Hacker News Reader

moleculeon The “Joel Test” for Data Science

previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12263980

As the author posted the article and the error is consistently made within the posted article:

moleculeon Show HN: Chrome extension to avoid noisy domains in the Hacker News feed

> I am talking about the noise from big websites trying to push their content to HN hoping for a bigger audience.

Does this really happen? If so, it's hard to imagine even 10% of the sites listed actually doing this. It doesn't seem like there would be any overlap between "big websites" and sites where traffic from HN would be noticeable.

moleculeon Open Source Exploitation and Burnout

Highcharts.js has a free-for-noncommercial, paid-otherwise license system

https://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts

(Not affiliated, but using highcharts for a project @ a non-profit)

moleculeon Preliminary NTSB report on Tesla crash

NTSB is looking into this accident due to the involvement of vehicle autonomy.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/driver-aut...

moleculeon Black therapist was shot by Florida police while helping a person with autism

Even "suspect" seems a bit euphemistic by implying that a conclusion hasn't been reached, "threat" seems more fitting for the view that's described.

moleculeon Pokemon Go is a huge security risk

> how do I permalink to a comment?

The comment's timestamp is a link.

moleculeon How AWS came to be

> The first AWS service launched for public usage was Simple Queue Service in November 2004

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services

moleculeon Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 2: Repairing the display

Wow, I had forgotten about degaussing. I worked in a plasma-physics lab in the 90s. Degaussing was required when an experiment was running-- strong electromagnets distorted the CRTs.

moleculeon Announcing the Docker for Mac and Windows Public Beta

Any word on improvements since the latest Private Beta, aside from bumping Docker Engine to 1.12?

moleculeon In Israeli desert, world’s highest solar tower looks to future

I wondered about this also. Maybe each mirror also has a photovoltaic and battery?

moleculeon [dead]

Does this article provide anything additional to the BI article to which it links?

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-holding-lady-day-2016-...

moleculeon Risky South Pole mission: retrieve sick scientists from research station

The way I've heard it described: McMurdo is a drinking station w/ a science problem.

moleculeon “I am quitting Twitter for a while”

seems like an important qualifier was dropped from the HN headline: "I’m quitting Twitter for awhile."

moleculeon My First 10 Minutes on a Server

> You'll only need this root password if you lose your sudo password.

Also, good to have in case sudoers file is corrupted, e.g. via bad edit, typo, etc..

moleculeon Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records

> He also criticized the Air Force for notifying Congress on Friday afternoon, five days after senior service leaders was told about the problem.

Prime time for burying bad news.

moleculeon MacOS Sierra – Apple

macOS Sierra / Siri-era

moleculeon [dead]

Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&query=docker%20wozniak&p...

moleculeon Letsencrypt just sent an email containing all their users' email addresses

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11881704

moleculeon Encryption Security May Not Be Secure Anymore (Possible AES Crack)

* > Is there any source for this that's less dodgy?*

The press-release link doesn't even go to any press release.

moleculeon jQuery 3.0

I hope that this is applied on a case-by-case basis, e.g. Rails 5 RC1 was released more than a month ago, and the official release of Rails 5 will be major news when it happens and it would be a shame if it were 'dupe'd off of the front page.

fwiw, I'm glad that this article was on the front page, if only momentarily, because I had missed or forgotten about the previous RC announcement and am interested in this news.

moleculeon Mistakes Beginners Make When Working with Databases

Good advice, but that's specific to MySQL and its InnoDB engine, while the article is about general relational databases.

moleculeon Police use new device to seize money in bank accounts or on prepaid cards

He's referring to plain-old civil asset forfeiture.

moleculeon Police use new device to seize money in bank accounts or on prepaid cards

> Here's how it works. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money.

Given the low-threshold for seizure and how we've seen civil-asset forfeiture exercised by law enforcement, that's terrifying.

moleculeon HTTPie: a CLI, cURL-like tool for humans

> I keep seeing people on HN saying "not sure why anyone would use Y over X" completely disingenuously as if they are expressely not acknowledging the legitimate use cases of Y.

Kind of like titling a project "X: a CLI, Y-like tool for humans"...

moleculeon Why Users Abandon Forms with Select Menus

> Why do sites use drop down menus for years like that?

One reason is that it's a (extremely) lazy / dead simple way of getting around the need to do input validation on the year field.

moleculeon Why Users Abandon Forms with Select Menus

This strikes me as somewhat of a mish-mash:

- It predominantly addresses the lowest-common-denominator subset of users: beginning / un-savvy users who are using a site / its forms for the first time, but the article attempts to make a point by referencing behaviors of familiar, advanced users: navigating a form's fields using the keyboard: Most forms begin with text fields where users type in their input. But when a select menu appears, they have to move their hands from keyboard to mouse to select an option. This interrupts their typing flow and slows them down.

- Discourages the use of select menus because they are 'hard to read' and require 'dexterous mouse maneuvering', but both of these can be mitigated via CSS.

The article has good points and has some good recommendations and is useful for its target use case, but the absolutist prescription, 'The Only Time to Use a Select Menu', seems to only address a specific case: using a form on an unfamiliar site for the first time, which would be fine for the article if were stated as such. However, there are many times when a select menu is appropriate: familiar users who use a site multiple times, when available space and / or menu population precludes the use of radio buttons, etc.

moleculeon Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

The --skip options are handy. For reuse, they can be put into ~/.railsrc, e.g.

    --skip-gemfile
    --skip-git
    --skip-keeps

moleculeon [dead]

The whitepaper that is announced here was discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538560

moleculeon I worked on Facebook's Trending team

> > "Working at Facebook, even as a contractor, was supposed to be the opportunity of a lifetime."

> Does anyone really say that working at a tech giant as a non-engineer is an opportunity of a lifetime?

The author is a journalist, practicing in a field which has been decimated, writing about working @ the most popular platform on the planet.