea why they baked that in either :)

It IS good though, the ability to out put really good applications quickly, with simple code shouldn't be overlooked.
I think projects displaying the pattern often have a root problem that the writeup didn't discuss: An initial application with requirements created by non-technical folks who had it implemented by whatever the equivalent is of outsourced workers/students/interns/guy they hired without knowing how to hire a developer.

The initial developer doesn't understand, know, or follow basic CS knowledge or design trade trade offs and constraints, but will try to create a reasonable system using whatever has press at the time - Rails, Php + Zend, etc.

Unfortunately they will follow weird aspects of tutorials they googled for studiously while missing out on the design implication of their choices leading to monstrosities like a product display page that requires hundreds of recursively made SQL queries, an entire application where 90% of the code is in one file, database tables that are composed in the most awful ways, and more.

It's this first layer that causes everything that comes after. The root of the problem isn't that trying something new is right or wrong. It's that the original was done so badly nobody can reasonably continue down the same path and everyone who comes after can't figure out how to cope.

Of course it's typically exacerbated by deadlines. When you can add a new dependency and meet your deadline or try to do things the inscrutably bad way they were done previously and miss it (let alone have any ability to test it), it's hardly surprising that people choose to add what they know.

When confronted with something intractable of course you throw your favorite spaghetti at the wall. And of course there's not any sort of order to what sticks.

So I think the lesson is more about the criticalness of doing things remotely right to begin with.