skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it's hard to plan for 2-16 inches. But that's a fault with reality, and not a reason to give bad forecasts. It's really hard to plan for hurricanes, so let's just give a forecast of "it's going to miss us"! That's much easier to plan for!

Sometimes life is uncertain. The answer is to account for the uncertainty when planning, not insist that the information indicate certainty when it's not actually there.
iOS has recently opened it's advanced javascript engine to developers which should put App web page rendering speed on par with Safari.
Is that something Windows Phone is doing, or are Mozilla and Google not making their browsers run on a device with a low market share?
This might be useful for password recovery in some scenarios.
I understand his sentiment, but I think there's something to be said for leaving a meeting open-ended beyond simple courtesy. When I was consulting, I found it was best for me to just let my clients talk as long as they wanted to, and rarely if ever interrupt. I learned a lot of really interesting things about peoples' professional and personal lives by taking this approach. While I appreciate that one can't do this all the time, I don't think that exploratory quality should be discounted, and I don't see how it would work if there's never any slack time in the schedule. I'd think it's even more important for a VC who wants to see through the pitch and get to the real story.
You make contingency plans for both ends of the range, and most importantly, you know you have to check for updates frequently.
Folders: a programming language encoded into folder structure
OAuth Authentication with Custom Headers in Swift
I'd love to know more views around your thought process.
It is nearly impossible to statically link glibc.
Mobile banking will help the poor transform their lives
In England:

You go to see your GP. You explain that you have anxiety (or whatever), and that it interferes with your daily life. They should follow the NICE (see below) guidance. There are "books on prescription" - curated lists of recommended self-help books; talking therapies; medication.

Or you web-search for your local "IAPT" (improving access to psychological therapies) service. This is often but not always provided by your local NHS mental health provider. You should be able to self-refer, by phone. Here's the example page for Gloucestershire: http://www.talk2gether.nhs.uk/

You can get private treatment from therapists. The BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) is a recognised respected professional body. So, web-search for therapists providing CBT and with a BACP registration.

NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) has some good information about what you should expect from providers.

http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/QS53

http://pathways.nice.org.uk/pathways/generalised-anxiety-dis...
First, my apologies for not remembering that you might read my comment. Second, more apologies for writing "alpha geek can overcome the filter" when what I should have said was very different: "HN readers upvote alpha geek material because of the source not the material." Finally, I went back and forth on whether to add my own opinion, which is that it SHOULD have been upvoted and discussed, because you and your fans (among whom I count myself) are an important part of the community. Thank you for your many wonderful essays. I look forward to the next one.
>> The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search)

When I'm "learning a new tech" -- let's use switching from Rails to Node as an example, I usually go to Google first.

Ask a question like "why would I choose Framework X over Y" in Google's searchbox, and your top results will have the same question on SO, except that it has been closed because the answer is opinion-based. The few answers to the closed question are usually fairly objective and insightful and leave me wishing that more people were able to add their 2 cents.

Sometimes newbies ask a broad question to get a big picture perspective (from multiple people answering) that can't be provided by a couple of blog entries found in Google results. And yes, those questions might elicit opinionated responses, but I would argue that the responses add more value to SO than they take away.
That is unnecessary verbosity. Try this instead:

bool r = !test();
After watching the same ridiculous news reporting touting "historic", "storm of the century", "unprecedented", etc., year after year, the more cynical side of me suggests that there's a small supplemental reason besides flawed models: there's probably good money to be made from overhyping storms. At the very least news stations must get great ratings the day or two beforehand. Note that this doesn't preclude accurate estimating...you just have to pull a bunch of cheap psychological tricks to get people to focus on the worst case scenario. The end result of people freaking out is still largely the same.

One reason this comes to mind is that I can't ever remember a storm reaching its worst-case snowfall predictions, and usually they barely make the minimums. A rule of thumb I use is to treat the minimum prediction as the actual maximum and zero as the actual minimum. Anecdotal, but seems to work well.
Coase won the Economics Nobel for his analysis of why and how firms organize. The Nature of the Firm[0] is still worth reading. The answer basically boils down to "transaction costs" and how they affect economic activity at different scales.

[0] http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~jsfeng/CPEC11.pdf
You can check your libc version by running libc - e.g. `/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6`
They give it away (which I find moderately not nice of them) by saying they used Exim (the mail server) in their POC.
That's fascinating, thanks for the links and the insight.
We changed the url from http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/01/kythe-new-appr... to the canonical project page. It also links to http://www.kythe.io/docs/kythe-overview.html.
When I'm meeting with someone about a job or contract, I do a bit of research

As you should, that is courtesy on your end. If however you end up finding a stallman-esqe[1] rider, then it will be clear you are dealing with someone who will probably not respect your time.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysoci...
Thanks for the interesting read. :)
And most people have accessed the internet through filters before at work/school/college and know how bad false positive can be.
> Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?

I don't think the current situation is the result of that. From where I stand, the history seems pretty clear:

1) Nerdy people like me get into a field because something about it tickles their fancy.

2) They happen to invent stuff that solves important problems or improves life in some way.

3) Eventually, non-nerdy or semi-nerdy people notice this, get into the mix and get rich as a result.

4) People at large start noticing this. The field becomes more and more lucrative and popular, until it turns into an industry.

5) The industry now attracts not only talented, passionate people, but all sorts of other people too: people who want to get rich quick, people who want to get famous, people who are in it because it was a popular choice when they had to pick a career, etc.

You'll notice that the inflection point in this story was #3, when some people got rich. The "culprit", therefore, is not making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming; it's capitalism.
Oh man... this page have so many ads that Chromium takes 70% CPU constantly.
There are people that are able to live on benzodiazepines long term without significant health impact. There are a lot of medications that are suitable for a lifetime of use in the SSRI and anti anxiolytic family that do not have the potential for habit forming either (and that's habit in the sense of your body becoming accustomed to it).

It's great that you're concerning yourself with the well-being of other people, but please allow concern over the use of medications to be between people with significant mental health issues who are taking those medications and their doctors.
" Just build stuff until it the pieces start to fall into place?"

That's exactly what I had to do. It's much easier to understand WHY certain parts of Flux were put in place once you start to use them in a larger app.

Deconstruct one of the Facebook examples (I'd recommend the todo app) and see how data is passed around. I had several light-bulb moments doing this.

Also: It helps to understand commonJS and a bit of node -- specifically what they use Browserify for.
You can now post videos and send group messages on Twitter
I somewhat agree with you, but I think that's going a bit too far. We should care what ancient humans ate because it can give us insights into what is healthy for us now.

The beef (no pun intended) I have with this sort of articles is that I think the authors start from their ethical point of view ("eating animals is wrong") and then they try to find a biological justification, which happens to be a bit flimsy and not what mainstream science currently holds. If they were more honest, they would admit: "I don't care what ancient humans ate, or what we are more biologically suited for. I still think eating animals is wrong, and that today we have the means to adapt to a diet that doesn't involve harming them." (Not that I agree with this position, but it would seem more honest to me).
I started using marty.js [1] after it popped up on HN a few days ago [2]. The documentation is outstanding and includes guides/explanations of the architecture beyond just an api reference.

[1] http://martyjs.org/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923053
On a possibly comparable note: in C++, programs can be run entirely from the constructors of static global objects ... letting one write a program with

#include "X.h"
X x;
void main(){}
I think practical politics are closer to hustling than philosophy. Main problem with politicians IMO is that they often stand behind domain experts and claim that political decisions are inevitabilities of natural law.
I'm surprised they didn't choose San Jose. There must be some things outside of their control considering they would have expanded into their own neighborhood.
Raise $ for EFF on Move Your Domain Day
The 30,000 Futures of the Brain
I am baffled by the people who decided to disagree with you here. Calling this source code is incredibly dishonest. It's the equivalent of saying "we've published the source code of photoshop" when you've base64-encoded photoshop.exe.

I would love to see the actual source code of regin. What they've actually published is useless to me.
Car battery would be much less obvious as a form of vandalism though, unless you were caught in the act.
That's true and a good point, but not (it seems) applicable to this particular function, which validates whether or not the name is one of two fixed-sized formats, right?

(edit) You may be totally right here, by the way.
>> It’s been nearly five years since we offered to build a fiber-optic network in one U.S. city as an experiment — and were met with overwhelming enthusiasm.

I suspect the enthusiasm had to do with Google not acting like a phone/cable company. My own hope is that this remains true, and that they come to the Boston area.
The corporations see the benefits, but the population does not. Same as in China.
For anyone interested... the whole motivation of Google Fiber to motivate ISPs to stop gouging us does exactly what it is designed to do.

Cox, in Phoenix, miraculously doubled everyone's speeds > 100mbps last year because they were concerned with our general happiness levels and wanted to show their affection.

Nope... that's not it. Ran into two leads at Smash Burger in June of 2014 and asked them on the spot "When are we getting gigabit speed?" and their reply was "End of year, we gotta move before Google Fiber gets here."

None of that would have happened if G Fiber wasn't coming - CenturyLink and Cox were perfectly fine dabbling in 50mbps service for the rest of eternity without true competition.

Now in less than 12 months my 65mbps service was freely upgraded to 150mbps and we are suppose to have a 1Gbps option any month now (there are test neighborhoods live since last year around Scottsdale)

I have no illusions about how fortunate we are being in a well-wired/competitive environment, but damn am I happy and appreciative.

It actually has more impact on me and where I would want to live than I thought... the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.
Counting is the hardest thing in programming.
Does it need a marketing moniker?
More to the point, who cares? The storm was still pretty bad: this isn't a case of a "bust" forecast. Long Island got hit, as well as much of New England.

So the line on the map of where the heaviest snow would be was a bit off: the only reason this is "news" at all is because that line happened to affect New York City, and there are a lot of journalists who live there whose view of the world matches that New Yorker cover[1]. If the line had been anywhere else we wouldn't have heard about it at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
Literally every government for the last 35 years has promised to get tax compliance up. It's not gonna happen. Beware Greeks Bearing Bonds[0] goes into good detail on the problems with the enforcement bureaucracy and legal systems that make it so difficult to actually apply the law.

[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-b...
I prefer this version as well. The other one shortens it and cuts out some great parts.
The thing is, as far as firms go, $5/employee is nothing compared to how much an actual employee costs. It might as well be free if it makes communication better.
Please don't misunderstand. I was only trying to make the distinction between "somebody's pet project that might work" and "this stuff HAS to work for millions of views and hundreds of devs every day"
They have the same right they would have if they were physically attacked by the US - the right to sit there and take it because they have no power.
Making Flux and REST Play Nicely Together
Being able to compile assembly directly into a C program is a very useful tool for allowing optimizations across embedded assembly. One way around it is use of intrinsics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_function which is basically what we're talking about.
Why Services Are Essential to Your Platform as a Service
We might have to agree to disagree. If TAs aren't interested in students diving deeper into the course material then I'm not sure they should be paid at all.

But perhaps the less radical approach would be to pay them enough such that they can take the time to judge the work on it's merit.
It will indeed be interesting to see. :)

You're right that the work needed to connect (say) a compiler or static analyzer to (say) an editor is usually substantial.

Right now, projects typically duplicate this work over and over again, for each combination of language and editor. We've found that for a lot of common cases you can re-use the work you did to instrument a given compiler and/or editor for others to mix and match, if they can agree on a format for the data.

Obviously this doesn't work for every such problem, but in our experience it's surprisingly effective for most of the day-to-day tasks engineers need to solve, such as figuring out what will break if I commit this change to the repo.
You could have a look at Samy Kamkars talk "How I met your girlfriend" at Blackhat 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5xRRF5GfQs&ab_channel=killa...
Word. Tried snarky sarcasm, forgot how people react differently, failed. Apologize!
Using the chrome app you can go to

http://weather.rap.ucar.edu/model/?model=gfs

I never tried it on my phone until a couple seconds ago. It looks pretty good!

You can create a shortcut to that URL on android, presumably legacy phones can do the same.
Seriously. Did nobody else here actually come because they were interested in seeing Regin's source code? I feel like I'm in crazy land.
Agreed. Half the reason I've kept my pre-order was as a reminder.
Show HN: GitHub Insights
Comcast also doubled speeds in Portland recently without raising prices. http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2014/11/c...
In case anyone has tons of Docker images and looks for a easy way to list those which include a vulnerable glibc version, here is a handy one-liner: https://5pi.de/2015/01/27/find-ghosts-in-your-docker-images/
-> ...and they sure as heck don't understand uncertainty.

Man this could not be more true. You can get people to (sometimes) understand basic probability if they don't have a math background, but try something like bounded probability for explaining the likelihood of the severity of an event and they'll get lost.
Yup, I got the postcards from Cox in my neighborhood (N. Scottsdale). Same thoughts as you.
Note that this article is written by the Capital Weather Gang, a group of DC-area meteorologists who consistently put out accurate and nuanced short-range forecasts of upcoming weather in the area. They give out great info and they aren't afraid to state their uncertainties up front, nor are they afraid to admit it when they're wrong (which is not too frequent).

They give an implicit answer to the question of "how could everybody do better?" which is "be more like us." And I think that would be great.
Well, Ulrich Drepper has been trying to get people to stop using it since 2007: https://udrepper.livejournal.com/16116.html

And not just because of IPv6.
>Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?

First of all, you should keep in mind that while the hacker culture may have been tightly knit, we have never been a hivemind. (One only needs to look at the various holy wars as proof of that.) While I'm sure there were plenty of people working to make programming easier to learn for newbies (BASIC is a good, perhaps misguided example of this), not all fit into this category. Case in point, Turbo Pascal. Perhaps you know something I don't, but that was created as a commercial venture. It was sold to companies to make a profit. Its relative ease of use was just something marketing said to managers to get them to buy licenses. Yes, both were created to be easier to learn, but I feel the reasons matter here. One was created to spread the joy of learning, to get more people hooked on programming. The other was created to lower the barrier of entry to programming so that companies could hopefully hire dumber, less motivated people to do the same work.

Personally, the article resonated with me. It reminded me of the first time I turned God Mode on in DoomII, only to discover it completely ruined the fun of the game. Yes, everything is easier these days, and I can prototype an application far easier than I could 20 years ago. But it's not as fun. I used to think it was just me, that I was running out of motivation or ideas, but now I'm wondering if it's actually something else.
6/7 Release

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-0092.html
There is a lot of room for innovative algorithms for providing those standards. And innovation of that type is exactly what is needed to take the web to the next step - so I applaud any team who tries to build new browsers!
Ask HN: Potential internship recruiter asked for my transcript
What do I do?
Not looking for any apology, just wondering why you think it is 'crap' beyond the surgery aftereffects. What better way to learn than to listen to your critics?
Spain planned to 'invade' Australia in the 1790s with 100-vessel armada
Wow, that is an intense list of expectations.
I’m always experimenting with new things. What do you do to keep meetings manageable and sane?

1. No phone calls. Use email. I'll respond when I can, almost always the same or next day.

2. No texts. Use email. See #1.

3. No status meetings. Email me your status report. I'll email you mine. Column titles should include: Item#, Project#, Title, Beneficiary, Responsible, Phase, Promise Date, Status, Disposition, Questions.

4. No "standing meetings". If you need regular (as in weekly) meetings, just send me an email with status, problems, questions, etc. the same time every week. I will answer you. My answer may include a meeting request.

5. No "all hands" meetings. Send us all an email.

6. Schedule any meetings that really require 1 hour over lunch. I hate to eat alone. Two birds, one stone.

7. 15 minutes is a waste of time to stop, meet, restart.

8. 30 minutes is usually good. (OP was right)

9. Meet in my office. I'm too busy to travel.

10. If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I lock the door. No meeting. If it's with several people, I will only meet with those on time.

11. Every meeting requires some form of written agenda, with appropriate content and length, that must be emailed ahead of time. Agenda topics: Date, Time, Length, Required Attendees, Business Problem, Topics to Cover, Expected Result, Expected Next Steps (if possible). There is no such thing as "Optional Attendees". There is no such thing as a meeting to determine the agenda for the meeting.

12. Your best bet: my regular happy hours double as "open office hours", usually from 5 to 7: Tuesday: Bar Louie, Wednesday, B.J.s, Thursday, Tony Romo's. These "meetings" have always been the best.
Three problems:

1. Uncertainty isn't actionable. A statement like, "There's an 85% chance of snow with accumulation of 1–24" with peak probabilities of 28% and 17% at 2" and 18", respectively" is nonsense to most people. And moreover, it doesn't mean anything to me. Are we going to get snow that will affect my morning commute? Are we going to get so much snow that I need to take emergency action? A probability distribution doesn't answer those questions, even if that's the best that exists.

2. Weather is news. The cable news channels were dominated by snow predictions yesterday, and the Weather Channel exists as an "entertainment" venue, not a source of scientific information. If it doesn't fit into a soundbite, the public can't absorb it. And "Weather is hard to predict" doesn't garner viewership.

3. Prepare for the worst. While small changes in the environment can lead to large variability in snow accumulation, the fact of the matter is that there was a not-unlikely chance (according to the models) that NYC, Boston, and other cities could have seen crippling snowfall. They were able to prepare for that eventuality. That it didn't come to pass is almost a non-issue. Can you imagine the outcry—not to mention the impact—if the situation was reversed (i.e., surprise 3' of snow)? Fairfax County Public Schools outside of DC got slammed in the media for not closing a few weeks back.

The real question is: at what point of probability do you prepare for a potential outcome, and are you prepared to back that up (either way)? Do we prepare for record snowfall on 80% likelihood? 50%? 10%? (And as a broader point of discussion, this same calculation applies to other areas: TSA spend vs. terrorism; flood insurance cost vs. coverage; etc.)