skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aaah - sorry, I hadn't realised that some of the books were much larger than the first two I looked at. $20 for a 300-page book is very good value!

I just looked at a couple, and it seemed like it was being split into small chunks (60 pages, 100 pages) as a way of selling more of them. Clearly I should have researched further!
That first 500 one is insane. I could watch it all day.
... my comments are US-centric despite this being a UK-oriented article...

> We demand a perfect security which is getting ever harder to achieve.

In the US we claim to be "land of the free; home of the brave". I don't think the public lives up to the bravery aspect. That involves accepting some level of risk, in exchange for freedom. Humans have free will and theoretically that's the root of evil. So unless we're going to lose our humanity we need to stop worrying about irrational or rare possibilities.

The other things the author mentions I guess I agree with but I think it's naive. Yes, better crypto and some help from the vendors and cloud providers will improve things.

But ultimately any device can be bugged, any chip can be backdoored, and I think we're a ways from securely printing our own computers. Satellites can zoom in anywhere. Microphones like ShotSpotter can listen. To some extent the people need to be brave about this surveillance too and not go paranoid.

But we also need to lay down some justice for those who broke the Constitution. The leaders of these bureaucracies should be tried in capital cases for treason, war crimes, or espionage. That would clearly establish right and wrong in society for some years to come. And for all the lower level LEOs knowingly sharing in NSA data or doing parallel reconstruction, they should be tried for their crimes too. We need to clean house.

The states also need an new Constitutional mandate for provide oversight to Congress. For some reason the checks and balances have completely broken down and D.C. needs the power inverted on them.

After all that's done, then tell me about better encryption. But until then, none of the tech matters except for making the intel agencies' lives slightly harder. But in reality all we've done is give the 5-eyes an edge on the rest of the world's intel by raising the difficulty mode to expert.
A 1.6MB simple .gif animation is a bit unexpected - I was thinking there would be some new HTML5 tech involved (WebGL?) But as bloated as it is, it was probably the best way to make something that works on just about any browser.
Yep. The US military and their civilian/academic researchers are working on this as part of the future battlespace. The 2015 US military budget has $700 million for drone procurement and R&D.
When you buy lunch, whatever that seller does with your money is not your fault. Even if that is commit a violent crime.
Yeah if For Dummies would just kill off the bad jokes it'd actually be easier to read. I don't like cringing through a book when I'm trying to learn something.
Hi Chuck, that's a good point - but I guess we're still a few years away from cheap enough batteries. :)
It's easy to be a critic. On the internet it's even possible to be a popular critic on a topic by admitting that one hasn't even read the subject of the criticism. In the world of male tech, one can easily achieve top common in an HN thread exactly for judging a book by its cover.

Anyone who doesn't have imposter syndrome hasn't tried the exercises in TAoCP.
Likely an interesting article, but to warn you: it is difficult to read, due to, the, many, many, commas. And short sentences. And, short, pithy statements, with no, obvious direction, with added details thrown in, that are nothing, to do with the, main reason for this, paragraph. There is also consistent incessant name dropping.

Meant in good humour.
It's relative. They've got low completion rates relative to university courses. They have completion rates right where you'd expect given a more reasonable reference class.

A MOOC is essentially an extended web interaction, not a college course. Very short web interactions which require minimal levels of work often have conversion rates in the 5~20% region. Think like "Fill out a survey" or "Make free bingo cards."

MOOCs require many hours of work, stretched over months.

Physical college courses carry a heavy precommitment to attend with gigantic costs associated with them. They also have a low completion rate in many circumstances, for example when the college hasn't already done an absolutely brutal filter based on a combination of socioeconomic status, IQ, and ability to take complex tasks to completion. MOOCs don't typically pre-filter based on those criteria, which means their completion numbers are affected in the predictable fashions.
In many cases, people don't have an intent to complete it even at the point when they're signing up.

I have signed up for updated versions of courses I had finished earlier simply because I wanted to show three minutes of lesson 4.2 to someone, and I've told my students to "sign up" for course X because its materials at week 4 explain a particular concept very well, and I'd recommend them to watch that - but the materials aren't available if you don't sign up.

In real life, if someone takes a brochure of a course because they're interested but never show up afterwards, you don't count those people against your completion rate (you might count them when evaluating your marketing funnel, though). Similarly, for a MOOC it makes no sense to treat the number of "signups" as anything more than that.

If you want a reasonable completion rate, you divide the number of graduates against the number of participants that (a) showed up to the course - actually listened to more than 20 minutes of lectures and (b) actually wanted to complete the whole course, as opposed to wanting only a single topic/part of the course.
Living in Lisbon is cheap? Ok...
several co-workers are huge Apple fans. One in particular is what I call a "heavy" typer - someone who really hammers the keys on his keyboard. After going through 3 Apple keyboards in a year, he finally gave up on them.

He was surprised and their seemingly lack of durability as most of Apple's products are fairly robust. After switching back to an an old Dell keyboard, he hasn't gone through any more keyboards, and that was 3 years ago.
If you've done something before, say what it is. There are tons of people who give that exact same "I've been an entrepreneur for years and I'm changing the world" speech and are bloggers or "social media rockstars". It's not trying to insult you, it's an evaluation of someone they might rent from or do business with. If you've done things now is your chance to plug them too.
None at all huh? Please discuss, HN (see my other comments in this thread). This seems relevant to the idea of "Justice".
This is usually categorized as JBOD ("just a bunch of disks"):

http://amzn.com/s/?field-keywords=jbod

From there it's time to start reading reviews!
Stranded Deep Island Teleporter V.0.1
I didn't know that TSLA is "one of the most short sold stock in the world."
What tool do you use to get this data point?
My collection would be better used as paperweights. I think the one on the bottom of the stack might be a 4 GB drive. At one point, I actually got rid of everything smaller than that.

My solution was to just get a cheap and prone to failure external enclosure, and copy the old drives to the largest one I had at the time. Whatever I might spend on an enclosure for multiple older drives could probably get me one new external drive big enough to hold everything on those drives.

This may be why there are few commercial solutions to this particular problem. By the time an internal drive is old enough to be swapped out, it's usually more worthwhile to copy it to a cheap new external drive than to try to reuse it anywhere else.
The amount of educational material on the Internet has increased vastly, but looking at all the misconceptions and "not even wrong" stuff floating around, I'm not so convinced this is a good thing. Quantity is not quality.
As a child I recall using imagination to superimpose the glorious boxart of Atari 2600 cartridges onto the crude sprites of the actual games.

http://a.dilcdn.com/bl/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/02/em...
http://babysoftmurderhands.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ha...
http://www.retrogamesnow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/at...
http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/scale_small/9/93770/2367...
> For the love of God please don't put a giant headed person on your cover though

These are what the covers of all the books in the series look like:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026327.do

------

side note: my kickstarter for the books, 2 years ago, playfully used the bald head image to catch people's attention (never the intended branding). I soon afer got a friendly lawyer takedown notice from the folks who own the game. We worked it out, and the new branding was born. :)
It is but well worth the read.
Highly enjoyable.
Redesigning the Linux video system from the ground up
Very well done. At one point I thought I could bob on the surface. Nope.
This is so great! I always lost my island... annoying!
Thank you for showing a commitment to getting useful knowledge published at reasonable prices. And of course, there isn't anything more reasonable than "free on github". I'm excited to pick through these books to become a stronger javascript programmer.
Please proofread your articles. Even running it through spell check in Microsoft Word would have caught many of the errors I've found.
Accessing a Windows Share Folder with a Raspberry Pi
The Wired article which was referenced in the beginning of the article:

The cover: http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/images/wired-pray-cover.p...

The article - "101 Ways to Save Apple" : http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html

The list is pretty interesting we can look back and see which ones were spot on and the others were way, way off.
April fools is early, huh. Who actually writes "Zen Javascript" in Production? Examples, please.
Gigafactory's output will be 500,000 batteries per year, and it will be optimized for a specific cell which will be put into Tesla's car.

Apple sells hundreds of millions of devices. I don't think they would ever plan to use part of that capacity for their own battery needs. Gigafactory's output is much more valuable if used to sell batteries to other car manufacturers, for their electric cars.
I have an account I do not use on Facebook with a completely made up name from a MMORPG I used to play and they have never said a thing to me about it. I can't believe they want to harass Native Americans about their names.
Speaking as someone who once implemented PWM brightness control for keyboard LEDs via a hacked copy of xset(1), it's hard for me to judge anyone on the basis of overengineering, and yet...
This looks very interesting. However for those of us with a slow internet connection, the fact that I can't pause and let it load means my experience is cut every few seconds.
>Unlike the stock market, the bond market doesn’t have a centralized system where traders can plainly see the fees involved in the trade.

I thought that, that marketplace is the bloomberg chat embedded in the bloomberg terminal, and IMO it's working good enough for big banks, I understand that lowering the barrier entry for FI will bring more liquidity but it's going to be a tough sell for big banks, which have >90% bond trading marketshare .
Draggabilly – js – Make that shiz draggable
I am also interested to know, Do you've any links on this?
Ask HN: What apps do you use to manage meeting and/or take minutes in a meeting?
Author here; I don't think it's misleading. There are factories in Japan which already produce several times Gigafactory's projected output.
Did Tolkien popularize the generic description of a wizard?
Develop as part of an interactive experience by the agency CLM BBDO for yachtwear manufacturer Guy Cotten and released on Apr 24, 2014. The goal is to remind people to buy and wear lifejackets.
I understand the desire for a free/open alternative to k but why do people keep reinventing J?
Echelon: US industrial espionage in Germany (2000)
You are comparing apples to oranges. Power sockets? Of course, there are billions. Electric charging stations that can charge your car in a time comparable to fueling a gasoline car? Only experiments for now.
Largely due to the fact they they are a) playing it safe and b) mostly reactionary when it comes to new product designs/concepts.

I have no qualms with the current product lineup, but I think that Apple, under Cook, has traded vision for certainty. I think that having more of Ive outside of cheeky launch videos would serve them well.
> It's easy to be a critic.

In fact it's so easy that you can make a snide comment criticizing someone else's criticism and it will do really well if you throw in some unnecessary and ridiculous "male dominated" comment.
I'd suggest, "The Tough Parts", as you mention in the preface.

Not sure who your target market is but as a professional developer who writes javascript daily, "The Tough Parts", piques my curiosity and sounds like an interesting challenge. "You Don't Know JS" evokes a more negative reaction.
Cool Tools – Snirt Stopper
the webpage takes incredibly long to load and open.
Two reasons similar/in addition to the ones already mentioned:

The obvious one: MOOCs usually involve small or no payment and are not typically part of a degree program. Everyone who has attended a traditional college has taken one or several classes where they disliked the material, the format, or the faculty but kept taking it anyway because it was a required course, they needed the credit hours to stay in good standing, or they had already paid nontrivial tuition and/or fees for it. For most MOOCs, if you are even mildly disappointed, you can just drop out with little remorse.

The second, less obvious one: on Coursera, I bookmark courses (including ones I have only tenuous interest in) months ahead by enrolling in them. Then when the course starts, I judge whether I still have the time or interest (I usually don't), and if not, drop out. I don't know if this is common, but if it is, then it would have an impact.

I'd also be curious to know how pacing impacts completion rates. Personally, while some platforms treat it as a selling point, I find it very difficult to complete self-paced courses. On the other hand, some people may miss one or two deadlines in a non-self-paced MOOC and simply give up.
>What if there is a flaw in the decision software and something goes horribly wrong ?

This argument applies to people too and we have ways to deal with it other than people being owned.
WOW, this has been missing from my life for way too long!

Thank you :D
Your distaste for JavaScript aside, writing your app in a language that can run the same exact code on the server and client is a giant win for companies that have been doing redundant work for years.
You do understand that is where hotels make money, right? And that you're doing the opposite, right?

Now, joking aside, that is awesome!
After reading this article, why again do we want to make the Internet a public utility? Do we really think that the government won't use the new power they will have to control the Internet?
I make my living with my laptop and I've used both. I prefer the MBP but I'm a Windows programmer so YMMV.

Yes, they are expensive but they seem to last a little longer than the Thinkpads. I think the Thinkpads used to be a professional class machine but I think they are coasting on their old reputation now. We had several fail (screens mostly) in a 3 person shop where I worked.

At some point, the cost of the hardware pales in comparison to the downtime you would experience if your machine failed. I haven't had any problems with my (less than 2 years old) MBP Retina but I had a few things fail over the 7 years I had the previous MBP. I had a video board fail and I took it down to the Apple store and got it fixed in a day or two. I replaced the hard drives and fans myself as it got older.

Another thing in favor of the MBP in customer facing situations is the screen. For demonstrating GUI's and graphics the MBP screen just looks good - though it was a lot better when they had 17" screens.
This is a nice analysis, although the causes of a high points per minute score could presumably be related to whether it gained an early vote / comment from a user with high karma (who is effectively giving it a stamp of approval).

This only had two points on 20 minutes when I voted for it though, so by their own logic is unlikely to make it to the FP!
Show HN: Adamcurtis.py
Why Microservices require a DevOps approach
My exact experience too. Signing is easy as bookmarking any webpage. Afterwards nature will just prune you out of the classes with bad difficulty/desire ratios.
Now up to 7 points in the time it took me to write the comment! :)
The commitment level is low. People put their name on a list as opposed to shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a traditional class.

The reward level is also low. You might get a certificate but nothing like credits that can transfer. You mainly just get knowledge.

I think it is a lot like going to the library. I've got three books checked out right now. I've browsed one of them and decided it is pretty useless and not quite what I expected. One looks really good but I haven't started it. It is by one of my favorite authors but it wasn't on my radar, I just picked it up because it was on the shelf. One I am halfway through and I intend on finishing it but it is taking about three times longer to finish because Hofstadter's Law applies to my reading list, too.

But my completion rate is the wrong metric. Over the past year I've probably read a dozen or more books that I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for my local library. And one lead me to buying the other six in the series, and a couple I've bought as reference.

I feel like MOOCs should be judged in the same way. There are a lot of people gaining education through MOOCs that they would not have otherwise.
The Flux terminology is confusing to me. It looks like the Observer pattern to me.

* Stores contain Observables

* Components (or Views) contain Observers

* Actions are Proxies

So the article is basically saying the Observer pattern is scalable, but uses the buzz-phrase "Full Stack Flux" instead. To make it even worse it is only a theoretical application of this pattern.
Why Use Haskell?
Day One Templates
Plan to Stop Rhino Poaching by Growing Horns in a Lab
> 3) Assets (eg, a house in their home country they rent out;

I know a guy who used to do exactly that. He had a house in San Antonio that he would rent individual bedrooms out of. Provided him with enough income to travel on, so long as he kept costs down. After a few years the neighborhood got fed up with it, and bugged the HOA until they changed the rules specifically so he couldn't do that.

Accustomed to traveling and not working, not wanting to settle down, he sold the house. Now he does just enough to get by, bouncing around the Americas with occasional sojourns to Europe.
By this logic, Java and .net and php and sql are all irrelevant because all the cool kids use nodejs and mongodb, right?

The HN crowd loves to chase what's "trendy" without thought for if it's a good fit for their problem.

GitHub frankly is a terrible solution for anything but an open source project, and even then there are plenty of better alternatives.

if your project relies on the popularity of GitHub to attract contributors I would be more worried about the nature of your contributors than where the code is hosted.
> To some extent the people need to be brave about this surveillance too and not go paranoid.

I don't think that surveillance is a problem per se. The problem is the law enforcement agencies that use surveillance to actually jail people. As long as they keep charging pregnant women that trip and fall, arresting to people based on tweets [1], or treating kids as sex offenders [2], they shouldn't be trusted with wielding so much power.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Buntin...

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Buntin...
My personal experience is that I've taken MOOC courses with an end goal of _actual learning_ the topic thoroughly, or at least getting the most out of the subject. This was related, but different than my objectives in college, where I was mostly concerned about my _grades_ and completing a degree to show employers. Although, not mutually exclusive, I find that when I'm focused on learning the subject completely, I'll eventually go off the normal course guidelines and spend extra time on supplemental materials (blogs, additional explanations, etc..). I'll also spend extra time completing all the assignments as perfect as possible (doing the extra sections, etc..). This is different than when I was in college, where I would often trade off a few extra grade percentage in order to make a deadline to achieve that A- or whatever. Couple this with the fact that I defer the MOOC assignments if work/life gets in the way and eventually I miss the projects and test due dates.

IMO (speaking personally here) - I find this approach to be Much more beneficial than the traditional college system. I learn the material better and have a deeper understanding of the entire subject. I've officially "failed" every MOOC course I've taken, because of missed due-dates. But when I look through the actual submissions, I usually receive near 100% on every assignment. This probably wouldn't apply to every topic, but the MOOC courses give me a structured way to learn that I wouldn't be able to come up with on my own, but also provide enough flexibility for family life, work, etc..
Like me, the reason I created it :)
> Macro film photo from my Macbook Air’s display

This is why people make fun of us.
hehe, I got to hear about rlwrap for SML/NJ too (Coursera proglang MOOC). Very small, very reliable, what's not to love.
Interesting post. I would like to see those plots on a logarithmic scale.
How Electrotherapy Could Help Improve Concentration
fyi: there were some who felt that it would detract from or dillute the brand "the good parts", which is also an oreilly title.
Of course he's a huge influence. But it's been 3 years of everyone who talks about Apple talking about what a huge influence he is. It really does not need to be mentioned other than in passing any more. This article spent way too much tiem on it right away, to the point where I only made it through the first section and had to stop.
Good to see that time puts everything in its place.
Hah, good point! Much to my chagrin, the theory I proposed is challenged by my own post. It looks like someone with a lot of karma can boost a post to the front page (there are some outliers in the analysis). Maybe we can get individual votes exposed via the API to know for sure.
In a Google hangout, the Thinkpad team imagined what their dream classic Thinkpad might be... rumor is that there might be a special edition Thinkpad next week to celebrate 100 million Thinkpads sold.

http://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/2w1tiv/uleadorg_hi...
I think the real issue is people are given the results not the background experiments.

Talk to an 10 year old about air resistance vs gravity and there probably going to take what you say on faith. Show them a video of a brick and a feather dropped in a vacuum and you words become more meaningful.
A Love Letter to FitBit Ultra
Deploying Go Applications to Azure Websites
The graph should probably be placed in the Graphs section of GitHub. Having it on the main repo page just takes a lot of space.