skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Number of people managed" seems like a wholly awful metric.

Can't we judge people by results?
Cool. Some of the words are very exotic, but then some are surprisingly common words. I wonder if there exists an index with a "commonality rating" that could be used to sort/weight the randomiser with, so that one could get more common words up first?
What? Why? Word and md/html solve quite different problems, the way I see it. Word is very much for paper-oriented documents while md/html are for screen-first.

Word is far from my favorite document preparation system [1] (let's call it that), but it still has many advantages over markdown,

* Html rendering has no concept of pagination. Paginating naively from html (ie printing from a browser) makes ugly documents.

* Word has tools for managing references and bibliography generation

* Also automatic numbering and referencing of tables, figures, etc.

Those are just OTOH features I'd consider important for writing a high school history report or whatever. If this were word '97 we were talking about, I'd understand, but modern Word is a quite powerful tool.

I don't mean to bash or disrepect, just genuinely curious if you'd considered this or you had specific reasons for switching to markdown.

[1] I've really been liking LyX for the past years, but it might be a bit much for your typical high school student. I've been considering trying out an asciidoc -> docbook -> (latex -> pdf or straight docbook to html) workflow. Maybee ascii would interest you, similar plain-text formatting like md but more full featured.
I've noticed, in 30 years of software development experience, that a lot of new-fangled psychological/management "innovations" exist primarily to provide justifications for bad behaviour.

Scrum being perceived this way is hardly surprising - its hard to develop a methodology for anything where responsibility and control are arbitrated in a fashion that gives the user (of the methodology) more of each component. Taking full responsibility for things is not the same thing as having alibis for when things "inevitably" go wrong .. if the methodology is a defense mechanism from the damage that occurs when projects overrun, its not going to be as effective at actually pushing projects through as it were if it were an attack mechanism for how to make things go right, no matter what happens. Alas, being effective versus being effected, is whats at play here. Few of us actually want to face the fact of our own failing, unless of course we 'predict it' in some fashion, first of all - and therefore create the conditions for failure to occur, 'comfortably'.

But like all tooling and methodology, it is a matter of the original intention of the user that counts. If you're adopting Scrum to save your ass 'in case things go wrong', you're doing it wrong already. If you're adopting it 'to make things go right, and do things properly', then you're doing it right. The only difference is the intention of those adopting the methodology.
From the perspective of historical evidence, Pinker's book is indeed cherry picking. He has a huge number of footnotes but when you actually look through them, you find that dozens and dozens are from the same book, which purports to explain thousands of years of history but wasn't even written by a professional historian. I find aspects of Pinker's argument to be convincing but his use of historical evidence is, frankly, not much higher than the level of the undergraduate students I teach. And since a large part of the book deals with historical change, that's problematic.
is this opensourced?
Learn New Languages Easily with Babbel’s Interactive App Learning
I think the intent of Markdown is more the plain syntax and non-programmer look of it than the readability.

Headers, tables, headers, blockquotes, code blocks, links, and footnotes can make text hard to read. Especially link syntax can hurt readability, even if you use [url] variables instead of the full (http) url; previews trim that away, although I'm slowly become broken inside enough to find Markdown tables easier to read than HTML renderings.

URLs, footnotes, and the big bad, tables of content, are the kind of set-and-forget stuff you'd probably rather prefer in a separate document or something.

But it's also worth keeping in mind that people use Markdown for very different things, and those who aren't writing extensive READMEs with tables, links, and a bunch of headers won't run into those problems; I love using Markdowns on forums, for instance, but I don't actually read those comments the same way I would an article or a README.

Previews are a little like fuzzy post-deploy tests for typos, poor phrasing, and syntax errors. :)
Bill Burr Monday morning podcast
"Use stdlib unless you can name a reason good enough to incur the cost of importing another package, which shouldn't be underestimated" is probably the short version of the idiomatic Go position. If you've only got three flags, there probably isn't any reason to use anything other than stdlib; you can't be winning big enough to pull in another package. If you're solely being driven by external scripts, it's harder to win than if you expect interactive usage. Of course, if you're writing a grep replacement and you've got half the alphabet in both capitalizations being used and half of them take arguments and a couple of things switch "modes"... well, by all means don't write that yourself, go get a package that does it well. Most of the stdlib is designed to hit the 95-99% use case, but if you're really pushing something hard you may need something else.

Probably the only truly controversial bits of the Go standard answers are A: pulling in external packages isn't free and extremely frequently underestimated over the life of the product, they better be bringing some real value beyond merely preventing the developer's nose from crinkling a bit [1] and B: if you've only got three flags right now, don't go leaping to the conclusion you're in the process of writing a grep replacement; wait until you actually have the situation I described before dropping another package in (YAGNI).

[1]: Contrast this with something like Node or Ruby that seems to encourage pulling in dozens of libraries, many of which may literally be single-digit lines of payload code, and it is considered totally worth it for developer tastes to alter significant elements of the language/runtime/stdlib. And I really do mean contrast this with... I am currently expressing no opinion as to which philosophy is "better".
I'm planning on adding a JSON config file to be able to tweak the network and add a lot more variation to the generated training set. Meanwhile, if you want to train it with several different fonts you can just add them to the 'fonts' array in captcha.js.
I grew up in Ukraine until I was 9, and spent the rest of my youth in NYC. I spent a large portion of my adolescence in NYC exploring Brooklyn on my own because a majority of my peers weren't allowed to leave their block, much less neighborhood.

I've found beautiful orchards that I spent my summers in lazily hanging out in and all kinds of amazing places in my neighborhood by exploring, things my peers weren't able to experience because their parents were deathly afraid of letting their children hangout outside.

I walked to school by myself by grade 2 in Ukraine, while when I arrived in NYC, my grandparents who came to the US a few years before us, wouldn't let me walk to school on my own until grade 7, to my great adolescent irritation.

I've only gotten in trouble a few times because I trespassed on some hapless elderly man's backyard, but never have I encountered a dangerous situation where some stranger meant me harm of their own volition.

There's most definitely greatly overstated stranger danger in NYC and America at large, even when you discount my anecdotal evidence and look at actual numbers.
Is it using a US-english dictionary or does it have both UK-en and US-en words?
I've heard good things about Welcome to Night Wale: http://commonplacebooks.com/
Stress test your Mac with the yes command
Nope they can't. Reddit is too much full of bullshit, hate, and things like that.
We have a list of podcasts and reviews here: https://podcasts.techendo.com/
The relevant part:

" Two leptonic production mechanisms are considered: decays of
squarks and gluinos with Z bosons in the final state, resulting in a peak in the dilepton invariant
mass distribution around the Z-boson mass; and decays of neutralinos (e.g. ˜χ
0
2 → `
+
`
−χ˜
0
1
),
resulting in a kinematic endpoint in the dilepton invariant mass distribution. For the former,an excess of events above the expected Standard Model background is observed, with a significance of 3 standard deviations. In the latter case, the data are well-described by the expected Standard Model background."
The 4 I have on my list at the minute:

* The Joe Rogan Experience - http://podcasts.joerogan.net/

* Nerdist - http://www.nerdist.com/podcast_channel/nerdist-podcast-chann...

* Startalk - http://www.startalkradio.net/shows-archive/

* Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project - http://www.tested.com/still-untitled-the-adam-savage-project...
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the first '.com' domain being registered
I've always thought of "jitter" as just adding a dash of entropy to the system I'm building.

I suppose a textbook example is... If I'm managing a pool of long-running threads I want to periodically bounce, I could write logic to throttle respawning threads. Or I could just add a rand() to the conditional -- introduce "jitter" -- and let probability theory "throttle" for me.

I'd rather build on top of probability than statistics.
Have to open up a new window anyway if it is any sort of long man-page that needs reading while constructing the command in another window?
Almost every idea is taken. Do it better than the people who have done it before
•	Software Engineering Radio - http://www.se-radio.net/

•	Hansel Minutes - http://hanselminutes.com/

•	Architectural Concepts - http://www.architecturecast.net/

•	Security Now - https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm

•	Arming the Donkeys - http://danariely.com/tag/arming-the-donkeys/

•	Freakonomics - http://freakonomics.com/category/freakonomics-radio/podcasts...

•	Planet Money - http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/127413729/podcast/

•	This American Life - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast
> I'd love to find a good fiction podcast, with either short form stories or episodic long form arcs in the fashion of old-school radio shows.

Afternoon drama:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qrzz

15 Minute Drama (15 minutes per weekday, total 1hour 15mins per drama)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qy2s

Book of the week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qftk

Book at bedtime: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qtlx
http://partiallyexaminedlife.com
Check out LyX! Not affiliated or anything, just great software that for me hits the sweetspot between Writer and hand-coding Latex. It's simple and lightweight yet powerful and easy to learn.

http://www.lyx.org/
TropicalMBA.com
Similarly in my home of Vancouver the construction of towers has been constant for decades and prices have only skyrocketed in response.

The cause and effect probably goes the other way.

why would builders do this anyway?

Why do gas stations lower prices when oil falls? If they don't, their competitors will.
Could we get a list on the site of those that are taken? Would be cool to see what people actually buy!
Ask HN: Tools for Archiving Web Research? Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, OneNote
An extremely frequent scenario I encounter is doing extensive google searching on a particular topic (solving a specific bug, researching how to do something, etc) and inevitably end up with a million browser tabs open, and then get pulled away to work on something else before returning to the task days or even months/years later.

Tools like the Firefox tree style tabs are very helpful for this task, but having some sort of a cloud based permanent archival system integrated with the browser would make things even better.

While googling today I came across a class of applications that I never knew existed. They are more targeted toward academic researchers, but seem to accommodate quite nicely the type of research I tend to do with my computing problems.

Is anyone currently using anything like this?

Here is a list of some alternatives (Zotero most popular, then Mendeley, EndNote):
http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/Zotero_vs._Mendeley

From the little I've looked into it, Zotero seems most useful:

https://www.zotero.org/support/screencast_tutorials
Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. A simple syntax for documentation that is extensible with macros. I am glad AsciiDoc includes them, they are very useful.
I didn't even know that Yahoo Mail still exists.
PS If somebody wants to give me $225M I'm sure I could muster a decent evernote clone. But why would anybody do that?
There is an entertaining public fight going on between Wealthfronts and Schwabs CEOs about their robo-investor options. Once the big boys get involved I have a feeling Wealthfront, Betterment and others are going to feel the pinch. Schwab has their offering now with zero fees (except for those from the ETFs owned).

https://intelligent.schwab.com/

I have a test amount of money at Betterment now, but am researching about moving it to Schwab.

The best thing Vanguard ever did was drive down costs across the industry.
If you have a list of hundreds of APIs to implement, you can easily skip the ones that are hard to (properly) implement in the first months. You also may choose to keep TODOs in your code that indicate 'minor' issues whose implementation is tricky, or that may already be correct, but 'just' need checking. For example, if a call that throws must not make any partial changes before throwing, you may whip out something that likely is correct, but postpone the actual verification of that fact.
Ask HN: Where to donate two Dell servers?
Hi there,

I have two Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers I bought for a project which now runs in a cloud.

I would rather donate them to a worthy cause.

Any suggestions or takers?

Thanks!
Do you think that org-mode could be extracted into its own application, or is it too bound to emacs? As a die-hard vim-user-turned-intellij-user (mostly because intellij has the best vim keybindings I've seen), org-mode is the thing about emacs that fascinates me the most.
The Changelog Podcast is a good show with OSS developers.

http://thechangelog.com/podcast/
Thanks for the link. At least we now have a specific definition for "crystal meth" (methamphetamine hydrochloride).

>This causes a user to want to repeat smoking much faster.

I didn't see where they made that conclusion. I did see this:

>>Despite much research data from animals in the literature,17 the areas of the human brain and the key neurochemicals that are responsible for the pleasurable effects of methamphetamine and for the transition from drug-liking to drug-craving are still unknown.

>>"Research into the pharmacologic treatment of methamphetamine addiction has largely been limited to studies in animals. Surprisingly, there are very limited data from clinical trials of new therapies to prevent methamphetamine addiction relapse.24,33 Although animal studies are essential to the development of new medications, given the public health importance of this worldwide problem and the existence of potential drug targets, it is obvious that the very slow pace of clinical testing of new therapies in methamphetamine addiction needs to be accelerated. "
And philosophical OSS people wonder why so many people chose closed alternatives. If you don't want adoption, fine, but don't pretend like that's true for every OSS project out there. I have no problem with that mentality until it comes into stark contrast with the goals of those pushing OSS (see: EFF.) You're not going to be taken seriously by people if you don't support the code you put out there.

>Or else?

Or else people just don't use your software and don't buy into your ideology. If you don't care, fine, but obviously many OSS proponents do.
Flow Control and Garden Path Sentences
Scrum / Agile can have failure points both technically (code/development) as well as socially (requirements/planning). It sounds like you've seen a lot of social failure points in your experience.

I would hate to address all your complaints point-by-point, but I'll address the first which leaps out to me: that of a requirements phase prior to sprint start.

In the training I've gotten for scrum, there's an overriding principle that you don't (nay, can't) commit to work when you don't have all the dependencies. I can't commit to building a brick wall when the bricks haven't arrived yet.

If you have a hard requirement where you need/want to have an architecture phase prior to sprint start then you should be staggering your architectural planning phases with your development phases. In the current sprint you can be working the architecture requirements for the upcoming sprint, and developing off the requirements/design that was worked out in the previous sprint.

Overall, I think you've got some valid complaints but many that are misguided. I worked with someone who "just wanted to code" and didn't work to grasp the big picture. Much of what he did had to be re-done because it didn't meet the actual customer needs.

You would likely look at that and scream: "See, scrum doesn't work! We should have had a requirements document written 18 months ago that this code monkey could have worked from!"

I looked at it and said: "Wow, I can't afford to babysit this guy who has all the tools, information, and access necessary to correctly meet the customer requirements, but consistently doesn't manage to do so."

In the first case, you have more clarity up front but less flexibility while the work is in progress (front-loading work).

In the second case, we would have had to have two people doing the job that one person should have been able to do (incorrect delivery was a persistent problem with him which we worked over a year mentoring him on).

You are absolutely correct that scrum is a terrible methodology for building a bridge. And waterfall is a terrible methodology for building a startup.

https://crossbolt.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/when-to-use-sc...

Scrum/Agile (when properly used) has two main purposes... to better predict delivery of a particular technical capability (ie: when can I ship feature "foo" to customer "xyz"), and focus on keeping the product under development in a shippable state throughout the development process (ie: even though feature "foo" isn't done, I can still ship A, B, and C with minimal incremental work).

Waterfall is pretty much the opposite of incremental delivery, and in my experience does a poor job of predicting delivery dates.

If you are in a problem domain where you have hard requirements up front, a hard deadline, extremely well known technologies, then you are effectively building a bridge.

Break out the gantt charts, put a flag in the ground that says: "We're doing Waterfall" and be proud of it. But please try to avoid muddying the waters of scrum when you're using a tool for something it wasn't designed for and getting poor results.
Internet: can anyone clean up the mess behind 'the world wide web'?
Your statement is a bit unclear, but any of these could be considered a 'major' war given their place on the casualty list at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

I excerpted the top few items that extend in whole or in part past the cutoff date of 1945 that they chose.

7,500,000 – Chinese Civil War (1927–1949)[11]
2,500,000–5,400,000 – Second Congo War/Great War of Africa (1998–2003)[17][18][19][20]
800,000–3,800,000[24] – Vietnam War/Second Indochina War (1955–1975)[25][26]
1,000,000 – Iran–Iraq War/First Persian Gulf War (1980–1988)[28]
1,000,000 Biafra War (1967-1970)
957,865–1,622,865 – Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989)[30][31][32]
400,000 – Civil war in Afghanistan (1989–92), Civil war in Afghanistan (1992–96) and Civil war in Afghanistan (1996–2001) (1989–2001)[37]
350,000–1,500,000 - Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962)[38]
300,000–3,000,000[41] – Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)
300,000 – Second Burundian Civil War (1993–2005)[42]
300,000 (TFG)–500,000+ (AFP) – Somali Civil War[43][44][45] [Dates not listed, wiki article puts it in the 80s-90s]
272,000–1,260,009 – War on Terror (2001–present)[46][47][48]
202,354–282,354 – Syrian Civil War (2011–present), see Casualties of the Syrian civil war
200,000 – Colombian conflict (1964–present) (1964–present)[50]
[+ many more]

I note that a lot of these were 'civil' wars. I understand the book excluding those. I am not clear on the logic behind why. I do not know of a way to define a 'major war' that is not arbitrary.
Can't believe teargassing.com isn't taken yet.
thetalkingmachines.com
I've been a fan of these since he started them, but I often end up wishing they were longer.
I do not think an automatic web scraper can decide what's "mobile friendly" or not.

The HN site was just fine before they decided to do what Google classifies as mobile friendly - totally ruining my experience browsing HN.

You shouldn't design a web page to satisfy Google, you should design it to satisfy your users. Even Google itself has said that. But yet they force Webmasters to make certain changes, and in some cases like HN, making the mobile experience much worse.
The original author included a misplaced modifier "only."

Despite their poor grammar it should have been included here.
That one sets sizes and width in pixels. This gets very tiny if you print it with something that doesn't auto-fix this... :-)
* The Haskell Cast - http://haskellcast.com

* NodeUp - http://nodeup.com

* This American Life - http://thisamericanlife.org/

* Fresh Air - http://npr.org/programs/fresh-air/

* Invisibilia - http://npr.org/programs/invisibilia

* StartUp Podcast - http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup
Vanguard offers 401ks and Simple IRAs for companies to make available to their employees. Fidelity and Schwab also have low cost plans.

If your company has you in a crappy retirement ask them to change!
My vote to :
Startup life:

The reboot Podcast

StartUp Podcast

a16z

General:

Invisibilia

99 % invisible

planet money

EconTalk
Also Dan Carlin's Common Sense:
Independent commentary on modern events: http://dancarlin.com/common-sense-home-landing-page/
+1 for Startup. I listened to the last episode of season 1 this weekend -- the first half is the most honest discussion of entrepreneurship I've encountered.
I've heard Carlin's podcast recommended several times, but latel I'm tired of history that primarily gives me a finished narrative, andam interested more in finding accounts where they spend a lot of time discussing sources (e.g., I'm less excited about hearing about Ben Franklin's life than I might be about the letters of Ben Franklin).

How does Hardcore Hisotry stack up in this regard?
I think Pinker is right about violence and war but reductions in those are probably offset by social aggression and surveillance as Gray mentions when he talks about the panopticon and incarceration rates.

We are biological creatures and we should expect that when interests collide there will be aggression. When violence is hampered, it turns into other forms of aggression.
As long as there are clear guidelines, they can use text, image, and behavioral algorithms to do some serious clean up. I doubt it will ever be perfect
This is one of the funniest tech-talks I've heard (the funniest is XOXO's lottery collective talk). Thanks OP.
Watched this quite a while ago; good watch if you like this kind of humor.
I wouldn't. I use IntelliJ for almost all the stuff I code, thanks to the support for almost any languages which you can find via plugins.