skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Learning iOS dev, coming from a js background, I have very few complaints about swift. It is in fact a very nice language.

The biggest pain is apple's frameworks and ide. The APIs are very inelegant and arbitrary. The worst thing is the drag and drop interface builder. I believe that the people who designed it never actually built an iPhone app with it. You can always get about 80% of what you want, then you have to resort to some outrageous hack and stitch the rest of it together with verbose imperative code. Declarative web dev with html really is a huge step up from Apple's stupid drag and drop thing.

Hopefully Swift is the start of Apple putting together a sane, modern development environment.
Thanks. Exactly what I was hoping for.
Totally worth the downvotes for asking.
He does assert it, then assume its truth in later pieces. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Quantum_Physics_Sequence#...
I am still using my first intellimouse; it must be 15 years old (I actually don't remember exactly when I bought it, but it was a long time ago) - it's absolutely perfect still. I have just ordered another for home (just in case) and two for the office (one for usage, one for backup). It really is a solid bit of kit, and I'd be gutted if I couldn't source one again.
Spotify uses Docker in production. Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlgoq9t95ew
In real-world AI, they tend to go for minmaxing, which avoids such absurdities. Minmaxing says "don't torture people, your dust speck has literally been defined to be insignificant."
It's true that the GPL currently uses copyright law to achieve its goals; but it's not true that copyright is the only possible way of achieving them.

If we're assuming legislative power (to abolish copyright), there's no reason we couldn't pass laws to achieve the same goals without copyright.
Looks like only the home page is responsive now. Viewing this thread right now on a Samsung Galaxy S4 and the font is too small.
The Church of TED
An editor with markdown syntax highlighting or preview helped me learn markdown and still helps me understand the ambiguities and subtleties of markdown. It is essential with deeper nesting.

I was surprised by the ambiguities and subtleties of markdown. I was surprised that Atom's markdown preview does not yet match the rendering on github.

Or consider some of the bug reports verses pope / vim-markdown:

* #60: inappopropriate italic: foo_<any non-alphanumeric character>bar
* #42: Bold links not being recognized
* #37: Incorrect processing of "_"
* #27: Ending an italic section with an escaped asterisk isn't parsed properly

After first authoring in vim, my preferred markdown editor with preview is http://pad.haroopress.com/ by @rhiokim (open source is promised). Scrolling synced between editor and preview is one of the killer feature.

I found preview very useful when working recently on https://github.com/lloydde/sdc-1/blob/doc-coal-setup-rewrite...
Yes, it's the sort of thing that makes people go to second-order utilitarianism.

(It's a bit like when someone says something absurd about Uber or Bitcoin and, when called out, says "But that's Econ 101!" Yes, but in second and third year you find out it's all a bit more complicated than that.)
If I can't have embedded pictures it's a non-starter for me. That knocks out everybody, really.

Just synced text, even if it happens to be markdown text so it's a bit prettier, is not valuable to me.

Evernote's ability to quickly drag in some pictures and throw some text in to explain them is what I want. A real notebook allows me to sketch. A digital notebook must also allow me to incorporate concepts that require pictures because they can't be easily written as text.

To improve Evernote, I would like the "notebooks" to actually be tags, so the same document could appear to reside in multiple places.

I would like it to have h1,h2,h3 header tags, so I could build documentation that had structure, rather than just manually making some text big and bold to pretend to be a header.

I would like a "table" creator or tag, so I could add table data easily.

I will never give up my embedded pictures though.
Might want to look into hidpi support, the blurry text is painful to read :P
I find it amusing that asking for source, using wikipedia's standard, is considered ”tone” of any sort, let alone a rude one.

No offense was intended in the grandparent.
You're assuming that dust specks across different people can be added, and then asserting that as evidence that dust specks across different people can be added. The addition is ridiculous.

Also, minmaxing is a thing.
Thanks, will check out and probably update the blog post with those two examples
No, but it's pretty close to one. Guess who bit his maths teacher at age seven when said teacher didn't know what a logarithm was?

Also, read this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9r/cognitive_biases_due_to_a_narcis... It's a perfectly normal literary analysis of HPJEV as a narcissist and/or raised by narcissists. It's not Ph.D-quality rigour, but it does back its claims. Note the amazing special pleading in the comments - fans outraged someone would dare analyse their favourite thing in less than glowing terms.

They seriously think they can get this thing a Hugo, somehow evading all artistic critique along the way.
Thank you for your feedback, bbissoon! :)
Here's a sample of the ad we place on each free fax sheet cover: http://imgur.com/V4wtZUy
We use it to spread the word about our service and also, give users the chance to benefit from it (by enabling them to receive faxes via QR code processing for free). I think it's a great way of promoting what we do while giving back to our users.
And yes, our paid plans are very affordable and compared to the existing niche market, the benefits we offer are very, very comprehensive.
Again, thank you for your interest and if there's anything else I can help you with, you can reach me at monica@faxx.us. Cheers!
Why is it hard to write a compiler for Perl 6?
Lowland LWI Bankers BNKR and City Of London CTY
What if you start investing in a bad year then?
Tinder Users at SXSW Are Falling for This “AI Woman”
Fama and French showed that "dogs" have better future returns than historical outperformers.
Considering "he lacked the attention span" in GolfyMcG's comment, it shows the dev can create, but doesn't demonstrate any long-term follow-through or team dynamics.
Show HN: Alternative to Chrome Console – HowJS (howjs.com)
What device are you using? An iPad Retina or something else?
I predict this blog will run out of content real fast. I also notice the author conveniently left out the timestamps for their posts.

Swift is still very new, crashes in the language and in the IDE will not surprise anyone who calls himself a software engineer.

I don't write code on iOS or MacOS but Swift looks very solid to me and an obvious improvement over Objective C.
So I come from the other end of the spectrum. Studied non-CS in college, and after graduating I became a self-taught developer and am now working as a "professional programmer".

I had always believed that I wouldn't need to know the CS theory because I was able to write code that worked and didn't find it too complicated. When I decided to become a developer I learned by launching a few websites, which performed horribly, but I didn't realize until I got a few users. It took me a while to even figure out what was wrong, but eventually I learned about Big-O and realized my algorithms were far from optimal. Started scrambling to teach myself all CS theory I could find online, just so I could build things properly. Then there is a phase where you are constantly worried there is something else from CS school you are missing which will cause your software to blow up, but eventually you get more confident (with shipped code/and a better understanding of CS theory).

So in the end, I think the CS theory in school saves you from a lot of head banging and ignorance after you graduate. However, you will probably do a lot of this in your undergrad, so I guess it all balances out in the end!
I already saw you on TIGSoucre and thought Superpowers looks pretty awesome. I was wondering if deployment to PC/Mobile is already working and what the performance on mobile can be expected.
Lack of snow forces Iditarod to move north
I understand where you're coming from, but I must respectfully disagree. However I'll say one more thing in defense of our users: modern front-end developers do data manipulation all the time. The data munging that's happening on the client is just as complicated and important as the coercion and marshaling on the backend. In many cases, the barrier preventing client-side developers from just doing the same thing is a different language, a lack of confidence, or organizational pressure and bullying.

Let's see what they can do :)
> nice to have as a check

I think this is exactly the purpose of having live preview, just like it's nice to have spell checker even for experienced writers. It's nice to know when something goes wrong immediately.

Also, Markdown's syntax spec, while relatively short, is not something people can memorize immediately, especially for syntax elements they don't use often.
Seconding this. Macs are definitely the nicest overall quality in terms of laptop hardware, and are also the most prolific in terms of hardware sold, so driver support is excellent. Macs also give you the most options for operating systems, allowing you to run OS X, Windows, or Linux with minimal hassle or hacking around.
Just remember, even if your system doesn't replicate HTML exactly, you'll have to create something else of equal complexity as HTML and a browser rendering engine to match the flexibility.

On the flip side, anything of less complexity will necessarily be less flexible. Though giving up some of that flexibility may not be a bad thing.

I don't say this to discourage, as I frankly think the technology in general is headed in that direction and have done my own work in that regard.

It would be interesting to see if anyone will create a feature-complete HTML rendering engine in JS. It will significantly change how we approach web development, as the choice in rendering engine would move from the user to the developer.
I remember when hackathons were all about "here's some buggy code I wrote that does random/obscure feature/task X because look at how cool that is" and not "look at this pitch/product I'm trying to make to earn prize Y" Shame those days seem to be fading into obscurity.
Snowden warns of future surveillance by countries, companies and criminals
> In other words, if all of the managers of the 2,862 funds hadn’t bothered to try to pick stocks at all — if they had merely flipped coins — they would, as a group, probably have produced better numbers. Instead of two funds at the end of five years, basic probability theory tells us there should have been three.

Um. You are trying to tell me that 2 instead of 3 is enough to reject the null hypothesis? I rather doubt it.
Oh - I see, neat. I assumed it was ads aggregated from a series of sponsors. I've used these services before - any API in the works?
Thank you. I'll look at those after Hellboy 2.
Of course they have, that's the expected statistical outcome of thousands of funds. The problem is that

1) You were lucky in picking those, not prescient.

2) Their winning streak is a result of luck, not competence.

Funds are a perfect example of survivorship bias in a zero-sum game. For someone to win at beating the index, someone else must lose, and losers are routinely eliminated. So when an investor presents funds for your choosing, you only get to see the lucky ones, a biased sample. Of course it looks like a great idea to invest in them!
Swede & Avanza customer checking in. Can definitely recommend them. If you reside and Sweden, make sure to open a ISK, not an Aktie- och Fondkonto (stock & fund account).

Living in Germany and have not been able to find a bank with the same kind of service and reliability. Comdirect comes close, but not good enough for me to close my account with Avanza.
And the article misses the down side of index funds tracking errors and having to keep funds univested to account for redemptions and the fact that some types of investments hare hard to run as an index fund PE and VC

Index funds are usfull for some investors for some of their investments but they are not the holy grail.
Building a photography inspiration app
You're totally right and I think your idea could help.

Somethething else that could help is cheap, decentralized forms of communication. If we want to enable real momentum for change, people need to be able to talk to each other without fear that every word is easily traced back to their government issued identity.
The next thing after A/B testing is the "multi-armed bandit"
Quite you should be investing in a fund for a minimum of 5 to 10 years
- Three seconds animation of your name and "Javascript developer" before I get an option to actually see content? Why?

- The animation makes refreshing work really strange. I can see the buttons, they then disappear and re-appear before I can use the website.

- Can't select text, no copy and paste, going to have to manually type out your email address to contact you? Never mind what it does for accessibility/SEO.

- I had a problem with the back button sometimes taking me to a blank page (forcing a refresh and another watch of the name animation), though this seems to have stopped happening.

Interesting experiment, if only to show why this is a terrible idea.
Yes there is a bit of a culture problem at hackathons and in university "tech" groups especially among student "hackers." They tend to be fixated on prestige and validation from others (versus actually making something good or unique). These are not very hacker-ly aspirations. Here's the good news though: you can set the attitude for your the people you work with. You get to pick who you work with. You do not have to go to hackathons. My recommendation is just to work with lots of different people on small software projects like you would at a hackathon. You will find some you don't like working with and others that you want to work with everyday. Eventually you'll find a stable group of coding people. It might take a while. I recommend going to your university tech group or picking in class groups sudo-randomly; if there's any other disgruntled people around you can initially bond over that and then form a cool collaboration. Most importantly remember that a lot of people just have weak wills. They are not fundamentally bad, they just cannot resist the urge for validation and prestige whorin', be nice to them, someday they may move past this.

Note: "Prestige whorin'" is the act of undertaking lots of accomplishable projects that don't challenge you and improve your skills. It's the act of actively trying to get more awards when you already have like 20-something awards. It's the act of over marketing projects you've worked on as fully baked products. It is a destructive attitude where real value and skills are eschewed for looking good on paper. It has nothing to do with actual whores.
Introducing the KDE AI Library
It's humor. Chill out.
Sadly, this has the perverse effect of forcing otherwise happy people to act like they might be a flight risk, otherwise they risk being passed-over for interesting opportunities, raises etc. If you're not playing that game then you're losing out.

It's yet another mechanism that devalues loyalty to a firm, which I'm sure they realise is already in short supply. I'd be happier if I'd read that this was also a way to identify and reward the dedicated, productive employees — but no.
>And yet no one has really made an convincing argument of why the conclusions of utilitarianism contradict the axioms of utilitarianism.

No, they've said "this is a reductio ad absurdum, perhaps reality is a bit more complicated than that." You don't get to assert your assumption - that simplistic utilitarianism works as advertised - as evidence.

Consider, for instance, minmaxing as an alternative. (Like real-life AI work tends to.) What answer does that give?
I posted about this three times last night before going to sleep, feeling sure that the info would get into circulation. Apparently not! Will explain shortly.

Edit: Here's the story. We occasionally hear from users who say that all of HN's problems on mobile could be fixed by adding one line of markup:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, target-densitydpi=medium-dpi">

We tried it several times and found it didn't work [1]. Last night, we tried again. It looked better than before, so we decided to leave it on for a while and wait to hear from you all [2].

Unfortunately, what happened is what I feared most: total disagreement. Since it was far from a clear win, we've rolled back to the status quo ante. I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who felt it to be an improvement, but you shouldn't have to wait too much longer.

Why not keep it and improve on its problems, or at least do a poll about it? Because it was at best a stopgap until we can release the real solution we're working on, which involves totally different markup. If the stopgap worked well for most people, it would be worth keeping in the interim. But a stopgap that doesn't actually stop the gap will create confusion. I feel like it's our duty to be conservative here until we have something that actually works. It's a high priority, and it's coming.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985687, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7330107, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6253835, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6253403, and probably others.

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205798, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205893, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205858.
Mh, on my phone it is as it has always been (which is not good on small screen operated with fingers). How do I see the mobile version?
Actively managed funds struggle to beat the market over the long term. There's a lot of evidence that passive investing (i.e. just buying a low-fee index fund) is the way to go right now for most investors.

The presence of active management, however, is good for the rest of us. Through their struggle to beat the market, they conduct extensive research that is used to better price public equities.

Those better prices help the passive participants, since they pay roughly correct prices for the dividends they will be receiving.
Show HN: Online Programming Conference
Hash49.COM: Explore Instagram like never before
It kinda seems like it already has run out of content. Most of the examples are using either a beta version of Xcode or version 6.0, at least 2 minor versions behind. As a few people have pointed out, some of the examples aren't even reproducible on the current versions.
With more time you could probably make this statement a lot smoother, I admittedly wanted to force it into shape quickly. Notwithstanding what I wrote, comparing the USA and IS involves a lot of apples and oranges and I don't want to imply otherwise. Still there are disturbing parallels.
The CommonMark is definitely more readable, but Markdown is just so sparse by design that every time I tried to use it for anything more serious than e.g. a blog post I found myself banging my head against the wall, so it's a tradeoff I'm happy to make - and we're talking about languages whose purpose is to produce readable output, so while a readable source file is definitely a nice thing I think it's hard to make a case for valuing that over functionality. To title a paragraph in markdown you can choose from an <h[1-6]> or a <strong>, that's it, and it's so tightly coupled to HTML (it's more of an HTML generation format like HAML than a document format really) that if you need to do anything remotely complex you're forced to either inline the HTML or bind yourself forever to external tools - in which case the goal of universal readability is defeated anyway.

Markdown's syntax constrains how much it can ever do, whereas AsciiDoc is designed to be extensible, providing macros at the "language" level and underneath that there's the whole DocBook toolchain: it seems to me that the clever move is leverage all this, rather than create yet-another-Markdown (and it's not like the syntax tradeoff is at all dramatic.) I think the footnote issue you mention can be done in block macros, but I'm not sure.

I might be getting a bit utopian here, but what would be really great is if all these markup languages sought to have their canonical implementation in pandoc, which would allow for the standardisation of a set of pass-throughs/filters/annotations for things like equations and citations.

Thanks for pandoc, btw. Just out of interest, is there a reason you haven't attempted an AsciiDoc reader? (Or have you?) Assuming it'd be quite a bit more work than the others, what with macros and so forth.
I think this is actually not a problem of overusing algorithms, but a problem of correctly separating the job titles related to software development.

There are software developers whose work actually requires no knowledge of algorithms, mathematics, or even CS besides their language, framework, and some architectural concepts.

On the other hand, there are "software developers" whose primary work is to develop algorithms and computational methods.

For historical reasons those roles are not always properly and clearly separated.

This can be one of the reasons why we have intimidating algorithmic interviews that are irrelevant to the actual work of the developers who are being interviewed.
> They will have to send people bills by e-mail (or perhaps even snail mail) and await payment, like any other honest business. Then suspend the account if it is in arrears for more than X days.

How do services like Netflix and Spotify work in India? In the UK I pay Netflix £6.99 a month (about the price of two coffees), and I'd get rather annoyed if I had to send them a cheque for that amount every month :D
Maybe this one?
"The Synchronization of Periodic Routing Messages" (1994) [1]

[1] http://ee.lbl.gov/papers/sync_94.pdf
If they are not incompetent, it will not need service more than once in a couple of years.
Is it just me, or is there really no easing on the transitions?
11 billion on what, 5-6 trillion in spending? So ~0.2%? In don't find that particularly terrible at all, in the slightest.

I've only had to replace my VISA card once in perhaps ten years, so overall it's not been an issue.

For direct debit, I get even more nervous. Now someone that's compromised my phone/PC or whatever I'm using can make difficult-to-reverse transactions?
This is so true. Steadily working on a long-term project is so much more valuable than writing shitty code that you won't look at again for 24 hours every few weekends.
This is good news. Being new to go, recently when I didn't get the expected behavior with a go cmd, not knowing any better I tried explicit =true.
The debating platform Alphasquare.us is now open source
I feel about Activities the same way I feel about nepomuk and virtual desktops: great idea, but useless for my workflow.

That said, KDE 5 (even with huge showstopping kwin_x11 bugs in latest Arch) is light years beyond every other desktop, including Yosemite and Aero.
It's an interesting situation to be in and it takes deep thinking.

Before 2000 a large number of services that offered bookmarks on the server-side had failed, up to the point where it was on everybody's list of "ideas that don't work".

Then delicious came along and it did work. (Then Yahoo got involved, and...)

If these apps are dead, the people behind them might be interested in talking about their experience and you might learn something. It is worth a shot.