skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe the only reliable way to make reusable code is to reuse it as you write it. If your team is working on several projects at the same time which have some overlap, then by all means if something could be useful for three or more projects, get together with everyone else and strive to write something you can all use. It will be reused immediately, so that's clearly reusable. But don't try to write something you'll reuse in the future; you don't have enough information to know if you are building the right thing, and you won't know if you did until you try to reuse it.
It's things like this that remind me that Lisp(s) are really the best languages for taking advantage of the idea of Turing completeness. In terms of ease of implementation that is. I think that really, this is what we mean by "powerful" languages - how easily can you take advantage of the principle of completeness to do anything in your chosen language.

You often hear people using the idea of completeness to say that their favourite language can, of course, do anything. But in reality some languages just aren't very well suited to it, or would require some horrendous amount of coding and abstractions (Greenspuns Tenth rule comes to mind [1]).

So whenever some new idea in programming becomes popular, whether it's pattern matching [2], concurrency [3], or even the web (HN), you can always rest easy because someone will be able to quite quickly write that functionality into Lisp itself. The only difficulty is in finding out about the libraries in the first place!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
[2] https://github.com/m2ym/optima
[3] http://lparallel.org/
Derivatives and complex financial products now mean that no one knows where the money is, and seems to be a big part of the financial crisis. Here in Europe the banks are offering almost no interest on savings as a result. Looks like the US is the same.

>"Given that this is HN and frequented by legions of hackers trying to find problems to solve that create real value"

Looking at the list of YCombinator funded startups on the front page (Reddit, Airbnb, Scribd), none of them seem to be tackling the big issues of climate change, pollution, seas being over-fished, deforestation, lack of physical resources for a growing population. Sure they increase efficiency in some small area, but I don't see any that even address environmental issues.

You need to remember that the majority of the worlds population live on very little money, and don't have the comfy lifestyles that many of us in the west have.
Intel unveils button-sized Curie module to power future wearables
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8713345
... cooking is much more of a craft than an intellectual exercise ...

Most programming is that way too, really: putting ingredients together in a way that makes sense for the end user.
Well, "any US company" can't coordinate well enough with "any other US company" to bribe the Congress and fix it, therefore they fall prey to the ones that can coordinate to maintain the status quo.
Almost completely agree, except I think maybe you have one step too many.

Mobile payments have been in common use in Japan for years, and there is only one step: present your device. Beep! ("Boom!") you're done.

This works at virtually any convenience store, taxi, train gate, and also at many vending machines (mostly those in train stations).

I think the reason Japan got this so many years ahead of USA etc is that it predates smartphones -- it originally started with (prepaid/pre-charged) cards, which have no screen or UI beyond putting them in a machine to add funds.

Probably the reason behind that was overwhelming use of mass transit; trains and buses provided the compelling consumer use case (not having to go to a machine, and potentially wait in line, to buy a cheap ticket), and were initially the only place the cards worked. They just expanded after that and then makin smartphones do that same job was a no brainer.

Sad caveat: the iPhone (which is my main phone) is the only phone anybody here that I know uses that can't do this.

EDIT: This is not to say that Japan is a utopian vision of mobile payments, though; there were several competing systems before universal compatibility was achieved, and you still can't buy everything with your smart(card|phone)... but they work for upwards of 90% of day-to-day shopping.
My startup: www.traction.vc
Thing I did to grow today: add "Pay per tweet" to see if it increases traffic by increasing sharing.
France Is Absolutely Crushing It at CES
It can via DP (make a DP connection that's actually Thunderbolt, flash the firmware) but that's on OS X - see http://bgr.com/2014/12/30/mac-os-x-thunderbolt-hack/.

And this DP connection isn't Thunderbolt, it just does DP.
Indeed, it's hard to figure they screwed up too badly when according to Canaccord Genuity's autumn 2014 estimates, Apple took 86% of the handset industry profits.

I used to think they'd missed an opportunity by not dominating the lower end of the market too like they did with the ipod but I think a big issue would be having the apps and software run on their phones. They are after all a software platform and if you produce cheap crap phones then the whole business of just being able to download an app and run it on your Apple phone breaks as the cheap phones may not be up to it. You'd then end up with different software and marketing efforts for the different phones and before you knew it you'd be Nokia.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/11/04/apple-continues-to...
It isn't a charging technology for existing batteries, the BBC are doing very crappy reporting. It is an ultra-capacitor made of peptides instead of a battery.
Popsicle will be a lightweight library to help build simple and clean backoffice web applications.
We need feedback to understand if our specialized UI library can be useful to others.
Main points:
- modern, evergreen browsers support only
- HTML5 & CSS3 for everything
- no custom Javascript layout engine
- no overlapping with other, well established libraries
- easy to hack
Check out the Intel Atom Avoton and Rangley SOCs. Nice x86 cores, ECC, crypto acceleration, VT-x, passive TDP, and 4x 1/2.5gbe or 1x 10gbe depending on the serdes. I only wish they had VT-d to get sr iov. If you really need more connectivity going the trident + Intel + cumulus white box switch rate has crazy throughput per watt.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvermont
Ansible – Getting Started Tutorial
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

...featuring a novel kind of diagrams which show you when to do what, for example, look at the bottom of http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/227/Ratatouille
The stick in question is not a TV tuner card. It is a full-fledged PC.
And you'll immediately see it when your program hangs in a loop ;-)
It's a little complicated - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing)#Unix-style_lo...

Essentially, if (Load average / number of CPUs) > 1 (for CPU bound work) then your system is overloaded.
Do they also have a laptop variant? Their Hardware is actually quite awesome - especially for Linux users
LimeLight – Day 3
Yes, some identifier would be nice so that it would be possible to look up the info in for example the "Correctional Facility Locator 2010".

For example this facility looks interesting (looks more like some farm):

http://prisonmap.com/images/facility4644.jpg
This technology seems almost too good to be true. It's simple, it's deployable, it's self-sufficient. What kind of emissions does this produce? It says they're within U.S. standards, but is that a high standard? How can it burn at such high temperatures without some additional fuel source? While this technology is incredible (and important for developing countries), how much of what they're disclosing about it is true and what damage might it do in the long term?
Maybe a nanopore/nanostructure battery[1,2]? They are touted to bring near-capacitor charge/discharge rates from fairly traditional chemistry. This specific application leaves a few questions, though:

1: What is the actual capacity of the battery demonstrated? If it has a high C but low capacity, this isn't really notable. The paper [1] indicates that total charge capacity is a function of how fast the battery is charged; what tradeoff are they making?

2: How many charge cycles is this battery capable of at those rates?

3: What thresholds are they putting in place for temperature, and are all the components of the phone rated for repeated thermal cycles to those levels and back to ambient?

4: What is the failure mode for this battery? Outgassing? What compounds are released in overcharge?

[1] - http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v9/n12/abs/nnano.2014.24...

[2] - http://www.google.com/patents/US20060216603
What a price difference. Wow. Dozens, nay, hundred of hours learning Linux finally pays off. Seriously now, I'm really pleased to see that you can choose Linux and pay so much less. Of course on a relatively more expensive machine that difference isn't much, but it's certainly a stark difference on such a cheap device.

Edit: I see there's a hardware difference too. That's a bit of a shame. I wonder what corporate forces are in action here..
"understaffed and underfunded"

More like lazy and unwilling to learn. You have to wonder if the guy saying this has even made a cursory effort to investigate the issue of if he is just doing the only thing he know how to do, run his mouth.
Rule of 3 should apply to interfaces. Don't make an interface unless there are at least 3 implementations.
I wouldn't doubt that the BBC is doing bad reporting.

My concern is over using supercaps: their density is still very low compared to Li-ions on a volume basis.

Also, I noticed they are using a Samsung phone. Last time I used a supercap in a project, I had to build a complex circuit that compensates for exponential voltage drop but outputs constant voltage and amperage. I want to know how they got around that issue as well.
Eleven dead at Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo
Thanks for the info, I'd never heard of that IDE before. With its common name it's been impossible to find screenshots so far.

> Although it sounded like a really cool idea, it didn't take off.

That could have been because it was bought by Boreland, who had a history of 'not succeeding' with projects, whose focus was elsewhere, who lost key staff at an important point, and then were bought out and mismanaged from there forward?

Delphi didn't have to die the death it has.
Slightly more detail available at BBC News[1]

"Charlie's latest tweet was a cartoon of the Islamic State militant group leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi."[2]

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30710883

[2] https://twitter.com/Charlie_Hebdo_/status/552773881283764224
I don't think that it is possible to master a language in a week. You can learn the basic concepts for sure but there is usually a lot more like idiomatic problem solving, libraries, frameworks, best practices etc.

In my experience you acquire those by working with the language every day for a year or so... and then you are still far away from "master".
Using the Flow type checker with standard JavaScript syntax
Video of the shooters from the roof: http://www.francetvinfo.fr/faits-divers/attaque-au-siege-de-...
I quite like the simplicity of the site. Yes, it may not play up the mystery, but it's cute and straightforward. I think that may inspire confidence in it.
How about diversifying then? Not in the sense of knowing everything shallowly. But in the sense of knowing like 5 things very deeply.
Great screencast – lots of detail in a short period. No messing around, it also shows how an optimized workflow should look like. The audio/video quality of the screencast was extremely good as well.
Still has more WTF moments than any other language I have used so far.
Oh putain.

The Charlie Hebdo magazine had a recurring joke where they printed a Mohammed caricature on the front page as a reaction to being criticized for printing a Mohammed caricature.
Actually they were making fun of everyone. But some took it less well than others.

If the French government isn't incredibly sensible in dealing with this issue, this will boost extremist groups on all sides even more.
isn't this more, the SourceForge wrapper is acting unsafely?

regardless, this has been happening for the entire last year with the consent of the developers: https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=13...

I would be very doubtful they will listen to their users any further about the harm it does.

I'll probably avoid FZ from now on, I don't exactly enjoy using software that is openly hostile towards me
go ahead and stab yourself with a multimeter, your gonna read somewhere around 300-1000ohms
God, he makes it look good. The demo does give me a few of the ol' "too much magic" heebie jeebies, but frontend JS development is so badly lacking in compelling packaage management stories that I'm going to give jspm a shot.

Here's to 2015, I suppose.

P.S. Glen, if you're reading this, I really would love to see a youtube of a DJ hooked up to automatically synced GIFs. Don't be a tease.
A free trial should help a potential customer decide whether or not the product is a right fit for his need.

So if you offer a slow, limited version is it helping your potential customer to do so? No, by making things difficult you're just manufacturing frustration.

From the other comments, it seems visitors need only a couple of hours to evaluate it. So why not make it a free trial available only for 1 day or for 3 uses?

Your fear("my worry is that somebody will get their money's worth in 14 days and choose not to buy afterwards) implies to me that you're not sure how your product fits in the user day-to-day workflow. If users would use it for 14 days and leave, the problem is not in the free trial, it is in failing to provide value and engage users.

So how can you change your product/free trial to engage users, getting them to realize value of your product, and creating habits for them to come back to your product?

I wrote an article recently into designing free trials, it might be of interest to you: http://www.saasfoundry.io/blog/design-saas-free-trial/

Good luck!
there are super cheap phones with okish hardware, but software is universally SHIT, from broken functions, lazy implementations, to malicious rootkits and spyware in factory roms
About time. USB + DisplayPort + Ethernet + power (- PCI Express) is wonderful.
This is all bull. There are skilled IT forensics people who can access these devices without the permission of the owner as long as they seize them on.

As far as I know the key needs to be kept in ram which means it is vulnerable while the device is on.

This only prevents dragnet surveillance; nothing more.
Icebraining's wiki link below hits it on the head, but my view is that knowing too much stuff deeply might make it hard to collaborate in teams as it makes roles really hard to define.

Happens in soccer a lot - teams with really versatile players will usually get whipped by teams who have specialists in each position. Top teams aim for squads with 2 players for every position, not 2 positions for every player.

Hope that makes sense, it's getting late here :)
'Disk detectives' top 1M classifications of possible planetary habitats
Yeah. Also, I'm pretty sure this was in the news half a year ago.
HTTP/2.0 — Bad protocol, bad politics
shameles plug for my little project - the pooh programming language:

http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/pooh-lan/2012/12/11...

here you can get an execution trace of the program: each expression is displayed as it evaluates:

http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/docs/html/pooh/example/...

(they used to have something like that in some scheme interpreters, i used this featue a lot at the time)
http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Chef-Learning-Anything/dp/0... is quite fun and as much a book about learning to learn as about cooking. It's sort of a hackers guide to cooking. Or agreed...Jamie is a good start too. One of the original ones (http://www.amazon.com/Return-Naked-Chef-Jamie-Oliver/dp/0718...) got me started.
How songbirds may help build a better hearing aid
phk (poul henning kamp) is the lead developer of varnish, in case people are not familiar with him.
I'm incredibly excited for the possibilities of this connector. Imagine a laptop that has a bunch of USB Type-C ports—and nothing else. Plugging a (universal!) charger into any of them charges the laptop at a rate of up to 100 watts. Displays are connected via DisplayPort-over-USB, etc. In fact, the display could actually be the charger as well (or, if you have a desktop, the display could be powered from the PC). A single USB Type-C cable could run an all-encompassing, manufacturer-agnostic docking solution.

Phones would also feature the same connector, so a laptop charger could also charge a phone, with no adapter needed.

I'm really looking forward to having a single connector for virtually all of my devices (excluding special situations, such as water-resistant devices) within the next few years.
Check out Nathan Myhrvold's work, cooking is (or at least can be) very much an intellectual exercise.
Marketing – The Bitter Business
What I'd like to see a matrix comparing all of the different systems using compression or stored energy via non-battery means.

They mention low cow air storage tanks - comparable to what though?
The following implementation comes closer to the original semantics of the ADT implementation.

type _ value' =
| GBool : bool -> bool value'
| GInt : int -> int value'

type _ expr' =
| GValue : 'a value' -> 'a expr'
| GIf : bool expr' * 'a expr' * 'a expr' -> 'a expr'
| GEq : 'a expr' * 'a expr' -> bool expr'
| GLt : int expr' * int expr' -> bool expr'

let rec eval' : type a. a expr' -> a = function
| GValue (GBool b) -> b
| GValue (GInt i) -> i
| GIf (b, l, r) -> if eval' b then eval' l else eval' r
| GEq (a, b) -> (eval' a) = (eval' b)
| GLt (a,b) -> a < b ;;

eval' (GIf ((GEq ((GValue (GInt 2)), (GValue (GInt 2)))),
(GValue (GInt 42)),
(GValue (GInt 12))));;

eval' (GIf ((GEq ((GValue (GInt 2)), (GValue (GInt 2)))),
(GValue (GBool true)),
(GValue (GBool false))));;

It does not support having separate return types for the branches on an if-statement but I consider that to be a good thing ;) I should probably update the ADT example to dis-allow that.
So any comments on how is this better than a Raspberry Pi for example? You could all this using an arduino or a pi isn't it?
This is American focused, but I think the story is very similar in Korea, so it might parallel how it works in Japan as well.

http://www.wikihow.com/Buy-Wholesale

I know in Korea that some of the big "traditional" style markets have shop fronts that are only wholesalers and won't sell to regular customers. If there's an analog where you live you might want to hit those up. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's a wholesale confectionary market of some sort that meets once a month or whatever.

My sister-in-law ran a small store for a few years and she'd go to a local convention center/stadium and buy all kinds of inventory at such places.
http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html

> (1999) A US Navy safety publication describes injuries incurred while doing don't's. One page described the fate of a sailor playing with a multimeter in an unauthorized manner. He was curious about the resistance level of the human body. He had a Simpson 260 multimeter, a small unit powered by a 9-volt battery. That may not seem powerful enough to be dangerous… but it can be deadly in the wrong hands.

> The sailor took a probe in each hand to measure his bodily resistance from thumb to thumb. But the probes had sharp tips, and in his excitement he pressed his thumbs hard enough against the probes to break the skin. Once the salty conducting fluid known as blood was available, the current from the multimeter travelled right across the sailor's heart, disrupting the electrical regulation of his heartbeat. He died before he could record his Ohms.

"It's the volts that jolt but the mills that kill" - voltage gives you the electric shock feeling but current across the heart will kill you.
Well, there is and isn't.

I bought my phone from aliexpress last year. Since then, Haipai Noble has had 3 major versions, and a dozen minor hardware updates.

Decide on price, and find reviews online of popular Chinese phones. Make sure the have the hardware features you want at the price you want. And then follow safe buying rules. Don't buy from low sales vendors, nor bad scored vendors.
I don't think it's evil corporate forces. They wanted a "budget" one with lower specs and realised they could reduce the price further by removing the Windows license.

I doubt it's actually that much of the price tag.
I'm currently backing the Petalite:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/petalite-flux-15-minute-c...

Which sounds rather more believable, and like it might be useful this year. I can live with 15-minute charging, and it being an external battery.
World's loudest alarm clock
I can imagine the fun when the alarm goes off when you're not at home. Poor neighbors!﻿
A motion–capture approach to detecting deceit [pdf]
greed and gluttony, the path to hell.
Until you realize that you have X different implementations of the "same" functionality. All because no one bothered to look at existing items, or never bothered to make their code a little bit generic so that those that look at it later on know how to adapt it to their needs.

In essence, they're both partially to blame. There are times when generic code is unneeded, and other times when it will get used in the future. The trick is to know the difference, before it's too late and you have X different variations of similar functionality.
I actually learned almost entire lambda calculus, partial application, currying & tons of other theoretical CS while cooking.

I usually buy a book (these days I'm reading "Elements of Programming") read a chapter and then build the mental model while cooking. Cooking is a double edge sword for me.
completely unrelated.
The article and cast was specifically about making the development flow for frontend javascript more robust. What are you complaining about? This article has nothing to do with advocating JS for "critical systems, frameworks and back end".
The we are learning is seems like a natural extension of multi-variable calculus and PDEs. As if what happens when you have hundreds of variables ? What tools do we turn towards ?

The thing is for example in ML the standard solution is to use gradient decent, but what I learnt is depends highly on the type of equations you are dealing with. The first tool should never be a hammer. We used stochastic gradient decent on linear machine tasks ! Now after learning optimization theory it seems like madness. The thing is whenever you introduce unnecessary complexity you pay technical debt.

Occam's razor is really important when you are dealing with modelling.
Rote symbolic manipulation is not inherent to solving the mathematics described in the paper. That's part of the point.

I'd argue that the endless swarms of people playing bejeweled variants suggests pattern analysis is extremely popular.

Mathematics is currently taught with the excuse "you'll need this later, it's useful - honest". If you're advocating an additional helping of that, why is THIS future possible application relevant in a way that the others aren't?
As an American, I know how crappy it feels to know about both terror attacks and mass shootings in my country. My deep sympathies go out to the victims, their families and the French people.
Lan Scanner (Chrome) tested on OS X
True. I guess the only recourse is to revolt, roll out the guillotine, and solve the RIAA/MPAA problem the old fashioned way.
Please use A/B testing if you try out a new design.
AT&T still 'very bullish' on Sponsored Data despite just 10 customers so far