skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice!

Any plans to use micropayment channels?
I wonder how many man-month or how much money was put into GHC vs. cpython.
The Smalltalk Evolution
This is an interesting article and everyone who uses in-app purchases should understand how they work.

However, a lot of work has already been done by other developers and it's wise to reuse something such as CargoBay https://github.com/mattt/CargoBay.
There's other weirdness, like Yahoo being valued at effectively $0 (once you discount their investments). But at least it's explainable in some sense.

Valuations are one of the least reliable attributes that use numbers I've ever seen. They're so unreliable as to be effectively worthless in any meaningful conversation. They indicate almost nothing, and aren't calculated in any consistent or meaningful way. If they're based on anything at all it's the most fractional speculation imaginable. Any company can sell me a single share at a price that would put their valuation into the billions. It's literally made up numbers. That's why this kind of stupidity exists http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/02/05/the_grilled_c...
I was never a fan of TV/VCR combos. If one side broke you were stuck with a clunky chimera of a device. The same is true if it becomes outdated. I've seen plenty of old TV/VCR combos hooked up to DVD players.

I'm not a fan of TV/PC combos either. The PC side will be outdated before the screen.
Cloud Foundry Names Sam Ramji as First CEO
Bug Report: on Firefox on Linux, after pressing "I'm interested" does not appear any message. Maybe email is not even sent, a quick look show a ping sent to intercom that could be enough. Chrome on Linux is ok.
Out of the box browser features that have been removed/destroyed by the quest for 60fps:

* Copy/paste (holding on an article gives the options to email or report)

* Pinch to zoom

* Double tap to zoom (opens links instead)

* iOS swipe forwards and backwards (renders the page swipe animation twice, at 60fps I guess)

* iOS Reader View (go on, try it, I laughed)

And most importantly

* Any sort of accessibility

60fps doesn't matter to someone who can't see the screen.

60fps doesn't matter to someone who relies on assistive technologies to surf the web.

60fps doesn't really matter.
This means even simple things such as pressing the 'Source' button to view the source list (you can't just press it to switch, you need to press this then select the new source from the menu) takes 30 seconds to load.

Is that an exaggeration? 30 seconds is far beyond what I would consider unusable, and a TV which takes that long to switch between sources would be quickly returned.
Finagle services made simple with Serial
Writing Just Enough Documentation
i'm constantly amazed by how quickly yc moves. thanks for working towards a better future and inspiring some along the way.
You could always use the "wrapper script pattern", e.g. http://blog.james-carr.org/2013/09/04/parameterized-docker-c... or implement a ready-to-go solution like Tiller (https://github.com/markround/tiller) if you don't mind the overhead of ruby in your containers.
I've tried in the past to explain how awesome the sqrt(2) ratio used as the basis of DIN/ISO page sizes is, but there are some very dumb people on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821947
This is one of those things that seems technically correct (the best kind of correct) but practically ... meh. The benefit exists but is barely enough to get anyone entrenched to actually change. Much like the common usage of the US Customary units, nothing is going to actually change.
> Does it indicate that they're more tricky than others and hence more bug reports?

Or that these projects are actually used.
Oh shocking that a tech "journalist" does shady stuff. Pretty much expected of "journalists" these days.
DATAcide: The Total Annihilation of Life as We Know It
>> You seldom hear about people who lie to their loved ones about their hidden coffee stash, or steal from their child's piggybank to sustain their caffeine fix.

Actually, this brings up an perfect example of the first poster's point. Smoking cigarettes was socially acceptable at one point. Now, it's considered a bad, unhealthy habit. I've known quite a of people who hide, or attempt to hide, their habit from their friends. And I'm quite sure that a good number of parents have taken money from their kids piggybanks to buy cigarettes.
Do excuse my ignorance, but what practical advantages does etcd offer over Cassandra (or even Riak)? To me, it seems that raft's leader-does-the-heavy-lifting style of replication will only limit the cluster size and thus the horizontal scalability of the cluster. The gossip-based Cassandra has stability and proven scalability.
> By either selecting that I agree or by not selecting that I disagree, I agree to the Yahoo Connected TV Terms of Service

Written under the deselected "I Agree" checkbox, with no "I disagree" option visible.

This has to be some kind of record.
And on a TV that you paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars, not in some spooky shareware download.
When someone claims uncritically that the ratio of any two integers is √2, I get a little edgy. I'm also having a hard time following this simplification:

A / √A = A × A / A = A

Huh? This only holds if √A = A = 1. I haven't checked the rest, but this doesn't give me much confidence.

Of course, knowing those Europeans, these sizes do probably make tons of sense on paper (see what I did there?), even if this isn't the best explanation of it.
Introducing pipes 2.0
Then why not just save yourself some money and get a "dumb" TV? I can only imagine they jack the price up a hundred or two for the "smart"
There are smart TV's with open firmware?
I have to note that A4 (what goes in a standard printer) is just a shitty format for documents. There is no way to get a proper layout done, you basically need two columns to use a reasonable amount of space with regards to font size and text body layout, which leads to other problems.

There is a very good reason you don't see any A4 books. A5 works OK for book layouts but still is too wide actually...

A5 booklet printed: http://mr.gy/blogopy/max/3589981109.html
Is this the place to bring "inches vs cm" on the table ? :p
I'm sorry. That was a stupid comment on my part.
Why did Americans simplify and streamline the English Language, but they didn't bother with all of the systems of measurement?
Or by then, motorcyclists might not exist anymore since motorcycles have been deemed too dangerous and made illegal, and neither pedestrians since it has become too convenient to use automated transport and walking is considered a waste of time.

Frightening indeed.
I really wish we'd switch to the ISO-216 sizes. A4 to A3 is so much more enjoyable and painless than Letter to Tabloid. This kind of thing came up often while making posters for campus because it was cheaper to NOT print out all of the posters on Tabloid. Rather, using a mix of Tabloid (for the important poster posting spots) and Letter (for unimportant spots and as flyers for handout). Always ended up having to spend more time to make two layouts because of it. And A4 to A5 for booklets without having to re-layout the document is a huge plus too! And for books, I like to use B4* to fold in half. (B5 pages are nicer than A5 pages for the kind of books I tend to read.) The proportions are all the same, so it just works! One layout, many paper size (of the same proportion) possibilities!

Edit: Additional note with regard to the book publication (depending on printing and binding method used)... Sometimes/often this is printed on something like A3 size for bleeding and with crop marks. The A3 paper is then folded and cut, so that the pages become B5 size. (Signatures essentially composed of folded B4 as a consequence of the cropping. There is of course difference between the outermost sheet and the innermost sheet in each paper signature, which is why it's all cropped at the end.)
Haha that thread is great... good old metric system.
alexkus: off topic, but would you mind sending me an email about RM380Z Robot Arena? :-) gmail digital.wilderness

(sorry, I couldn't figure out how else to contact you)
Plenty of alcopops / cocktails that will taste fine to a kid.
Who's the 'journalist'?
The Histomap
From the article:

> US Letter: 216 mm x 279 mm

> A4: 210 mm × 297 mm

so it's 18mm longer while being 6mm narrower. At that small a difference, I would assume that a preference of one over the other is similar to that of metric vs. imperial - the one you were raised on just seems right.

Which one did you grow up with?
Just a heads up; the page header (and footer?) does not render correctly on mobile. The top graph is centered and its data is impossible to read because of label overlapping. Interesting analysis nevertheless.
Cropping Image in Rails via Carrierwave and Cropbox
There's nothing crazy here. It just means that if the length of the long side is √2 times the size of short side. That has the nice property that you can bisect the sheet and get two smaller sheets where the ratio between the long and short edges is maintained, which makes it standardising a whole bunch of other things much more straightforward.
Can Mobile Health Streamline the Clinical Trial Workflow?
We moved away from the pub/sub model in our app. It became too difficult to manage all the pub subs happening across modules, especially in a large project with many team members. We're restructuring our app to be better organized and to use a live-binding library.
Google I/O 2015 Announced
‘Hands-Free’ Cars Get Green Light for U.K. Road Tests
weird tidbit seems true: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Unit3/resp...
WE ARE HYPERLOOP TECHNOLOGIES INC
No, I've used a Samsung Smart TV a few times and this is hardly hyperbole. When you "start" the TV it's in some sort of lite mode, actually going to one of the menus requires booting up the secondary operating system which can take a few minutes. Every menu is painfully slow to navigate, the interfaces are displayed at a few frames a second, and the wifi built in is beyond useless. Trouble is, it's almost impossible to buy a dumb TV as far as I can tell. You're stuck with a stupidly buggy, outdated and vulnerable system that snoops on you if you connect it to a network. Fantastic stuff.
One reason might be the owner wanting to say "I'm worth $100 million on paper!" There's also the potential it's part of one of those pump-and-dump scams, and that people are getting emails right now saying "don't miss this hot stock! Up 10,000% this month alone!"
It's night and your driverless car is waiting in front of a red light. Suddenly you see a man with a shotgun walking up to your vehicle. How do you tell your driverless car to ignore the red light and get the hell out of there?
Never received FISA order or been approached about PRISM or anything like it
True, but title is really misleading, and from true photography point of view, smart phone cameras are edge case, on low quality end of spectrum.

Also, most people with smartphone will never care for more than point & click, so suggested slight enhancement of coverage would make much more sense (although it doesn't put in anything that isn't already written out there 1000x times).
So, has the wholesale design/concept cloning of (mostly) american startup web services become an everyday-thing in Singapore too now?

(In addition to e.g. China and Russia.)
More than that, Vista (along with .NET) put http stack into kernel. It's called http.sys
Gayton McKenzie's Harsh Open Letter to Julius Malema
Guaranteed Auto Loans Bad Credit No Money Down
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Isn’t Just in Your Head
The point is: An A5 booklet on A4 is the same as A4 booklet on A3, etc.
Alleged Silk Road admin threatens to leak user data
It has other useful effects: it makes it easier to standardise containers for the sheets, as well as their division, amongst other things. And all this from the simple use of a ratio.
A lot of US "standards" (only US uses them) should be banned.
7 Ways to Influence Google Results with Search Preferences
I agree with your general point, but my Sony TV automatically downloads firmware updates on a regular basis. The apps (Netflix, YouTube, etc.) are updated regularly, though the changes aren't always improvements.

That said, the apps on my TV are surprisingly serviceable. I can even stream video files directly to it (though an Apple TV does this with better reliability and video quality).

The only unforgivable failure is that it doesn't have a Twitch app, but neither does the Apple TV, XBox One, PS4 (it doesn't count if I can only watch PS4 games being streamed), or Wii U.
I grew up with the A sizes of paper and agree with the parent comment. When I moved to the US I was pleasantly surprised by the size/shape of US Letter sized paper.
Both ABIs are shipped in libstdc++, but all other libraries are build with the old ABIs.

You can manually use the libstdc++ with the new ABI, but any of your dependencies that use the problematic ABI must then be rebuild (and will be in F23).
Totally orthogonal argument. It's the ratio that matters.
> There is no way to get a proper layout done

This is puzzling - how do you explain the abundance of people who seem to have no problem with this whatsoever?

Finally: I have seen lots and lots of A4 books, but they're simply not as common. It probably does help to live in Europe in that regard.
No, alcohol isn't a raw product, not even relative to the popular forms in which it is consumed.
Yes, probably. Any suggestion?
Smart TVs being a good idea, all depends on who you are.

It's good for TV manufacturers, because old TVs get older faster (outdated processor / software and so on).

For consumers however, having a separate box for the "smart" part of your TV is much better, because it makes it easier to upgrade.

Personally, I prefer the dumbest possible TV. Most of the time, I don't need a new panel, all I need is an upgrade of whatever smartbox I'm using at the moment. So far my Chromecast is carrying me quite well. The biggest upgrade of my TV I'll be doing in the near future will be an upgrade to 4K and/or maybe OLED down the line.
As someone mentioned in the comments (and the post author dismisses), a reasonable version of this myth might be constrained to sailing.

I found an okay discussion on it here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-2008...

There's a reference to "Purser's Instructions", where apparently it is mentioned that the Royal Navy sailors were allotted 1 gallon of beer per day. I tried finding it online, but couldn't find the text. Kind of blows my mind that in 2015 I can't just easily read any book that is more than 250 years old.
I think history is a lot more interesting and makes a lot more sense when you finally realize that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us, as opposed to the bumbling idiots we often assume them to be.
It already is: Mozilla has been building apps¹ that allow users to contribute to a shared database of the locations of cellphone towers and WiFi APs.

The idea is to allow GPS-less devices to find where they are, but it could certainly be used to identify new towers in places which had already been mapped.

EDIT: It seems there's also opencellid.org, which actually allows you to download the full database.

¹ https://location.services.mozilla.com/apps
Ruby's development started in 1993 (February 24, to be exact). First full release was 1995 (December 21, that one I had to look up :)).

This is very interesting in my opinion: whenever someone asks why one of those languages doesn't do $featureA "like Java", you can just reply: "because Java wasn't a thing back then".
Except, you know, everywhere that isn't the US.
The problem is that as soon as you tie the ability to send someone an email to your bank account you immediately put poor people at a grotesque disadvantage. I wouldn't presume to speak for pg, but I doubt any savvy investor would be happy passing up the opportunity to be the first to hear about the next Google/Uber/Facebook because the founder couldn't afford to send you an email. If you want to limit the number of emails people can send then you need to tie the ability to something else.

That's why Bill Gates' idea was so good - his plan was to make people's computers have to do useful work (say, Folding At Home or the distributed Seti search client) rather than merely transferring money around. Wealthy people wouldn't be at an advantage because the work unit would be time: a rich person with a fast laptop that can test 1,000,000 protein folds in 2 minutes has to do 1,000,000 tests to send their email while a poorer person whose hardware can only do 1,000 folds in 2 minutes only has to do 1,000 tests to send their email. Time is effectively the same for everyone. It's a beautiful solution. Far better than boring old money.
Books come in absolutely random factors.

The book "advanced engineering mathematics (8th edition on my desk)" is just as wide as A4, but less tall for some reason.

I regularly print documents in A4, and full-width text is absolutely ok if you consider the required margins for binding.
As a general rule, decision made due to regret ... well tend to lead to more regret. That happens to me a lot. What a lot of people don't do after a project is to first evaluate how well the whole thing worked.

How many bug incidents were there ?

How many times did a design decision have to be refactored out ?

How many times did you really have a problem ?

Then, first things first, take out all problems that were obviously not project related. The team moved ? Someone went on holiday ? All of those don't matter.

After that, you'll have problems left. If it's 3 problems, none of which delayed more than 2 weeks/10%, your project went as well as you can reasonably expect. Don't change a thing. If after that you arrive at the conclusion that the project went ~80% as planned, then you've simply done it right. There are no lessons to be drawn from mistakes, because the fixes are likely to screw you up more than the "mistakes".

Even when this is not the case, you should limit fixes. Take the top-3 problems, at the very most, and implement a fix for one of them. Then try to mitigate the second and stay away from everything else.

If you don't you'll have seriously more regrets about your next project a whole than your current project.

Lots of people generally don't do this. They do a project, then switch programming languages. That's a decision you should make once in 5 years (unless you're switching back after a disappointment). People seriously overcompensate. From management to developers. Redesigning an entire organisation because one bad apple leaked something is very likely not justified, and similarly a rewrite is almost never justified.
There's a record of Luther dismissing Copernicus, or at least geocentrism, though it's from four years before On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published:

"So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down."

But that's pretty mild for Luther. If he wasn't using scatalogical references, his heart wasn't really in it. We only know about it because many of Luther's casual conversations were recorded; he was literally complaining about it at the dinner table.
I believe that gp's point is that this is impossible, what with √2 being an irrational number. It is pretty close (4 significant digits), but of course not exact.
Also the notion that humans in the past were just so vastly different than humans today is another myth we like to tell ourselves. We look at stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza and assume there must be some great philosophical plan behind it, not that people did things for the same reasons we do things today: to impress people, to leave our mark, to challenge ourselves, or just to try something new. The implication here is that if our ignorant savage ancestors endeavored to put the effort into building something, there must be a great spiritual or philosophical reason. It doesn't cross our minds that they sat around and pondered this stuff just like we do.

I feel like this plays into the popular idea that everything in medieval times was poorly built and covered in shit. We seem to want to think that because they lived in a largely illiterate, Church dominated feudal society that all the peasants were too stupid to function. That these savages would be too dim to possess the critical thinking skills to realize that if they used well built tools, that they could accomplish their work faster. That after thousands of years of human advancement, we hit this period where everyone not just lost accumulated knowledge, but forgot how to be a human in the process.
It was like talking to a brick wall. A very dumb brick wall that couldn't get it through their head that the units didn't matter, and that what mattered was the ratio.
Anecdote: the office management/finance/HR people in the european office where I work really, really hate US Letter formats, because they don't really fit in "normal" binders.

They're the ones who really suffer from this, because they're the only people who deal with paper format documents these days, I guess.
I think your conclusion is correct, but not a problem, precisely because concepts like 'addiction', as well as 'mental disorder' are contextually defined.

ADHD might not be a problem if you're living in a wild environment and roaming the woods as a primary activity. Schizophrenia might not be an issue of you live in a society where you're considered a 'seer/prophet' and taken care of by the community for your 'valuable' service. Heroin might not be an issue if you're filthy rich and happy with your lifestyle.

Practically speaking, of course society might value labeling any use of heroin as 'addiction' because it might be too rare for people to be able to live well while using. Similarly, I believe making alcohol a bit more of a 'drug' (as it is commonly seen) is not a bad thing because so many people, relatively, become unhealthily dependent on it.

I've become more and more convinced that it would benefit us all if we 1) let go of our somewhat arbitrary current definitions of 'illegal drugs' and 'addiction' (at least in 'common' conversation), and 2) keep in mind that the goal of criminalizing a substance or labeling someone as 'mentally ill' is to help people function in whatever society their in, and not an attempt to objectively define any of these things.

I have a lot of friends who by many definitions suffer from various 'mental problems'. Many of them function well because they chose a lifestyle, career, and social environment that suits them, rather than taking the path of medication. While this is not an option for everyone, I wish the mental health industry would spend more energy on this rather than simply 're-socializing' people through medication or therapy.

To be clear, I realize this is not a simple issue, and that for many people medication is a lifesaver. I also realize that the impact of incorrectly advising people on these matters can ruin lives. I'm not an expert!)
I expect it will disrupt the software car industry instead. Insurance companies could buy robot car manufacturers and dictate the logic to follow in case of collision. New standards could emerge, like assigning more blame if one car has an older firmware, which would put pressure on manufacturers to deliver "insurance-friendly" cars first and foremost.
But it is both 18mm and 6mm narrower, so it goes from 1.414 to 1.29 in terms of ratio.

In other words A4 seems 10% narrower in terms of shape, which isn't insignificant.

Having said that, I'd rather keep A4 given the useful properties described in the article.
For what it's worth: I am a European, still living in Europe and surrounded by A4 and I envy American's US Letter format.

I almost always have the feeling that A4 is too big.
That's a 9.5% difference in the aspect ratio. I don't think that's small.
Inker, transactional email development workflow evolved