skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This rings a huge bell^H^H^Hgong to me.

MPL is relatively complete, but it has been one of the worst libraries for plotting that I've ever used. You can make nice plots with it, but you can do the same using most of the other libraries as well.

It's terribly inefficient when used with the OO interface, which is allegedly the "way to go". But in reality it's so verbose, that almost everybody is using the pylab wrapper at least in parts to reduce the boilerplate you need. Not to mention that the pylab wrapper in itself is a very crappy compromise with a lot of state. I never used Matlab, but I certainly know that I don't like the way it works.

Even basic stuff, like the ability to customize/cycle the color of the series in a central place (which is key to being able to use palettes efficiently) is not there. You need to supply color values manually!

I routinely use a lot of plotting programs, but despite its shortcomings I keep reaching "gnuplot" very often. The syntax is arcane, but gets the job done quickly. You can customize the plot in a few commands, and often a simple ~/.gnuplotrc with a few defaults can make the plots look identical to MPL.

The "publication quality" is a red herring. What makes the plot publication quality is not the software. As long as it renders with AA or at 300 dpi, you can get the same output from most of the plotting packages.

Now, speaking about plotting packages, I've been using 'seaborn' a lot recently, which helps in reducing the clutter you need around MPL. Unfortunately, like most of the packages that just wraps core functionality, it's sometimes impossible to customize the plots the way you need. For example, you cannot get decent B/W plots, since you cannot customize the line types (again, missing functionality from MPL which should be core). The same on gnuplot takes 2 seconds. You would think that plotting in B/W should be common, given that often you need to pay extra to publish color figures, and this clashes a bit in the "publication quality" issue, which seaborn also claims.

A package in pythonland that shows promise is yhat/ggplot, which is a copy of the former package in R. I'm not superfond of the ggplot way of plotting: it requires a lot of data alignment before you can use it effectively (contrast this to seaborn/gnuplot, which also lets you plot any series without much fuss). But it's already way better than plain MPL.

Unfortunately mastering a plotting package takes a long time. I'm curious about impressions about alternative plotting packages to python, geared at figures (so excluding interactive/javascript/web based plotting backends).
Should probably look through reddit. Lots of resources of right.

http://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards

e.g. Keypress force.

Red (45 centiNewtons, 60 cN)
Brown (45 cN, 60cN, tactile)
Blue (50 cN, 65 cN, click/tactile)
Black (60 cN, 80 cN)
Clear (65 cN, ?)
Green (80 cN, 105 cN, tactile)

Most people seem to like Blue and Brown. Blue sounds clicky.
CxxTest is a unit testing framework for C++
Yes, I dislike the whole iTunes thing all together. I'd like to be able to just plug it in and move files around like it's a drive. (like my android phone) I also really dislike iTunes a media player on my MacBook. Love my mackbook over all, but iTunes as a media player sucks. Main complaints is that I can't just point it to a folder and have it load into a library without it copying files around, so now I have music in two places wasting space. Maybe there is a way I can change that in the settings, but that shouldn't be the default behavior.
|| gives 1 or 0 only?
These are GNU C tricks! Fine anyway, I think I especially like those that are ISO C. Trick number one is a C11 feature -- anonymous struct members in structs and unions, though I will not vouch for its validity without consulting with my C11 standard handbook.

Oh, and by the way, why not use X macros in the form where the macro to apply is passed as the argument? #define SPRITES(S) S(1, 2, 3) S(2, 3, 4) etc.
On another thread people were saddened by rapidshare-like website being put down because a lot of content was hosted there. Let's be sure the cloud will stay long. So far most 80s data I see on the web comes from .. magazines. Ha paper.
The whole interface is incredible unintuitive. Especially if you come from Windows.
> But this isn't about the pharmaceutical industry, it's about the FDA. The FDA is clearly catching these companies doing wrong, so why are they covering it up?

There's some overlap, right? http://geke.us/PharmaVenn.001.jpg
Except that - if I understand how US justice system works correctly - they won't be hired by anyone because they have a sentence in their books. Which is awful.
This is really some great piece of software
Mechanical keyboards are like the whiskeys of the keyboard world. They're not for everybody, and can be an acquired taste, but there's a huge amount of people who swear by them. They're also a premium product, so there is a bigger barrier to entry than the normal products.

To me, a mechanical keyboard has been brilliant. I bought a Razer Blackwidow a few years ago, and haven't looked back. It's much easier to type quickly on than a non-mechanical, because every sensation of it is so defined and fast. As a programmer, that means the connection between my brain and my computer feels more natural.

However, I know programmers that can't stand the increased sound and don't need or want the speed.

If you can afford to buy a keyboard on a whim, I would say "try it and see". The only way to know if it is for you is by trying one for a while and weighing the benefits against the negatives. Even if you don't particularly like it over a regular rubber dome or ergonomic keyboard, at least you'll have a premium keyboard that will last you a long time and will be better constructed than most.
One thought that entered my mind, and wouldn't quite leave, while reading this is: "I hope that people like and value my work after I'm gone." This article is good writing, even though most of it is just re-telling of actual events.
Not sure about this. Maybe in other industries the threats are distributed across customer service personnel and don't make it to the top. The only case I can think of is animal rights activists vs. Huntingdon Life Sciences ( http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/animal-rights-gro... ) and that isn't even customers.
Hate it with a passion since 2001.
Outdoor temperature reset has been a feature on furnace controllers for a long time (also called modulating aquastat).

(so there is a sense in which it isn't necessarily a smart home type of feature, it doesn't need a great deal of integration or whatever, and will work with any dumb thermostat)
Knife Tool Algorithm – Animated
No one ever considers the volume of photos and documents we are now creating. My parents probably took dozens of photographs when I was younger, and kept maybe one or two albums. Nowadays, most people have hundreds if not thousands of photographs and videos. So it seems to me that the converse will actually be true. If you've got a 100 fold increase in the number of documents and photos being created, and only 1% of those make it, you're still preserving the same number of documents. And frankly, I think that's a conservative number.

As some of the other posters here mentioned, with the advent of cloud based services and easy backup systems, retrieval is getting easier. So if storage and retrieval is solved, that leaves format evolution problems. But somehow I doubt in 20 years or even more that JPEG is somehow going to be harder to read than it is now.
Oh, I see, thanks for pointing it out.
Still, speed is not such an important factor for using a linter.
I prefer being able to have custom rules and up-to-date stuff like ES6 and JSX.
Fair enough; my comment was intended as an addition to your list of "It's also, y'know, people with an interest in promoting public health, people who understand the concept of herd immunity, and people who have a reasonably tuned sense of social responsibility." with examples in living history. Plus you can't get away from the concept of "good science" and people who don't accept the concept at all in this domain, especially the ones who can be accurately plotted by Whole Foods locations and otherwise claim to respect "science".

Let me add that at least in theory, vaccines receive the strictest regulation of all drugs, since the they're given to ostensibly healthy people.
Yes, especially if you are discussing it in the context of a VC round. After all you are getting your shares after...
http://tinychart.co/dist/browser-bundle-d447cd2a4a298091b268...

I don't really know how this can be considered "tiny" at all. Dependencies on react, brace and another charting library (http://www.chartjs.org/) seems a little much.
The authors better be careful or the next contact they have with government documents is notice of an IRS audit.
Host Magento on Google Compute Engine in Just 8 Minutes
It is Hacker News, not Computer Engineer/Scientist news. It was always supposed to tilt towards Silicon Valley. I don't think that's a good thing, but it's a free service from Y Combinator, so it's very understandable.
That reminds me of the Encyclopedia Galactica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Galactica. I wonder if this is a scheme to get comp scis to a remote Location and eventually start a new galactic empire.
Looks like a static-typed version of AppleScript at first glance. It's hard to say who this is targeted at - people who really want the English-like syntax are going to squirm at things like "writer : [string]→⊤".
The UI is really, really bad. Every time I sync one of my devices I have to search for the widget that gets me to the place where I can search for my content. The software makes arbitrary decisions on what type of content goes where, and honestly this shouldn't matter.

Music is music, a book is a book, an app is an app. Just provide a default structure and have the device figure out what's what -- we've been doing this with file systems for decades.

iTunes doesn't scale. A linear list of all of my music? Those books? Doesn't scale. Ordering a list by title / artist is clumsy after fifty entries, and unworkable past a few hundred.

I'm really surprised that Jobs didn't rip the iTunes team a new one. Or maybe he did, and this is the best they could do.
Oh, yeah, the Steam and iTunes stores are both abysmal! Slow loading, no tabbed browsing, poorly designed views -- it all gets in the way of spending money.

That said, I do quite like the iTunes album cover view.
That really depends on the viewpoint. The user-space APIs are stable and the Kernel project is going great lengths to ensure that userspace is never broken (any breakage is treated as a bug).

So if you look at the userspace interface as the API semver would work against, we'd be at 1.0.1234 or something.
The NYT piece cited in this article was discussed when it came out:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8598652

I thought both the NYT piece and the discussion were interesting.
It's gotten worse over the years but it's most certainly better than any of the alternatives I've been obliged to use on linux.
You can find plenty of programmers with excellent communication skills; you might just need to look in other places or offer more money. People who possess multiple valuable skills often demand a higher wage than people who possess only one.

As for the language, the general idea of English-like programming is far from new. Here are a few arbitrary historical examples, the most impressive of which is Inform, a language for writing interactive fiction:

http://inform7.com/learn/eg/bronze/source.html

https://cukes.info/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk

http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/examples/Conditn/IterIf.htm

None of these revolutionized programming. The hard part of programming isn't learning to read a specialized notation. The first hard part of programming is learning how to think in a logical, step-by-step fashion without omitting even the most intuitively obvious details. The second hard part of programming is learning how to maintain a large, complex program as requirements change. Neither of these is made much easier by writing in a rigid, artificial dialect of English.
Wow, learning to code without being able to refer to stackoverflow or anything on the internet... does that count as cruel and unusual punishment?
From Grad School to 'The Atlantic'
How to Game Silicon Valley’s System
Yes, almost as much as I hate iPhoto.
Yes!! I hate it so much, it's the worst UI experience ever and I've used a lot of bad UIs over the last 35 years.
SpinKit – Simple CSS Spinners
Panasonic doing some VR
You're pretty great yourself :D
Support of EC2 API for OpenStack
In the post the album id for the attackers album and the victims album are the same, 518171421550249.

I'm not surprised the delete worked...
I loved iTunes up until version 12. It is now a bafflingly user hostile piece of software and I am done with it.
Totally off topic, but the post OP wanted to show on 18th January is visible right now.

http://nikhilbuduma.com/2015/01/18/genetics-as-a-social-netw...
What should a Programmer be able to do in an hour?
I've seen Linus loose it with devs in the past for breaking backwards compatibility with kernel updates; I'd suggest this also has something to do with it -possibly more so than an inbuilt fear of BSD [1].

I'm failing to find an explanation of how the RHEL numbering scheme is date based -please could you expand?

[1] As a long term linux user, I have both fear and bafflement over BSD device naming and the lack of gnu options on standard utils ;)
Sure, here's the repository: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok

I don't have a rigorous approach for testing compatibility at present; My starting point was the K2 manual, and I've tried to get as many examples from that working as possible. I have been learning the language as I go, so often I don't realize functionality is missing until I stumble across an existing K program that doesn't work properly.

I'm targeting K5, which is unreleased, so there's a great deal of speculation. I think I have a decent subset of the functionality working now, but most of the time when I write new programs using it I still shake out bugs and unhandled edge cases.
The PHP language uses count() for array lengths. Maybe copying that and using ARRAY_COUNT() or such might be less ambiguous?
Peter Molyneux: “I have no idea how much money it costs to make a game”
This makes a lot of sense.

I've heard that the best ROI comes from upgrading (1) kitchens and (2) bathrooms. Why? These are the rooms where people spend a lot of time. The trend for many years has been for big, open kitchens because they are used day to day, and during special occasions (parties, etc) everyone gravitates toward the kitchen anyway.
My Spotify Premium subscription is worth it just for the fact that I haven't had to touch iTunes in months.
The trick with digital data (including that stored in cloud services) is to keep it in motion. Movement from one service to another, leaving behind a copy that may eventually get deleted but just might stick around a while, is the best way to keep data available. Whatever disappeared with rapidshare would have been just fine if people have moved it to the various "latest and greatest" systems when they popped up, the only way it gets lost is if it stops moving.
How about 2013.05.20__2014.02.13 for a kernel that was released in 2013 and last patched today?
I don't think the point was to look ahead at your legacy but to look back and see what we can learn. Japan is interesting in this respect as it is a nation that has a long and generally stable history. I remember reading in the Guardian when the tsunami happened about a coastal town wit a shrine up a hill and a story the townspeople told about going not to the hill over there during the tsunami of 1000 years ago, but to the less obvious vantage point where the shrine was. Turns out this 1000 year old oral record saved a lot of lives, 2 tsunamis a millennium apart and an unchanging landscape.

Although what this tells us about how to run an inn for 1300 years I'm not sure.
I don't like it. It's heavy and bloated for what I would ever need it to do (put music onto my ipod). In fact, I have it installed solely for that purpose.
I actually had a very similar idea[1] and explored other forms of representing the color too. I took the average color of the frame for to represent a line and less data points. These are really beautiful though, much more refined.

https://medium.com/@adrian_cooney/movie-plots-literally-8b82...
Why Does the World Need More Programming Languages?
Possibly. I think it'll be a while before we do any audio/video stuff.

We're actually just two guys with full time jobs and this is our "10% Time" at work, so our time is a little strained.

I'm hoping to get some pull requests from strangers which I've heard are the best kind of pull requests!
Jein. (Thats a very german cross between yes and no)

iTunes has a fast search through my large library and it is very easy to reach the thing you want. I don't create playlists, but from time to time return to my player, search for something and hit "play", closing the window afterwards.

iTunes is not perfect at that, but _every other player_ is worse. Either, closing the window kill the program (lackluster Linux/Win-Ports), the search is slow or just not very central the interface. For example, VOX wants me to search for a song and then hit "Enter" twice before playing it, with a fancy, but slow animation. Searching for albums is even slower, I'd prefer if they just presented me with album matches immediately.

So, the outcome of my eternal search is: iTunes is not a great music player, but every other on OS X is worse.
He's a war criminal who slaughters innocent civilians in countries he is not at war at (not that it matters, since, innocent civilians), so ideally, he should be tried at the Hague?
Minuum (YC W14) Launches Serendipitous Emoji Prediction
Usefulness? When did I say Lisp wasn't useful?
Well, we do have a rather early fully legal 1981 copy of the system, and one or more illicit but no one seems to care copies of much later Symbolics systems (don't know if those included source, though). So that in part an issue of software archaeology, when we can also ask most if not all of the people involved about details.

And I fully agree the focus should be on the software, as I hope I made clear in other comments in this topic.
Agreed. The UI is horrible and getting worse with every release. What used to be a decent interface for digging through Genre -> Artists -> Albums is now hidden behind super kludgey nonsense. To get a fresh install of iTunes into a usable state with a music library of any reasonable size is a huge pain.

The idea that the default interface should basically just be a window with big album art is probably the worst thing they ever did.
I love my mechanical keyboards and won't work without them. That said, they aren't magic and there is at least some evidence that they are bad for certain ergonomic style problems.

They can also be very pricey. I would ask around your colleagues to see if anyone has one you can borrow for a little bit.

That said, if you can afford the expense I personally think it is silly to skimp a little bit of money on your main input device for your main career (assuming) tool. My order of importance of spending on machines is SSD, Keyboard, RAM, Display, everything else.
Great Entrepreneurs Move from Developers to Leaders
I find it works really well for listening to music in album format and getting more albums from the iTunes store. The store integration is well done and I love the (newish) UI that reacts to the colors of the album artwork.
For listening to music that is not in album format and/or which you didn't purchase via iTunes and for any other tasks they have bolted on, such as device management, I find it not so great.
But you get to marry his daughter and make a useless heir who will be replaced by a random employee who you like more than your son!
What should be in your mobile proof of concept?
Five Signals Your Organization Is Ready for Big Data
It was so bad when i got my first iPod nano (2009) that I quickly actually gave up on using my iPod. It was such a faff getting music on it (using a windows based laptop) that I stopped changing my music and soon I lost interest in my iPod all together (couldn't be bothered to change the music). Later on, I've started using spotify on my android phone and it fully replaced my need of iTunes/apple products (iPod).
If the app works it should tell you the state of your devices.
I would understand "I was throwing my lunch up" vs "I was throwing up my lunch" to be completely equivalent.

I've never heard the form of words "to throw one's hands up", but it's obvious what it means. Therefore "throwing my hands up" and "throwing up my hands" make equal sense and are equally humorous.

(Not that it matters, of course there's no real ambiguity here)
Ikea's Emoticon App: The New Arbiter of Domestic Squabbles?
It would make more sense to have 15.01, i.e. YY.MM.

Works perfectly fine for ubuntu and would likely not break the numbering scheme..
The problem is that the hiring risk is greatly amplified if they don't know the stack. If they don't know the stack, they say "Give me a month or two, then you'll see."

Well, in a month or two, what do you get? Who knows. Evaluating anyone from a resume is very difficult. They might be terrible, but you had to give them two months to find out.

If they claim to know the stack, a bad hire has nowhere to hide. They'll be found out much quicker, so you've lost much less.
The Great Internet Power Grab
Hey if you're IRC-foo is crazy good, it'd be amazing if you helped us out! Think about it, you could be internet batman.
It looks like you haven't figured out what ioGrow is yet, and that, in turn, makes it difficult for anyone else to figure out.

Here you're calling it a "growth hacking tool" (using that term just turns people off), on the site I'm getting mixed messaging about "social discovery," CRM, project management, and collaboration? So... what exactly is it?Or is it all of those things at once? In which case, why start with "social discovery," something that's available in any marketing SaaS?
Has there been any scientific studies done on the benefits of mechanical keyboard?

I've used one for years and it definitely feels faster and more comfortable, but I honestly can't tell how much of that is due to the placebo effect.
Imprudent Acts and Great Bastards: Sex Advice from 1861
Are you talking about the social stigma or is there something in the law that makes it difficult for ex-convicts to find jobs?
Just interested: Do you use static analysis tools (like for example coverity) in the gamedev industry?
Ask HN: Would you be interested in a FPV drone/quadcopter racing event?
Hey folks - curious if there is any interest in a friendly competitive drone racing event. Imagine showing up and racing either a stock FPV quadcopter setup or an entirely custom one against a group of like minded racers?

As an event host, we'd provide feeds to racers vehicles, prizes, course design and setup, logistics and all the other things necessary for a smooth running event. Of course we'd provide alcohol and awards like "Best Crash"
One of the challenges is that the cost of the quadcopter/drone might be prohibitive for casually interested people, but open to ideas. Maybe we could organize a group buy and save some money for participants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsxyV-kgfio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H19z1X3V4UQ
This post seems to cover PCA in Python quite well: http://sebastianraschka.com/Articles/2014_pca_step_by_step.h...
And yet if you don't, you risk losing purchases when Apple loses the distribution rights to something. The little cloud download button gives people a false sense of security, but I've lost a lot of music and TV shows by not keeping backups on my hard drive. Apple really pushes this feature, but when you get stung by a removal, iTunes support will say "what, didn't you read the fine print?"
I hate iTunes. I am much happier with Google Play for iOS and Android.