skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* Switched to washing my hair once a week after 45 days of not washing it, no 'poo style. Before this, if I didn't wash it every day, I'd have a head of grease in 30 hours.

* Hit 60K pageviews on http://www.developingandstuff.com for the second month in a row; started splitting posts by content into several thematic blogs.

* Restarted playing the bass, seriously considering getting Rocksmith after trying it out at a friend's house.

* Got my first sale on fiverr: https://www.fiverr.com/mparramon/
Quit eating sweets of any kind - over a month in and going strong.

Started reading every night before bed again - trying to read two books / month in 2015, despite a very busy schedule.
Cringly said in his article that a quarter of the IBM workforce would "get their paperwork" to be laid off in the last week of January or so. He was very specific and he's not even close. At some point, the layoffs may total a quarter of the workforce, but that's not what his histrionic diatribe said. If he now gets to backpedal and "restate" what he said and be right in his predictions, then so were the forecasters who said New York was going to be buried in snow and yet only got dusted.

People have been predicting the imminent death of IBM, with detailed litanies of the myriad of ways it's unrecoverable failures, pretty much every day of the 30 years I've been in IT. The thing about predicting the end of the world, is that if you do it long enough and lack the humility to be ashamed of all the times you were wrong, you'll eventually get to be right.
If you're looking to lose any and all good will you've established, charging all previous customers $70 to get updates is a great way to do it. ST2 dev is dead, which is what matters to the people who already paid for the product.
One could also think that while playing SimCity. It haven't gone through my mind though.
I have an Asus RTN66U "Dark Knight" and it works wonderfully in about half of my ~1500 sq. ft. apartment, but shitty in the other half. I'm convinced a single router won't be enough.
The legal tender status of US dollars doesn't prevent any party, public or private, from accepting payment in other forms, whether currency or commodities.

It does mean that US courts, when awarding damages (even for a contract denominated in some other currency) will do so in dollars, and that a tender of payment in dollars for a debt will generally be given legal effect.

And, anyhow, if it doesn't require the state to actually hold bitcoins, it may mean the State just contracts with any of the many entities that takes payment in BTC and converts it to dollars. Its no different, in effect, than the state deciding to take VISA instead of just cash or check.

EDIT: on review, the bill requires that the plan includes contracting with a third-party payment processor.
Hi there dchuk. So many great apps out there built on top of Stripe's API.

We actually set out to be just as easy to integrate as the Stripe Checkout plugin (if not easier). Let me know if you can take it for a spin; would love feedback!
So is it for submitting sites to HN or for seeing site rank from the extension? (or both?)
Mag+ - Business Systems Product Manager - NYC - Full-Time

Mag+ is a mobile app building software SaaS company funded by Bonnier (They own Popular Science and a bunch of other magazines).

Responsibilities:

- Manage business systems and third party integrations with various technology systems used by sales, product, support and marketing teams (Salesforce, Marketo, online commerce, etc)

- Draft technical requirements, architecture diagram, specifications and documentation for integration projects to guide the development teams during the implementation phase

- Share best practices for business systems integrations as well as specific results based on proof of concept in testing environment

- Coordinate with product and development teams to complete projects that require prioritization and development implementation

- Plan and execute on strategic reporting across systems drawing and elucidating analytics and business intelligence to assist sales, marketing, and support operations

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the position, company culture, etc.
These businesses are most certainly NOT "on their way out". Office supplies is one of the largest categories in ecommerce. Staples and Office Depot are each doing billions in annual sales online. The idea that Amazon has already won in this category is simply not true (yet, but still).

Staples did ~$10b in online sales last year and Office Depot did ~$6b. Online only.

Staples sells more online in pure dollars than Apple, Walmart or Dell.

This is not Radio Shack.

I think this is a really smart move for Staples.

Source: https://www.internetretailer.com/2013/05/24/big-and-getting-...
Let me know if you want to be a beta tester for my game to learn reading the music staff. Here's a sample game video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_xNPk2y8N4
Ive been so excited about this! Though I kinda miss the call to action buttons that they had on the old site. Scrolled down the page looking for the quickstart button before I had a "duh" moment and clicked on documentation.
Those deck chairs are not going to rearrange themselves.
That is exactly how jaconda.im is working now, everybody in the room can send emails into the room.
> aging is still quite unavoidable. Would postponing
> the unavoidable end really make you less mortified?

Yes, I want to postpone the unavoidable. Death is unavoidable, I'm trying to postpone it. I will probably be in a wheel chair like my father eventually, yes I want to postpone that as long as possible so I can walk around in nature and enjoy it. If my hearing starts to fail, I will get hearing aids to try to postpone deafness as long as possible. (My elderly mother wears hearing aids.) I don't care if deafness is inevitable, I will fight for every extra day of hearing birds chirping and the hearing the ocean waves.

What am I missing? Isn't everybody just like me? SOME parts of aging are Ok, but most of them are super bad - when your bones get thin due to Osteoporosis if you fall you might break a bone, which in turn might end your life. Nobody wants to get Osteoporosis sooner, we are all trying to postpone it as long as possible, right?
On the contrary, it's very interested in the truth. When you want to present an expert witness, you include in the paperwork what truth they're going to tell the court, and their evidence for it.

The trial is a show for the jurors to convey information to them - everything that's going to be said NEEDS to be conveyed to the opposing side in advance, so they can prepare responses.

Surprise witnesses that blow cases wide open are only on TV.
Very cool. My parents had several decades' worth of National Geographic on their shelves that I would browse through from time to time, and the map inserts were always my favorite parts. I specifically remember spending hours poring over the Moon and Antarctica maps mentioned in this piece.

The 1914 map of Europe is fascinating. I find myself really really wanting to be able to zoom all the way in on those images.
I can’t see why it’s a good feature, since upvotes count when something is hot on HN, when it’s not hot you can simply “submit” it and it upvotes for the previous submitter but HN is for discover of new stuff, less for “maintaining point of interest” for that btw you can try kifi.com
I think you are greatly exaggerating the rate at which fundamental changes occur in cosmology.
This is probably why so many of the Windows Updates this year broke critical things, especially for enterprise. I feel Nadella is taking a "cheaper, faster" approach which is fine and dandy in the otherwise non-critical mobile space (mobile users are used to being treated like crap and having buggy releases) but in enterprise there's simply a higher standard of quality.

I'm not sure what this means for MS. At our shop we now have to overly-test all patches and then wait a minimum of 30 days to see what happens. This has saved our bacon several times under Nadella's MS when before we only had to do pretty casual testing of patches. This also means a lot of shops are no longer rushing to get security patches in because of his negligence and corner cutting. That means a less secure internet for all.

I really wish someone would step in and show Nadella that MS shouldnt just be an Apple-lite and that catering to enterprise should be MS's main goal, especially considering that's where almost all its revenue comes from. I'm sure playing Steve Jobs-lite is fun for Nadella, but its about time he grew up and started running with the big dogs. Frankly, I'm sick of the focus on mobile and other popular technology taking away from the core competencies that made some of these companies great. The recent actions and changes on OSX are disheartening as well. Or how the steam behind the Chromebook is more or less dead as Android eats the world.

Buying and updating an MS product shouldn't be a gamble. They're supposed to be the conservative and stable big brother to the industry. Ironically, its only now under new leadership that we have so much more incentive to move to FOSS products. Its the same amount of headaches, except with FOSS I have no licensing worries. Under Gates and Balmer, the commercial MS products were less headaches and delivered a fair amount of value. Now just installing an Exchange rollup is asking for a complete reimaging. We don't even bother with service packs anymore. Might as well roll out a new image with that cooked in. The fail rate on those is unacceptably high.

edit: why the downvotes? this echoes the sentiment at places like stackexchange and /r/sysadmin. testing at MS has gone to hell and everyone knows it. burying my comment does nothing to stop that reality. Its well known Nadella personally redid the QA and testing parts of MS and those outcomes have only gotten worse.
I think there's no denying that there has been some progress. But if you think To Kill a Mockingbird no longer has relevance to racial issues across the US, I'm going to guess you're white. There's an ocean of stuff relating to that, but this would be one good place to start: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
I am interested in this also.
I lost interest in mathematics starting in tenth grade. Looking back into the haze, it wasn't so much mathematics as high school in general and by extension industrialized education. Boredom begat indifference. Chaos reoriented priorities across starts and fits with mathematics in post-secondary education.

I enrolled in Coursera's Discreet Optimization about a year ago. It was way beyond my ability [No SoA], but I learned a hell of a lot about computing and solving hard computational problems. It also suggested that mathematics might be important when grappling interesting problems.

For fun I watched a number of Strang's Open-Courseware videos on matrices. I hit Chapter 1 of TAoCP. I treated it like programming - it was ok to only partially understand. I took an Algorithms MOOC or two. I actually enjoyed following the analysis even formal analysis is not something I would do for pleasure.

The turning point though was when Lamport's "Thinking for Programmers" [Lamport: Thinking] hit HN. It threw down the gauntlet. Specification is a prerequisite for a commitment to getting it right, where the it is computing. And when the it is computing, we are talking about math whether we like it or not.

It's not that the math and specification replaces testing. It's that tests are ad hoc without a mathematical understanding of the computation.

[Lamport: Thinking] http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/3-642
> In yet simpler terms: Newtonian mechanics is Quantum mechanics (except that it is always off by a miniscule, totally ignorable, amount. Except in extreme circumstances)

I believe we are saying the same thing.

Your "as Planck's constant approaces zero" is the same as me saying "in the regime where Planck's constant is irrelevant" (not quote from above, but those are the words I would use).

As you say, one can think of it as an expansion like:

QM = NM + \hbar C_1 + \hbar^2 C_2 + ...

(QM = Quantum mechanics, NM = Newtonian Mechanics, \hbar = Planck's constant, and C_i are correction factors (your "insert super complicated formula here")). Take \hbar to zero and you are get what you just said. But if you go into a regime where \hbar is significant, "Newtonian Mechanics breaks down", e.g. corrections are of same size (or perhaps even larger).

It might be "unsatisfying" how I try to describe it, but I tried to say the same thing as you did (I think). :-)
As some other commenters wrote - there's not that many differences with Symfony approach-wise. But it's more fun to write code in Laravel, Symfony on the other hand is incredibly verbose which is not a good thing in my opinion. You have to write way more code to achieve same thing in Symfony compared to Laravel.

Laravel has very reasonable and easy to understand structure and you don't need to use .xml or .yml for configuration.

I've had experience in CodeIgniter, Symfony, FuelPHP and I've been sticking with Laravel for over two years because of how simply nice it is to work with.
Why purging 60% of our email subscribers boosted list growth
Mostly it's not a space constraint, especially in the outer boroughs where there's a bit more space. There are plenty of compact European models that well into small apartments, e.g. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Washing_M.... But laundry machines are banned from most NYC buildings due to fears about overflows causing damage.
The bill specifies that the plan must include the use of "an appropriate third party payment processor that will process bitcoin transactions at no cost to the state."

This doesn't mean that there would be no fees, it means that the payment processor could only charge fees to the taxpayer, not the State.
What do you mean by purchasing an office?
Worked on and finished a couple big features for Improvely (https://www.improvely.com). Visitor profiles are looking snazzier (http://i.imgur.com/Up61dUk.png). Still an unending TODO list for February and onward.

Gave W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com) a bit of a facelift, and a new set of plans & pricing. Offering annual plans has increased customer LTV a lot.

Started testing Amazon Aurora for RDS. I'm considering replacing several bare metal servers with RDS once that service is out of "preview". The feature set is just bonkers for how easy it is to use. The price is just bonkers compared to RDS for MySQL/Postgres -- you get multi-AZ replication for free. Can't wait.

Did my taxes. Waiting on 1099s to come in before I file anything just to make sure everything lines up with my own books.
I launched alpha of my lifelong dream - website to visualise all public budgets:

http://blog.wikibudgets.org/2015/01/sankey-builder-launch.ht...
Improved Password-Based Authentication in MongoDB 3.0: SCRAM Explained (Part 1)
The building-laundromat thing I think of as very Swedish (all the way down to having rules governing how machines are reserved). Maybe also Finnish? Not sure about Norway.

In any case, they aren't common in Denmark, though a few buildings have them. The basement is more often given over to bike parking and storage cages. In Copenhagen, coin laundromats are extremely common as a result. I go to one that's about 2 blocks away. It's getting more common for people to install an in-apartment washing machine if they remodel, though, and newly built buildings all come with the appropriate hookups installed.
Quick suggestion, the main image is pretty, but makes it hard to read this text: ("Mobile QA Simplified") and ("Logging a bug has never been easier with Snaffu")
Great thread idea! Began a "biggest loser" competition at work, lost 5 pounds. Launched MisfitWatchr for iOS and Android (converts Misfit activity into WeightWatchers points). Began development of BeerSwift (faster check-ins for Untappd). All in all, a very productive month!
There's a lot of title inflation in the US, where someone who only knows some HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript, with little formal engineering education of any kind, can be called a software engineer.
To me Github has become a social networking website for developers (bear with me). As a social networking website its sort of half-way between Instagram (instead of sharing pictures you share code) and LinkedIn (It serves as a programmer's online profile ).

As a social-networking website, the most important thing that defines it is the number of users. You could publish your code on Codeplex or Bitbucket, but you would be simply limiting your reach.
FiscalNote, Inc. - DC & NYC - Full time - Authorized to work in US only

Open Positions: Senior Software Engineer, Architect, Front-End Engineer, SDET, Data Scientist, Ruby on Rails Engineer, Product Manager

We just announced our Series B investment round yesterday and are looking to further build out our engineering and data science teams!

At FiscalNote, we're building predictive analytics platforms for open data that impact every corner of industry and society. We're penetrating sectors untouched by advanced machine learning and NLP methods. CNN called us one of the Top 10 Startups in America. The legacy competition is not pleased.

We love engineering across a cutting-edge stack, we love our customers, and most importantly, we love our team. Job descriptions and requirements can be found at fiscalnote.com/careers.

Want to be FN Awesome? Email stubbs@fiscalnote.com.
Right, an engineering degree is a guarantee that you know the important points of what it means to be an engineer. Ethics, engineering process, math, etc. When you get an engineering degree from a certified university, you are an engineer. It's a guarantee that (at one point, at least), you possessed the set of skills and knowledge determined by a board of professionals to be necessary for a career of engineering. Other degrees may overlap, but they're not held to the same standards.
Decided to launch something every month in 2015 as a way to train myself out of half finishing projects.

Of course I'm briefly blogging about it as a journal too.

Initial discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908275

And yes, I did manage to ship in January!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8973807

I am planning Feb's challenge later today...
It does both. If a web-site wasn't submitted before, you can quickly submit it by clicking on the extension. So it works as a share bookmarklet too.
Recently I bought a router from Staples because I had 15% cash back if I used my debit card. Found the same router on Amazon.com and they have matched 110% of the price (must be sold by Amazon). So I actually got my router for less than Amazon's price.

So I think they are stepping up their game to compete online.
Having worked with Kohana, CodeIgniter and WP, Laravel is the reason I started writing PHP again. Also being a node developer, Laravel feels at home with Express(both influenced by Sinatra).

Artisan command line utility, Migrations for DB version control, Blade template engine and the neat directory structure are some of the things I like apart from the community ofcourse
Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages
PyParallel: added support for detecting system memory high/low states and altering behavior accordingly (i.e. hit high memory, stop accepting new connections until the event clears), refactored the heap snapshot logic, implemented socket re-use and context re-use for socket servers, switched over to using custom threadpools per socket server such that min/max threads could be limited to ncpu (prevents the kernel from flipping out and creating 200-300 threadpool threads when hitting instantaneous load of 10k+ connections (which happened when I was just palming everything off to the default thread pool, which has no min/max thread bounds and simply tries to do "best effort" servicing of thread pool load, which is completely sufficient in just about every case other than huge instantaneous loads)). Removed the extensive pointer/memory address testing from the release build (still in debug build) which, as expected, gave a significant performance improvement. End result, gloriously low latency and low jitter: https://twitter.com/trentnelson/status/562839986408800257. Only crashes now when you ctrl-c it on the console (as I haven't written the cleanup code yet) -- once that is fixed, I'll build an installer and do a public release, wahey! I love it when a plan comes together.

(PyParallel: native CPython running on all cores without being impeded by the GIL. https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-...)
I really hope they adopt that name, Staples Depot Max!
So we now effectively have an office supply monopoly? Ugh.
> "emotion is not science"

However, study of emotional response can be part of the scientific process. In fact, that's the basis of the advertising industry.

If I have tested meditation and found it predictably alters my moods (and similar examinations have been done for friends/family), is it fair to claim that is not science?
I decided to jump in head first and build a company. I'd been planning to do it for years as a side-project but always ended up too tired in the evenings - so, now that my partner has a job (he was previously at university so we were relying on my income), I've decided to just go for it.

It's scary and chances are I won't make it - but I'm so glad I've at least made a start. At the very least it'll be a nice break for 6-12 months, with some good experience too.

If you're interested in what I'm making, I'm building a simple, affordable web analytics service. There are loads of fantastic tools in this space (Heap is a great example) but they're 1. frankly very expensive (I'm targeting small companies/design studios) and 2. often more complicated than what most people need. Google Analytics has an awful lot of features (and has the advantage of being free) but is really quite complicated, especially for people who aren't as technical.

I should be launching in under a month - please feel free to sign up to be notified if you're interested: http://pleasant.io/
Dude! You make my achievements look dumb :( Good work! One day I hope to be as good.
> I don't see how this is anything but a loosing proposition.

Its a winning proposition to the third-party payment processor mandated to be contracted by the bill, and -- presuming the method of accepting bitcoins is that the payment processor takes bitcoins and provides the state with USD -- its not a losing proposition for the State so long as the bitcoin costs are set at a level such that the state always gets the full USD value of the taxes and fees.

I don't see how its really a losing proposition.
There are others too, Crystal rock for example.
Staples has been well run. Especially its online business. They were installing Kiva Systems' bots in their distribution centers before Amazon (which now owns Kiva), and they've consistently squeezed more margin than others from a category that deals 100% in commodities.
The fact that they're necessary conditions for its production doesn't mean they're sufficient, though. It doesn't follow that you can just take a vitamin pill and get some sunlight and you'll naturally have high levels of testosterone.
The Benefits of Online Tutoring for Parents
Win $6,000 for Your Plastic Bearing Startup
APODtab: A Better New Tab Screen for Chrome
This is interesting research, but it's also completely unsurprising. As human populations migrate, expand, collapse, invade, mix, and die out, both their culture and their genes will do all those same things.