skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use it with i3, and on a mac (shameless plug: https://github.com/smazga/conkeror_mac_bundler). You really do feel a little bit like a wizard when you can switch from your text editor, browse the internet, and then jump back without touching the mouse.

Unfortunately, many places on the web seem to be trending toward mouse (or touch)-centric design, which makes it harder to navigate from a keyboard.

Still, I really like it.
The Muse (YC W12) Is Looking for a VP of Engineering
Show HN: Digest, a meta newsletter of all your favorite tech newsletters
My recommendation for you is to work on your reading comprehension skills since they are severely lacking.
Nice project, but could you tell me why I should use this over let's say Wolfram Alpha?
Interesting observation: Seems like girls are better suited for full VR experience than men.
Because a programmable dildo coupled with the VR action is a lot simpler to design than a programmable pussy imho.

I think geeks are cutting what's left of the branch under their feet with this tech :).

VR-sex junkie girls will take a bit of work to impress then.. Oh well, who cares, we'll have our own VR girls!
If we'd drop "Secure" from "TextSecure", from a lay-person perspective there are quite a lot of appealing alternatives for an SMS/MMS texting app.
I applied for a PhD at an average school, passed the qualifying exam. But after a couple years found a full time programming job and didn't finish. Looking back family and friends were upset at me for not finishing, but I think it was a bullet I dodged

This is me, right now, except in English: I'm a technical writing consultant (www.seliger.com if you're curious) and I feel terrible for my peers who are trying to make it in academia. The problem is bad enough that I wrote this: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor....

Intellectually I know that I should've finished the dissertation, for the letters, but I stopped caring.
Nothing is killing open source. Open source is not dying.
I was thinking the same thing, and then I read:

"With institutional bias in hiring now proven by multiple social scientists..."

Is anyone familiar with these studies? This is a crucial piece of information for the article.
I just read the article so it sounds like the author is punting on symbols in the direction of the video. Before responding now I went back and watched the video.

As far as the difference between "string".freeze and :string; the symbol will resolve to the same object_id every time across systems and processes. If you spin up irb and type :foo.object_id you will see 1092508. Now one way this is commonly used in Ruby is when we use Object#send. We pass a symbol in place of the function name as the first argument and internally this is used as a system optimization to lookup the function that is being called dynamically.

Now I haven't been knee deep in the code of any of the Rack web servers, but I would imagine that something like Puma which is built for concurrency and multi-threading could take advantage of this behavior as well for some shared process to enable spinning up lighter weight additional processes or threads thus leading to lower memory consumption on your web server and the ability to handle more traffic on the same hardware.

Erik is right in saying that strings and symbols are "converging"; they have not yet converged however. At the point at which strings converge to symbols in the sense that both resolve to the same object across systems, then what we have left is symbols and so it is not symbols that have been killed, but rather strings supplanted by symbols. If instead we go the direction of saying memory and performance don't matter so let's punt on that whole symbols are immutable thing I think we are giving up too much.

I use Ruby because the high level abstraction is great and saves me developer cycles, but I also want it to eek out as much performance as possible. Honestly in general I'm tired of hearing the argument that X should die now because it is a performance hack. Some performance hacks are good.

(For reference: In the video he discusses symbols vs freezing strings from 22:00 to 25:07)
There's a lot to take issue with in this article. Graduate institutional affiliation is huge because more and more research is being done by undergraduates, so top institutions can more easily pick out the best talent early. It is still true in academia that research>institution, but the latter is becoming more and more correlated with the former. Top PhD graduates come from top schools, with few exceptions (and those exceptions still get jobs). With undergraduate this correlation is weak.

Yes financial privilege is huge for getting that far, but everyone applying for an academic PhD program has spent decent time in academia and has chosen that instead of money. I've never seen or heard of someone turning down an elite academic PhD program because of a low stipend (students do use stipends to choose between similar schools). Any academic adviser would tell you you'd be crazy to do so.

Edit: This might only be true for math. In undergrad I was constantly surprised to find students from elite vs sub-elite institutions differed hugely in privilege and less in ability. In my PhD program, there was a huge difference in ability between our school (arguably #3 in the area) and nearby Harvard/MIT. While this is all anecdotal, elite academia is a small community and I've seen a large chunk of math. Ability here in math is easy to measure (if they can solve my problems and I can't understand theirs). Mathematicians keep mental rankings of other mathematicians. When you apply for graduate school and later jobs, lots of other mathematicians have a really good idea how you compare.
I don't think the Linux kernel is a good example here. The vast majority of people who commit to it are paid to do so by their employers, and if you're just getting started then committing to the kernel is probably a bad idea anyway.

There are a tonne of smaller projects who will gratefully accept submissions and not be such a pain. It's easy to view Linux as the centre of the open source community, but in practice it's not.

A much easier way to get involved in open source is just to do so as part of your normal life - when you're using a library and find a bug, submit a fix - if there's a feature you've added and found useful, submit it as a PR. It might not be well received in every case, but it will in many.
If the experience is so real, will it be possible to fall in love with the VR characters ?

The shit future generations will have to deal with is amazingly complicated, at least that's one of the good parts of getting old(er) and old-school-ish.
Why can't everyone who joins the military attain the rank of colonel or higher eventually?
A family member works for a large chain of car dealerships. They regularly buy vehicles at auction. It's not uncommon that they find trackers on the vehicles. Here's a picture of one he sent me to play with a couple years ago.

The battery pack on the left, and the tracker on the right were in a magnetic Pelican case attached to the underside of a black Escalade. The sim in the tracker was from some US MVNO that I didn't recognize.

https://i.imgur.com/VLzTPt4.jpg
I thought this was a fork for the Konqueror web browser. Yikes - what a terrible name.
Be careful about taking one open source project and then using it to paint all open source projects.
Toxicity exists everywhere. It's just that in open source projects it's a lot more, well, open.
We'll be left with people who preferred 'RL' experience over 'VR'.

They will be the ones who reproduce, while the rest of humanity are trapped by 'VR'.
Don't get the wrong impression from that though. Professors absolutely do NOT on average make enough money. Terence Tao is a rare case who have the potential to have their name lasted for the next thousand years in proof and theorem (emphasize potential). He's literally one of those "one in a millions" genius thing. If anything, paying for one of the best guy in the world 400k a year might be a wee bit too far on the low side ...
I'm not a fan of corporations "securing" my firmware by preventing me from installing my own custom version. Currenty, I use libreboot on my X60s and Macbook2,1 with GRUB in the firmware and configured to only boot kernels signed with my own personal key.
AFAIR one of the few things that software engineering research has consistently shown is the bug-count is correlated with LOC, esp. with churn, i.e. number of lines changed. (I can't recall exactly how robust the effect is, but I remember reading about it in "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It" and you can probably find a few cites in there.)
Getting started with hackernews culture, sharing a blog of mine on producitivity
Well, for Vivaldi and Opera, "all of your changes" in this case amounts to just the UI. Neither has the capability nor motivation to modify Blink in any significant way.

Also, Opera has been contributing to Blink, so they aren't keeping all their changes private.

Vivaldi hasn't launched yet, but I would guess the same would be true of them - it just isn't rational to do otherwise (if Vivaldi fixes some small bug in Blink, why keep it as a patch they need to constantly reapply on top of Blink? Far easier to upstream it).

So aside from the UI (which is tiny compared to the entire browser), Chrome, Blink and Vivaldi are about equal in terms of being open or closed.
Only if you care about going into academia. It's possible to want to get a PhD just to grow in your field.

I acquired my PhD a few years ago, and while I admit that it's hard to compare that to the experience I could have had in industry, I feel like I grew quite a lot and that it helps me in my current position in many many ways, only one of which is pure CS ability.
Or they could just make sure the have a good spidey collection.
That's the point. You're held indefinitely without trial.
Absolutely. Dropping GCM and rolling their own for that is great.

But SMS still is the more reliable protocol. When I'm in a subway without stable data, and I tell my girlfriend I have an expectation for reliability of delivery that is shaped by SMS. So does she.

Roaming data is disabled by default on Android for good reasons, I pay insane amounts for it on my otherwise fantastically cheap data plan. So I am in Paris and all of a sudden her messages don't get through.

If there is an intelligent fall back to unencrypted SMS this could be a boon though. The risk of undelivered messages very strongly outweighs the risk of these messages being read in these use cases, so if SMS can not be made secure and usable, unencrypted fall back is absolutely fine.
Reconnect – hijacking accounts abusing Facebook Login
It pretty much looks like a browser. It's not the looks, but the works that make it interesting; you don't look at it and say, "That looks like it would intelligently employ keybindings similar to Emacs! Look at that extensibility!"
If you worked where I do (on Earth) you will be judged for your gender,age,race,education,social standing, where you grew up, hygiene, personality, religion, etc...
Visa Gift Card Transactions Exposed by GoWallet Vulnerability [FIXED]
About being correlated, I guess it is simply not true, just check statistical models. What happens is that increasingly what is considered good research are what top schools are researching... Like String theory in Physics...
But let's all focus on one part of this multifaceted situation.
This is a side project I created w/ my coworkers to ultimately ingest competitor email content.

The entry point is a programmatic aggregation of popular newsletters in tech, but if people find value we can expand to other niche categories, or create fully customizable issues (you hand-pick exactly which news you want in your blast).
The 1% does declare that the plebs complain too much about their self-inflicted lot.
You may not realize this but because you worked hard for your position you believe you are entitled to it and the system that promoted you is near perfect. The reality is not so. I have been to UC Berkeley, where the average faculty is far more interested in gaming the system than making real contribution to science. They orbit around "famous" people, co-author papers with "big wigs," be co-PI with well connected people, because this way is easier than doing real science. There are top people at the top universities, and there are top people at the lower-tier schools, at a lower rate but with a far greater base population. Scientific breakthroughts historically do not favor top rate institutions.

Let's face it. The "top" students that Harvard and Stanford accept are past experts at gaming the system. They are total believer in and are totally committed to climbing the existing social-economic hiearchy. They worship the authorities, are perfectly content in following established lines of research, and pad themselves in the back when they re-search past results to apply to an arcane area, which in all probability ten people are ever going to find interesting and never useful. They are the perfect sheeps pretending to be lions.

Talk about entitlement.
Who gets do define merit? Too many Jewish students were getting into Harvard in the early part of the 20th century, so the application process was changed.
For some reason I've always thought that recursive coding is the most beautiful.
A friend of a friend suggested to me that a job in his team would suit me. I said I refuse to make weapons or spy on people.

He said he liked "catching baddies".
Why wouldn't I use Vimperator and be done with it?
Security Concepts: A Hackers Guide Book
Where's that guy with anxiety from yesterday? Strap this to his head and put him in extremely awkward situations of close personal contact. Have the app give instructions on strategies for dealing with anxiety so he can try those things out.

Someone should make that... I'm not into VR yet and have too many other projects or I would.
Is your refrigerator running ... a spamming operation?

All the more reason to fill it with Vegamite instead of spiced pork and ham...

And yes, The Internet of Broekn Things is a disaster waiting to happen.

The Pusch to WiFi All the Things rather reminds me of this Huge Gernsback cover: http://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-2j8uwh9lX5s/VL1_itXSOtI/AA...

Note the "Radio Heater", "Radio Clock", and "Radio Power Roller Skates"...

(More: http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2015/01/videophones-from-fut...)
The problem is the sweet spot moves, and it can also be different between individuals and teams. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn that the sweet spot for a team is a lower level of abstraction than any individual team member is capable of, partially due to communication reasons and partially because "abstraction comfort" is not really on a line and you probably ought to target the minimum for any given "element" of it on your team.

It's why I've said before that while I'd very much like to work with Go, it's not my personal favorite. I'm comfortable with Haskell, but I would be engaging in malpractice to put code into the source control system that requires that level of fluency with abstraction to understand. Go has a really solid balance for large teams. If you're currently in a startup with 5 well-chosen, high-skill engineers, you won't have any clue what I mean by that, but when you've got hundreds of engineers who may touch some bit of code, where most of them are trying to spend as little of their cognitive budget as possible on it so even the very smart and very skilled ones are pretty much just stabbing the code until it does what they want it to, you start to appreciate a language that limits how hard they can twist the knife.
Do you guys think people had this same conversation when pornographic films were first created?
Yeah, but you need to then configure your phone to make sure only TextSecure uses roaming. If anyone knows an effective way of doing this (that is not manually disabling everything else) I would love to hear it.
I believe that most founders exercise early when the company is formed and do an 83b. It's the smart thing to do, anyway.
Is there somewhere a clear explanation of social toxicity?

I get that people use it to label things they don't like, it just seems like it is used as a catch all.

For instance, is bluntness that occasionally comes across as rudeness toxic? Is the use of expletives toxic? Etc.

I think something like excessive, pointless rudeness probably fits under toxic as a category, but it also more useful to just say that such and such is rude.
Lessons from Client Work – Designing Logos
People will wax poetically about meritocracy and fairness. Then they will get children of their own and think to themselves that giving them all the advantages that they can get is their newest and most moral goal.
The 7 Levels of Social Media Engagement
Students launch desktop recycler that turns pop bottles into 3D printer plastic
Was pointing out we should not rule out any government agency just for the quality of the setup. I find it hard to believe that an activist would be targeted by a private investigator.
I am a mathematics professor at an R1 university who has been directly involved in faculty searches for four years in a row.

This article is quite mistaken, at least from the perspective of an academic mathematician. (Maybe it is more accurate in the humanities.)

(1) This year, two of the three candidates whom we interviewed got their Ph.D.'s at non-top-20 universities. We made offers to both of them. One of them turned us down, in favor of a better offer from another R1 university.

The third got his Ph.D. at a top-20, but not top-10 university.

The last person we hired, in a previous year's search, also got his Ph.D. at a non-top-20 university.

(2) My own university is not in the top 50. Most of our own Ph.D. graduates, if I limit to the strongest and hardworking ones, have been successful in getting either academic jobs at good universities, or very appealing non-academic jobs.

(3) In mathematics at least, the top universities offer a much better graduate education than non-top universities. For one, the absolute leading researchers are at the top universities, and there is a big gap between these people and merely very good researchers. (I say that, counting myself in the latter category.)

But still more important than that is the quality of the peer group. In grad school (at least in math) you learn much more from your peers than from your professors, and Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. attract the most talented, ambitious, and hard-working students. That is why these places are so good.

(4) "Why don’t prospective graduate students simply limit their applications to favored elite institutions? The answer is often financial, and, again, speaks to privilege and discrimination endemic to academic culture. The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country."

Well, for one, these places all pay higher stipends. I don't know of any grad students in math at any of these places who have had difficulties paying their living expenses, except for those who were simultaneously trying to raise families.

Ambitious students who can get into elite universities, usually should. And exceptions are typically in the case of elite research groups in otherwise non-elite universities.

I am not saying that there is no privilege and discrimination in mathematics departments (the gender ratio is notoriously bad), but I find the author's criticisms off-base.
Ask HN: Front-end “design patterns”?
Hello HN, Are there any treatments of the topic of web front-end software design? I'm looking for something similar to "Design Patterns" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns) but for web front-end HTML/CSS.

I've read Duckett's book (Amazon bestseller) and its just syntax. Also, I've read the Atomic CSS design and BEM methodologies, and while those come close to what I want, I'm looking for a more detailed treatment.
To give an obvious example of what I'm looking for- I would say, use margins to separate multiple instances of same components (among other uses). I wonder if there are books that deal with similar, but non-obvious topics.
So if I go on a 4-week vacation, I will return to an empty account? Uh oh. That should be printed in bold red letters everywhere. It's the opposite to peace of mind.
On a similar note, how should one feel when reading/ learning about people like this?

I mean, on one hand, it's rather inspiring to read about the amazing thing that another human is achieving. On the other hand, I can't help but feel ... helplessness, like whatever I do, it doesn't really matter (add on with the guilt of squandering my time, and wondering if I could ever have been that good).

When I was younger and have less (or no) ambitions, it was easy to brush off everytime a story like this comes up: well, they're genius, and ... so what? But interestingly, since I've learned that I might be able to do more than I thought I could, everytime I read a story like this, I just feel extremely mediocre, even pathetic of myself.
It's interesting to read up about what terry himself has to say on the subject. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...

The comments section is particularly interesting in which a reader asks Terry about the genius of Ramanujan.
To bolster your point, I averaged about $25k/year at UCLA math in the 2010's, and I had a car by the time I graduated (granted I tutored to Beverly Hills high school students on the side).

I would even say there's a substantial difference between a typical grad student from a top-10-and-not-top-5 university and a typical grad student from Harvard; this is not at all meant to disparage the former schools, but basically every student I met from Harvard REALLY knew their stuff.

By the way, to those saying the system is not a meritocracy, I got into UCLA coming from an undergraduate institution that's not even top-100 because I was bright and I worked my tail off. Would it have been easier if my parents were buddies with the president of Harvard? Sure, but life's not fair.
I block all scripts globally, flash heavy sites do not load and I consider that a 'feature'. Frankly, surfing the web without NoScript & AdBlock is an experience I do not want and have learned to do without. IF I need drivers or need access or ecommerce I'll allow the main site to run temporarily in Sandboxie or use tools/alt approaches to get the data without 7 or 8 ad servers running. The false promise of the internet is easily eschewed when you take a pragmatic approach to it.

Also: I was looking for something on mainstream retailer sites and was amazed at the list of servers. How many TargetImg servers does it take to load a product page? Answer: At least four, plus all the other tracking/ad loading detritus. Just wow.
Writing 50k lines of code takes a lot of time, and every line has a chance of spawning a bug or undesired behaviour. Of course it's not a perfect metric of a system, and of course a line of code written by some experienced C guru will be completely different from one written by a newcomer to the language. But it is also true that the less lines of code, the less potential points of failure in a program.

Also, if you were given the task to read and analyze a piece of code, you'd surely wish it were shorter! As long as the software performs the desired tasks and readability is cared for, shorter tend to be better.
Great. Now I have the theme stuck in my head. I KNOW WHERE YOU WORK.
> Having to look for research position at a company or getting stuck fighting for tenure position

That's something of a false dichotomy. I know lots of PhDs that aren't doing research or faculty jobs.
Did you make use of sync.Pool at all for your common garbage generation cases?