jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> In fact Amazon is in a much better position than customers to absorb those costs

And if you call amazon support and talk to them, especially as an individual, you might get your bill cancelled.
I generally agree. I'm definitely not asking users to jump into the most complex, feature-rich software suite they can find :). And the industry is definitely choosing to focus on developing programs for basic use cases. The problem I see with this are as follows:

- The basic use case is the only one that gets developed :). That's where the money is, that's how you make userbase grow fast, and that's where my complaint about following "best economic decision" comes from. The oxygen gets sucked out from the market.

- The software may only provide for base use cases, but that doesn't mean it has to be bad at it. The bar for improvement is really low here. It's fine to be focused, but you can still leave room for users to grow - to get better and faster at using the existing functionality. So e.g. you don't need to turn your photo filter app into the next Photoshop, but you could add keyboard shortcuts to all operations, allow users to apply the same operations to a batch of photos, and let them save the result in a commonly understood format (instead of just proprietary one).

Shaping the learning curve is always tricky, but there's plenty of room between notepad.exe and Emacs. We don't have to build software only at the extremes.

(Related: simple software for basic use cases is half of the hallmark of UNIX philosophy. The other half is that software needs to compose well. While traditionally applied to niche CLI programs, these principles work well in general-purpose GUI applications too.)
It's back?
I can't access HN on Chrome at all. Firefox I can though. Someone else on Twitter can't using either. And there are other tweets reporting HN as down as well.
Yeah, I think that they added this, faced a backlash, flubbed the rollout, and then did an about-face the next day is noteable for various reasons.
I'm a little confused as to why people think dumping cables from American embassies would show the US in a negative light or contain some sort of revelation that the US is engaged in anything illegal.

These are cables from the American point of view of the rest of the world. If anything, it is going to show foreign leaders/countries far more negatively than the Americans.
Opera Mini 6.0.24095 on Nokia E63 '35'
Practice, learn from others. Don't spend more time reading than coding, but a couple of books with good tips include "The Pragmatic Programmer" and "Apprenticeship Patterns"

Also going to dojos and doing katas.
It is funny how people complain about web apps, but then the more complex a desktop app it is, the more the UI starts resembling a web application running on top of an embedded web browser.

Also, quick questions -- what other platform has a nearly 100% market penetration rate and how does that compare to the iPhone's Cocoa?

AND, with the iPhone's Cocoa you're not even allowed to distribute or update your app, without going through iTunes, both of which have been problems far worse than whatever any regular web stack has caused me.

Bitching about how web development sucks is NOT seeing the forest from the trees, because if you think about what web development enables, there is absolutely NO other alternative, and each of those little annoyances have a good reason for being there. And even though we could do with less cross-browser compatibility issues, I think I don't have to mention the shithole you're entering when doing cross-platform desktop UIs.
Alex, I checked out your profile and your sites. I think we might be a good fit. I'm Chris Norstrom (http://www.chrisnorstrom.com) and basically I'm up to my ass in ideas. I've only posted a fraction of my creations online, my startup ideas I keep offline.

I'd love to chat with you on Skype if you can, I'm in St. Louis, Missouri but am planning on moving to the Bay Area soon.
Has dropbox taken money since the $6M in 2008?

Their financials must be incredible. If it costs $2/yr to support a free customer, they must already have 500k paying customers to cover the cost. They could just as easily have 1M paying customers and be wildly profitable.

My guess is they are keeping their financials a massive secret, because if they became public it would invite competition from copycats with a budget for TV ads.
Articles like this do no favors for the viewpoints they espouse. The author has no scientific credentials, and the piece is a mishmash of broad generalizations from cultural history and questionable interpretations of scientific theories. This is not a rational, evidence-based argument on behalf of sane ecological priorities; it is a woolly, narrative-based claim that humans are naughty and will be punished by mother Earth.

What frustrates me is that I am a strong supporter of making mitigation of negative human impacts on the planet a top priority for civilization. I don't believe the best way to accomplish that goal is with the claim that we should go back to animist thinking about angry sea-gods.
Excellent point. Thats the same experience I had when moved to the flash platform, some years back.

Now that I am coming back to html-javascript, i can help but feel frustrated by the mess that is html app development.

My dream for the web platform, would be that the committees would create some kind of underlying bytecode and basic graphic primitives. On top of which different programming languages and graphic Apis could be implemented. Then, to develop hyperlinked documents, you can use an hyperlinked document oriented API. To develop complex UI, you can use a complex UI oriented API.

Maybe the web is now near that goal. Javascript could be the bytecode. And the DOM (wich I hate with passion) could be replaced by a GUI toolkit build on top of the html canvas. I would love to work on that, if I had time available.
Makes lot of sense for any country to do it. Read an interesting article about Norway in Reader's Digest few months back, about the planning & sacrifices made by a generation of Norwegians to secure the future of the country's wealth.
MFK Fisher's The Art of Eating. It's currently my favorite book. :)

I would actively point teenagers away from Atlas Shrugged. While it might be enlightening, and they might enjoy the story, it has the potential to be quite destructive if they interpret her philosophy of objectivism & egoism in a way that leads them to apply it to their own lives. I just don't think this is a good idea. Her other novels, whether The Fountainhead or We The Living aren't nearly so overbearing.

Another one: How To Lie with Statistics
"page down" is working for me, the last sentence up to just below the floating header.
Store everything on PiFS[0].

Ahah just thought that maybe Amazon Glacier is implemented this way, and that's why it takes hours to recover a file.

[0] - https://github.com/philipl/pifs
Oh yes. Curiosity is my sole driver, not economic reasons. It sounds like a tonne of fun. Just wondered what everyone else's take on it is.
I would recommend books on learning/creating mental models and design.

Mindstorms by Seymour Papert

Design of everyday things by Donald Norman
>[...] According to Ivan Gotyaovich, one of the developers working on systemd[...]

I'd say it's a prank but I don't think it's April 1st anywhere in the world yet.
I think Tim Ferris commented on this problem once in a Google Talk where the topic of the quality of (text)books came up:

To a big part it comes down to the fact that ideas and chapters presented in books are most often structured and sequenced in a way that suits the author in writing it. Less about what would actually be the best way of presenting the material from a learner's perspective.
It's an idea that is DOA. It will never work because it will never be economical, nor safe.

If you think about it for a few minutes, you'll realize it's a joke-- like an April Fools joke.
This just seems ripe for dns injection tomfoolery.
Is this problem being solved the best way? Is it not possible to build a plugin for Photoshop that exports an interim format, something where there are things like layers with text elements in something CSS friendly so that those people with familiarity with things like imagemagick can automate what they need doing in some sensible way? This need be a one-way export so those of us that have to do something with other people's Photoshop files can just get on with it. The import of the interim format (to Photoshop) need not be necessary for many workflows.
Agreed. That was the concept until the video went viral.
Of course, if you really want a barebones setup, just run vim without plugins. But that wasn't your question, so here are my favorite plugins…

Shougo/unite.vim, airblade/vim-gitgutter, mbbill/undotree, junegunn/goyo.vim, junegunn/vim-easy-align, gerw/vim-HiLinkTrace (handy for tweaking colorschemes)
As a scientist, empiricism is very important to me as rationality alone will lead you into the thickets of solipsism.

Is there an expected useful outcome for challenging every statement? "My favorite dessert is chocolate cake" can be countered with "I've seen you choose apple pie instead of chocolate cake for dessert the last 3 of 5 times". But so what? Why do you think your limited observations trump the speaker's more complete knowledge enough to force an argument at that point?

It doesn't sound like you've used feedback from your previous arguments in order to determine if you indeed have enough information to have a meaningful counter-argument. Doubt fuels empiricism, not rationalism.

There's also an opportunity cost. "The Vikings made it to North America" can be challenged with "but the Norse of Greenland weren't really Vikings", inviting a competitive but ultimately bland argument about various etymological nuances, when the speaker actually wanted to bring up the latest archeological finds on Baffin Island. The speaker may be less likely to talk with you in the future about interesting ideas, to avoid being dragged into inane debates.

There's also the possibility that you are being deliberately distracted. A reflexive challenge means you only really consider the surface arguments, and not the underlying premise. If someone says that Agile is better than Waterfall, your response could be to point out cases where Waterfall is better, without realizing how that discussion tends to assume the creation myth of Agile, constructed on a false narrative of history. (See http://www.infoq.com/articles/bossavit-agile-ten-years-on .)

Statements are data points, not debate points. You may feel like you need to respond to them at once. Or you can collect them, use to them test and refine your hypotheses about what the other person is saying, and estimate if it's useful enough to voice a contrary opinion.
Poses no problem to Firefox 34 on GNU.
There's a book called Seeking Wisdom be Peter Bevelin that I really enjoyed. He also has useful lists of checklists in the back.
>I would take this as evidence that he is questioning the process.

So I thought, but then he goes on to talk about how "sadly" no one uses the recursive solution these days.

I take that as evidence that his questioning is feeble at best.
So, nowhere.

I'm surprised you think "banning all the unhealthy foods" means nothing more than a NYC-style transfat ban. (Hint: GMO bans have nothing to do with nutrition.)

I'm pretty sure that everyone else was aware of the difference.
You're still addicted or accustomed to a high level of sugar. It takes time for your body to adjust to lower sugar intake but until you do, healthy alternatives to sugar-laden (or salt-laden) foods will not "taste good" for you.

Also, you probably just need to try more alternative peanut butter. It took me a few tries to find something I liked.
You are tacitly voting that Facebook should be viewed as an arbiter of identity by taking this point of view.
My 7 years olds will spend 1.5 hours minimum playing roblox and minecraft. So... I think designing and building a game with them is a great idea!
Exactly. Christmas is my culture, not my religion.
I was able to avoid this by buying from Carmax, where they really didn’t seem to care that I wanted to pay cash. They offered financing but didn’t push after I asked about the interest rate and declined. They also took a personal check (rather than requiring a cashier’s).
The real space colonization value though comes from carbonaceous chondrite asteroids which we know contain volatile compounds rich in carbon, nitrogen, etc. Japan found gas from the sample they retreived and the US got so much gas it blew up the sample container.

We know that there are huge amounts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons floating around in space but until now weve never gotten to touch any of them.

The obsession with nickel iron asteroids eludes me. People still think a lunar economy will be an aluminum economy despite the fact that apollo astronauts brought back iron ore as good as any you could find on earth.
This very quickly gets into "what's the point of it all?" and I'll admit that I don't have the answer. :)
I think they are doing themselves a disservice by ignoring something that elevates overall understanding, ease of onboarding/troubleshooting and generally, the polish, of the project. I love documentation and usually manage to set aside time to add details in the README/wiki etc. It is a great way to share details with others and myself, six months down the line, because I don't have a super sharp memory.
"On June 5, 2010 Chuck Norris breached the compound's walls and shut down the transmitter"

don't be a vandal
The home page loaded after waiting for a bit, and it seems to be a merge of Etherpad and Processing. You collaboratively edit Processing code, and it shows up to the right of the pad. I'm excited to try it!
people buy too much house.

Its as simple as that
Snake Oil salesmen never go away. I'm curious how he knows he is upgraded? Did he set a baseline of tasks before he started supplements? Or is he just "feeling" smarter?
"It's unclear how Chariot is getting around San Francisco's anti-jitney regulations."

From the article:

"... Vahabzadeh says it has received support from SF city Supervisors in neighborhoods that it currently serves."

Seems like they have at least some political support.
Huh? Last time I checked, BLM app ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/black-lives-matter/id955318790 ) is on Apple store and the group has, among other notable events, burning Kenosha done on their bucket list. Google, Apple, FB, Twitter et al have zero issues supporting violence as long it supports a given side.

I don't buy the analogy ( mostly because most analogies are crap ). Normal people try thought experiments and use the same situations and change one critical piece of information to see how it affects the model.
For a civil engineer these ‘Roman concrete’ pop science articles must get a bit tiring after a while. It would be better to call it by a more accurate name ‘certain mixtures of high cost aggregate-cement concrete’.

Then we can say modern concrete prepared with ‘certain mixtures of high cost aggregate-cement’ would also grow stronger over time too in similar conditions.

And then the erroneous title becomes obvious.
Isn't deplatforming the term that gets used when certain individuals, invited to speak at a University (for example) get prevented from actually saying anything due to intentional disruption?

Would you consider this to be censorship? Does it make a difference who the speaker is?
The question was asked and they didn't respond before the article was published, a timespan which in this case is likely a few hours.
oh please. plenty of cops bent the knee for the BLM protests and stood by as stuff happened. some cops want to crack heads, some cops think attacking the mob will make things worse.
The Covington story is not remotely equivalent. News organizations ran a story based on information that turned out to be inaccurate. It was sloppy, not deliberate and most of the same orgs that got it wrong ran corrections. That's misinformation.

I have no idea what you mean by the laptop story. The laptop existed and had some photos on it. The notion that it proved corruption was completely unsubstantiated and it was very clearly engineered as a political ploy.

Donald Trump and his supporters have been very deliberately concocting false stories to further a political agenda that has led to dangerous confrontations and culminated in a violent insurrection. Stories that utterly defy reality and are designed explicitly to sow discord. Stories that have hampered our covid response to the tune of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Trying to draw a parallel is absolutely ridiculous. There is a slippery slope here but we're at the bottom of that slope trying to climb right now.
There's more going on than appears to be the case from either of these (PR submarine) stories:

https://apnews.com/article/capitol-police-reject-federal-hel...
Or india will adapt to the autonomous vehicles and drive like sane humans. Its the same in many 3rd world countries.

In montreal, trains user rubber wheels. It totally makes sense to have auto-bus lanes and auto-highway lanes where every car on the lane has to be in automatic advanced cruise control mode.
From their github:

>OlegDB is a s̶i̶n̶g̶l̶e̶-̶t̶h̶r̶e̶a̶d̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶n̶-̶c̶o̶n̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶t̶,̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶n̶s̶a̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ NoSQL d̶a̶t̶a̶b̶a̶s̶e̶ datastore written by bitter SQL-lovers in a futile attempt to hop on the schemaless trend before everyone realizes it was a bad move. It is primarily a C library with a Go frontend for communication.

[1] https://github.com/infoforcefeed/OlegDB/blob/a220ae8bc178d02...
You're quite welcome. It was great to have an opportunity to evangelize a subject quite near and dear to me, namely Windows 3.1. Hopefully my comments motivate you to try it out sometime, or do a "bind use test" between it and a modern OS like say Windows 7.
At the end of day I think it is for essentially the same reason the 50 year old Harvard MBAs in grey suits prefer to hire other 50 year old Harvard MBAs in grey suits. Like attracts like. People are instinctively drawn to people with the same cultural values and background as themselves.
Glad you like our stuff; sorry you never got a callback! Our HR department was very disorganized for a while -- it should be a lot better now.

I'm sure it cost us a number of excellent people.
I've been on both sides as well. But here's the deal... as the spying IT guy, you have to be super careful. Do not be afraid to tell your employer that you do will not do something if you think it puts you personally in a bad legal position.

I had one of our legal guys at a job request that I manually review email logs to look for something for him. My response to that was simple, "fuck no." I'll grep for strings and patterns and pull you the emails that come up, but there is no way in hell I am reading someone else's email.

The reason is pretty simple too. I don't want to be a part of your lawsuit. I don't get paid to be subpoenaed and deposed. If I quit this job or am laid off I don't want to be getting called up a year, or three down the line just to show up in court and answer questions about why I was reviewing jane and john smith's emails to their kids.

Simple fact is, at some point you have to be willing to tell an employer that what they are asking you to do goes way beyond your pay grade. And protecting yourself legally comes before anything related to your career advancement.
Oh Patrick, as usual you got me to thinking. Then it hit me: the "Name" issue isn't that much different from the "SKU" issue. (SKU is short for Stock Keeping Unit, aka Part Number or Product Number). I have had to deal with this everywhere that has SKUs. No one does it well, but by slowing down and thinking about it, there's almost always a decent solution.

There are 2 ways to assign SKUs, sequentially (start with "1" and increment 1 for every new SKU) or not sequentially. I have never seen anyone do it sequentially. (Although some excellent systems keep 2 SKUs, one of which is sequential and is used as the primary key and for all indexing. This is the best way I've ever seen to handle SKUs that change, but that's another story.)

Almost everyone wants a smart or semi-smart SKU. So that by simply looking at the SKU, anyone can tell what it is without reading the description. You know, the first digit is Commodity Code, 1 for shoes, 2 for pants, etc. Then another digit for color, another for size, etc. This works well until you have ten colors; then you need 2 digits or alphas.

But wait, there's more. Let's put hyphens (or some other delimitter) between the product descriptors and the vendor data, manufacturer data, and customer data.

So now you've covered any possible product with your super slick smart SKU naming system.

Until something comes along that isn't covered. (Now we have military items with 14 other considerations.) So we come up we a second totally different scheme. Then a third. Then a 4th, etc. So now you can tell anything about an item if you know which scheme it falls under.

But wait, there's more. You should be able to enter any SKU into a form field regardless of Smart SKU scheme. (If the first digit is "9", then use Smart Scheme 3. If there's a hyphen in position 3, then use Smart Scheme 8, etc.) Your form logic should be able to intelligently guide the user based on the rules of the template or scheme.

I have built apps where users can design and build their own Smart SKU templates, which are then used to enforce compliance and guide operators. These have generally worked pretty well.

Is there some way to do the same thing for human names? I dunno, but now you got me to thinking about it. A combination of standard templates and custom templates oughta cover most possibilities. Some basic logic with optional pop-up forms which uses the templates as parameters should work. Something to think about...
Price discrimination is not fraud.

Selling you X widgets for Y dollars -- we both agree to those amounts -- is not fraud. And it's still not fraud no matter what I sold widgets to someone else for. It's just a negotiated, voluntary contract.

Offering discounts to one guy and not another? Not fraud. Just a style of capitalism some people get offended by (hence one might want to not mention it).

The US Government being a chump that's bad at negotiating to get stuff cheaply? Not fraud (excepting politicians who made campaign promises to do better with no reasonable expectation of being able to do better ;)
recurly.com
> they provide pretty much every functionality (correct me if I am wrong)

For me, it's not about the functionality. It's about the culture, and the productivity. Also, I love Ruby.

> Considering how much more easier it is to deploy php+mysql+apache applications

This is not really true anymore. Rails is pretty easy to deploy these days, especially with things like Phusion Passenger.
NYC (flatiron) www.proclivitysystems.com

We do algorithms that analyze consumer behavior and predict what they'll want a month from now. If you like math, big data or just good engineering, drop us a line.
forget the HTML5 full episodes and seasons of star trek enterprise. Thats the more awesome news here
There are other ways:

* Spam filters -- if we can spot viagra ads, we can spot rape threats. A paid moderator can review posts that are flagged by the filter but which are not actually threatening.

* Charging people for the privilege to post comments on the site. You are free to make commentary on your blog if you do not want to pay, and a small fee (e.g. $5/yr) creates just enough of a speedbump to keep most trolls off the site. This can also help cover the cost of a paid moderator.

* Upvote/downvote systems, though these tend to descend into mob rule / groupthink / downvote-because-I-disagree.
??? Yes, but that is not a reactor which will have catastrophic fallout if it stops getting cooling.

In fact, it would do the world a great service if the cooling failed there :-)
Well, damn! Thanks for the tip