skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I often avoid software upgrades not because I know something will break but because I speculate something will break and dont want to find out.

Out of all the "features" that anger me the most are automatic, silent upgrades. One can generally disable them but I dont want to have to figure out how; if I want an upgrade I will download and install it manually and do so when I am good and ready.

That web applications - as opposed to those I install locally - are increasingly common I regard as the problem not the solution. Quite commonly a website breaks for no apparent reason, eventually I clue into that they revised their Javascipt but did not test on the browser I actually use.

When considering whether to install software, first look for reviews. Many eCommerce sites make it easy to sort by most-critical first. Do take them with a grain of salt as bad reviews are sometimes posted by unethical competitors as well as cyberstalkers like Kuro5hin's modus.

If those bad reviews would affect you and are in a recent release then maybe you want to give it a pass.

I know all about security patches, I once got to play on that same Sun workstation that Kevin Mitnick ransacked but at least I had the sense to ask Tsutomu's permission first.
Having a lottery is a good idea and one I support for grants in general. The grant review process should be simply "is this idea viable and worthy of funding - yes or no”. If yes put it into the lottery and fund as many good grants as you have resources. Peer review works well for this type of sorting, but it is terrible for trying to pick a top 10% idea from a top 15% idea. It just isn’t possible for even the best scientists to be able to do this consistently.

The problem with fellowships is that the longest I know of only go for 5 years and most of the junior ones are only for 3 years. This is just not long enough to take the chance on failure.

If you want to encourage young talented people to tackle really hard and high risk problems you need to provide funding for at least 10 years.

I would go as far as adding a restriction that recipients of these high risk fellowships can’t publish in anything but the absolutely top tier journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc) for the first 7 years so they don’t get distracted from the high risk work that other scientists can’t afford to do.
HN,Reddit,Product Hunt,Slashdot,Designer News...  All in
I often ask other coders to contemplate "What software that we write today will still be in use 10,000 years from now?"

That I am unable to answer that question is a primary reason I write English text rather than code the last ten years.
Handling Multiple Media Stream Tracks with Callstats.js
You can do it, baby
NASA Satellite Camera Provides “EPIC” View of Earth
It's for being able to write functions that are generic in the context they operate in. You absolutely would want to do this in Erlang, or in SML if the type system supported it.

E.g. I can use Future for managing async-ness. I can use a system a bit like http://typelevel.org/blog/2013/10/18/treelog.html for weaving statistics collection through my computation. I use Free to express database operations that need to happen in a transaction. I can use Either to handle operations that might fail.

I can write a method that builds a report from a bunch of rows that works with any of these four contexts, because all of them form monads.
ICYM Top Answers from Andy Johns AMA – Former PM at Facebook, Twitter, Quora Etc.
In one of his essays, PG wrote about the paradox of knowing that the success rate of YC companies indicated that YC could absorb a lot more risk, yet was unable to do so because spotting good ideas that look like bad ideas (or bad ideas that could become good ideas) was incredibly difficult. I believe that critique has been sufficiently answered.
I find it interesting that people are finding issue with the $12K. Personally I have kids and mortgage and I will be applying with my healthcare startup which as it happens is in very early stages.
I would have applied even if there was no $12K since, YC is not taking any equity in this case, and, is providing access to its network which is worth much much more than $12K to me.
It's simple but very abstract. The hard part isn't the concept, it's connecting it to anything you're actually familiar with.
I think Maybe monad could be really useful in Swift (Apple's new language). Some people use it for chaining up the optional type. However, I found that the lack of functional feature such as curried parameters in swift makes it less useful.
Please don't rewrite the titles of submissions to HN unless they are misleading or linkbait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
PhoneClean Pro 3.5 Crack Plus License Code Free Download
Among my pet peeves is that most sites set cookies even if I do not log in as a registered user.

A while back Mom asked me to fix whatever was wrong with her email. I could not ping her mailserver but other servers were fine, so I told her the problem was at Earthlink's end.

Mom started screaming at me to stop torturing her with ping because she needed to read her sister's email. Iswear I'm not making this up.
JPEG is perfectly streamable and beside from the beginning of the file not randomly accessible. You have to iterate through all the markers to find your data, so mmap doesn't bring much advantage when parsing...
There's a quote by someone (Steve Jobs?) to the effect that there are three phases of understanding a problem: first, you don't understand it; second, you research it and come up with all kinds of complicated solutions and, third, you really understand the problem and you can find a solution which is elegant and actually works.

This is oversimplified, but I think most of the things today that try to be user-friendly and intuitive are stuck in the second phase--it takes a lot of effort and care to get to the third one. The iPhone interface (touch, swiping, ...) might actually be an example of a successful attempt at the "just works"-category--we've all heard of babies learning to navigate iPads etc. And today it seems so obvious, you don't even think about all the nuances that have to be right for this to work, but that's probably a hallmark of the designs that really are intuitive--they seem so obvious you don't immediately realize someone had to come up with them, and iterate on them until they just worked.
Self-Destructing Email in Gmail
Not all: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-create-index-...
In Spain the Goverment is issuing a law where you have to pay about a 60% of the power you generate for your own compsumption if you are connected to the grid. Clearly, our Governtment truly believes that we do not need renewable energy.
Cloud Analytic (BI&A) for Saas Companies
Because it's a little bit similar to exploiting the snot out of a loss-leader product- a good-faith offer extended to generate some good-faith business, that is frequently a good thing for everyone.

You are exploiting a complex promotion system by finding tiny loopholes, at the expense of everyone else (because at the end of the day, the banks will get their money...)

And no, you can't argue that "because the loopholes exist, that's proof they don't care".

Or another comparison, a white collar criminal who embezzles his company but found a legal loophole that means he can't be charged. Just because it's not illegal, doesn't mean it isn't immoral!
I wish us Europeans could do that :(
> It just seems like a trivial pattern.

It is a trivial pattern. But a powerful one.

> I'm all for investing in better primitives, but do these kinds of libraries really help vs implementing them from scratch with language primitives inside your (inevitably more complex) domain code?

Yes - the best way to build complex things is out of simple primitives. A lot of the time, making a custom type be a monad simplifies the logic - that is, you'd want to implement the monad operations (and support do notation) anyway. Calling them by their standard names makes it easier for other people to read your code, and being able to use generic library functions like traverse (which work for any monad) with your custom type is just a bonus.
Thanks a lot for the heads up on Crystal. The language looks close enough to Ruby that I immediately feel home, yet looks slightly different (and somewhat lower-level it seems).
Erm... I sort of figured it out years and years ago, and I do work in plain vim.

(Hence to me there's no difference whatsoever between one Linux distro and another, because in any case I can only get plain vim and plain grep to work and not much else. So I won't reply wrt Debian vs Ubuntu except that the other standard reply that I get apart from "running old software" being wrong is, I always seem to be using the wrong distribution. I think the one thing that unites all the distros is that each of them is always the wrong one...)

The difference is that on Windows I can run VS just as easily as I can run vim.
Growth Hacking and Traction for Startups
> The Concorde entered commercial service and safely ferried douchebags across the Atlantic for 25 years.

Why this? I mean that seriously. Forget that it's unnecessary. I don't even get the stereotype being referenced.
How does HyperLogLog fit in here?

http://antirez.com/news/75
Your experience and mine is why I write "Solving the Software Problem: a Taxonomy of Error":

http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-proble...

While actual code serves as a good example the problem is far more general. Consider the Apollo I fire: the Astronauts were unable to convince NASA to redesign their capsule's inward-opening door so they had themselves photographed praying over a model of the capsule.

Everyone knows astronauts are brave; those men died for a door hinge.
> I often avoid software upgrades not because I know something will break but because I speculate something will break and dont want to find out.

That is a great way to describe that. Same here. On my daily dev system (Debian), frequent updates were sporadically breaking different bits of system -- sound would stop working, then would work again but something else would glitch -- and eventually I got busy enough that I just couldn't sink the time into troubleshooting things if the next round of updates happened to break anything I really relied on.

Time passed.

I now have something like 2,000+ updates to apply via apt and I am terrified. I have this sinking feeling that if I try to update now, my laptop will grow legs in the middle of the update and try to run out into the street to put itself out of its misery.

I think -- I hope! -- we're very close to completely reversible software updates in Linux environments. Between containers and VM snapshots and ZFS and efforts like Nexenta (http://www.osnews.com/story/19180/Transactional_Debian_Upgra... -- amusingly, the link to the page on nexenta.com is no longer available and I can't find a newer version of it on their site), I'm hoping that updates will become a little less of a time sink in the future.
Yeah, if we're talking about JavaScript, the explanation should start with promises. It's a pattern lots of people know, and it's a very real-world example. No need to front-load the explanation with a bunch of complication before people even know why they should care.

I suspect some people (not saying this author) butcher the explanation intentionally. Makes it seem like an ineffable topic that only the smartest programmer can understand.
This kind of blog posts are super interesting and depressing at the same time :) makes me question my programing skills. Almost all of the things mentioned here are over my head.

Thanks for sharing though, very interesting
TextDrawer: a UIView allows you to add text, with gesture, on UIViewithUIImage
Your explanation makes sense, but I don't see how are Monads different from Rust's Option Type (or Java's Optional Type?), or any other nullable type?
نقل عفش الكويت – نقل عفش في الكويت – اعلانات الكويت
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8118696
I wonder if they'll be looking to recoup some losses from the strut manufacturer. Would be an interesting case. They can prove that the struts can fail well below certification, which should be worth something, but unless they can prove that this particular failure was due to the strut, or at least more likely than not, it would probably be difficult. Also might be unwise from a business perspective as it could make other (potential) suppliers nervous.
Ok so I went through a whole thing for this with my snail simulation. Usually naming stuff is pretty easy for me but...well, it is hard to make a snail simulation sound interesting and cool (because it's not). But I sure as hell was going to try!

One of my big rules was that I didn't want it to sound too _gamey_. This is a _simulation_, not a _game_. I also wanted it to sound kind of unique. The other thing is...the .com. You wouldn't think .com domain names related to snails would be very popular, but all the snail.com stuff I tried had already been snagged! My list of brainstormed names included, but was not limited to, the following:

* Snails

* Snail Simulator (sounded too gamey because of all the other simulator games, but I registered the domain just in case)

SnailWorld.com (unavailable)

* SnailTales (too gamey and cutesy sounding)

* TheSnails

In the end I settled on...wait for it...Gastropoda.

It sounded unusual and the use of the name of the snails' taxonomic class kind of promoted the simulation over the game aspect. Ignore the fact that slugs should then also fall into this...and are not included in the simulation. But as for the .com - even gastropoda.com was already taken!! I ended up registering gastropodasim.com and learning to live with it.

But it never quite felt right. I kind of resigned myself to not being 100% happy with the name - I just needed _a_ name. And then...I learned of the .life TLD. Screw the long _gastropodasim.com_! I saw that snail.life was available!

And, urged by the sheer appropriateness of this name and domain name to the thing I am actually making, I learned to drop the .com and renamed the project to SnailLife.

In the end availability of domains and some hard rules on the message I wanted to get across (unique, not too gamey-sounding) was what drove the naming of my simulation for me.
I think it's because they solve a problem that people don't realize they have (and truth be told maybe they don't really have it), so the learning process has no motivation.

They solve a major problem that Haskell has (namely circumventing a type-anal non-strict compiler), so they're a big deal in Haskell, whereas in imperative languages straightforward code works just fine.

More to the point, compared to the case of for loops vs `map`, the use case for this kind of function chaining doesn't appear all that often (nor is it as syntactically localized as a for loop) so it's not as easy to abstract. I.e. the underlying pattern is not as pronounced, so it's not really recognized as a pattern/problem/something to DRY in the first place.
This is the way I prefer to communicate sometimes. Hadn't got the exact subject to start with :)

Precise with some potion of rudeness :)
"Subject: Closing The Loop"
> It's the difference between culturing a microbe to make a vaccine or make a bioweapon. The latter should get your ass droned.

As a last resort. Ideally, it would get your ass arrested, your lab destroyed, and a speedy trial.
Check the Poly Conf 2015 presentations (sorry cannot search for the link right now)

Lots of Ruby code can even be compiled as is.
“Tricia – we'll build a telepresence robot”
I think life is a bit more complex than this. There is good reasons for having a signing bonus be repaid if the recipient leaves within the stated time period, but it should be set at a level that make the person think twice about leaving, but not not so high that the person is handcuffed to the job. It sounds like $35K was too high and maybe a number around $10K would have been a better fit.

I am surprised anyone would spend a signing bonus until they are sure they wanted to work at the company that had given it to them. Keep the money safe until you are sure you want to stay.
Search is replaceable with DuckDuckGo for me.
The reckless plot to overthrow Africa's most absurd dictator
The post said they're rated to 10,000lb and failed at 2000. Sounds like there's a lot of margin between the highest force expected and the rated level, so they could test somewhere between the two.
going thru the comments, its seems that the remote consideration is going to be the charm as well as the biggest challenge.
The Curse of India
I believe it likely that all drugs have a net negative effect in the long run. If humans in general had a chemical imbalance so our brains did not function optimally, and caffeine would fix that so that we just functioned better overall, shouldn't evolution have taken care of that by now?

Messing with the signalling systems can be productive in the short run, and certain individuals have other needs, but it is unreasonable to assume it would be good for most people forever. I do drink coffee every day, because I like it, but I would never assume it makes me more alert or smarter in some way.
Researchers prove HTML5 can be used to hide malware
Even though I feel like Jesus in the Temple every time I change money I understand why I am paying these fees.

How are you going to make money? The reason for the spread is the costs involved are high at small scale.
The maybe monad is just being used as an example here, but Haskell allows you to implement the same interface for any applicable type. for example; IO, mutable state, parsers, etc.
I copied it from http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/sw/rippledoc/quick-markdo...
Socket.io: What the hell (NSFW)
Evaluating Splatoon's Ranking System
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9780581
Food of course (~200$/mo), and travel (but usually my employer pays for it, if they send me somewhere worth it I will take a few days off before coming back).

If I could 'hack' an extra return flight to SF, NY or Tokyo once a year
it'd be great however.

I update my phone and laptop every five years or so. Bike is free.
Yay, I couldn't agree more. Those truths are seldom mentioned, and even more seldom so many of them at a time.

If only I could find out who held this talk, there doesn't seem to be any hint or signature.
I got into this pretty late, about 4 years ago; I've managed to hit almost every airlines first class cabin (most of them many times).
Just a few left; gotta catch 'em all!

I always assumed people on HN would be all over this kind of thing, it's a total minmax optimization problem. Especially back when this was even more of a game, with the US Airways Grand Slam through 2011. The puzzle there is worth reading about. You'd get up to 100,000 bonus miles for completing 36 'partner activities' (bonuses are only awarded in groups of 4 activities -- 1,2,3 you get nothing and at 4 you get all the miles for that group -- and the number of miles awarded for each group of 4 increased from nominal to significant. I spent weeks optimizing and figuring the marginal cost. After minmaxing the hell out of your strategy, you execute; fill in surveys, buy the cheapest thing on Skymall (in my case, a toilet lock for a child I didn't have), book phantom rides on the super shuttle. Maybe spend a few bucks and splurge on a bamboo plan. Ended at 140K miles for $700 -- at the time just short of 2 round trip business class tickets from North America -> Europe -> Asia -> North America.

Once you get into it, your average getaway is better than most peoples' honeymoons; I flew Etihad apartments to the Maldives for a weekend for 75K miles and $100. And that was just one of the many.

Agreed, lucky is one of my favorites. I actually got started with The Points Guy but the quality has gone downhill so much, and the blog has become a shill for card signups even if they don't make sense. My other favorite is Matthew at upgrd and Efficient Asian Man.
Challenge: find a solution with no undefined repeat behavior and no more than two consecutive print statements.
One time I wanted to edit and compile a large open source application on windows... can't just run a build, have to open the project file in VS... VS has to index the source code for intellisense, slows down the whole interface and uses a full gig of memory, and I haven't started a build yet...

Really, I'm just quite biased against windows in particular, because I had only Windows 98 and Windows XP when I first came of the age to have and tinker with my own computer, and the amount of stuff that you can't control and can't fix (installing common software, networking, file sharing, drivers) is infuriating. If something only runs on Windows, that's it's biggest flaw.

EDIT it's an easy potshot so I'll throw in this link http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...
Ashton Kutcher, Troy Carter, Chris Sacca Join ABC’s “Shark Tank”
US median income growth compared to other countries
Check out domai.nr for checking multiple possibilities quickly
Well, the biggest current problem is that everything had to be redesigned for fat fingers and small screens. The worst expression of this was Windows 8, which made desktops look like tablets, and was rejected by the market.

Then there's cutesy web design; Flash ten years ago, "material design" now. Just because you can animate everything doesn't mean you should. (Annoyingly, the one browser thing that ought to be animated isn't. When you click on a link that exits the page, nothing happens until the new page loads, often leading to unnecessary double clicking. The browser should blank the old page, or grey it out, or dissolve to the new page, or do some kind of transition.)

As for the big stuff, the AI-driven future is going to be interesting. The big threat, as I point out occasionally, is not Terminator robots. It's Goldman Sachs run by a a machine learning system optimizing for maximum stockholder value.
Opening your credit cards definitely does not hurt your score nearly as much as you think it would. It can often increase your credit score. And if you're a proper churner, average age of accounts doesn't even get touched since you've got so many cards on record (closed cards continue to reflect positively on your average age of accounts for 7 years).
Count-min sketches can be adapted to use exponential decay. Presumably any sort of recurrent decay could be used to get approximately rectangular windows as well.
Looking carefully, you have this very, very wrong. You've said:

Today I found something called Wolstenholme’s
theorem, which says:

A number n (> 3) is prime if the numerator
of H(n-1) is a multiple of n², where
H(n) = 1/1 + 1/2 + ... 1/n

No, no, no, no, no ...

The theorem says:

For a prime p > 3, the numerator of H_{p-1}
is divisible by p^2.

You have your "if" condition the wrong way round.

I've tried to comment on your blog, but it requires a login using any of several techniques, none of which I use, and none of which I'm willing to create just for this. So I didn't.
Because it's a blog entry? He wrote this one week, and part two the following week?

I know, it's outrageous; some people just want to watch the world burn.
> I'm pretty sure brudgers is either trolling or dysfunctional in some way.

Whoa, that's not nice. Please don't make personal slights in HN comments.
Script to detect whether you have been caught cheating
>I enjoy my time online less and less as more content is stuffed into single-page app walled gardens that load massive quantities of cruft, ads, and tracking code. I almost preferred the flash-era.

Agreed. I have noticed that I avoid heavy sites and prefer light static HTML sites with server side rendered content. For example, when I go to Reddit i always check the url of a link before i decide to click it, if it is a "magazine" site or "engadget" site or the like, i won't click it.