skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish it were easier to select text with the mouse.

On "complicated" web pages, tiny changes in the position of the mouse while dragging (selecting text) can result in large changes in the selection (the parts of the page highlighted in light blue). Sometimes a tiny change in mouse position even causes a whole 'nother column of text to be highlighted.

It sometimes takes many tries simply to select the contiguous words I want to copy. It sometimes takes planning and learning from experience. I would prefer for selecting text with the mouse to be so easy that I can always keep all of my planning and learning faculties focused on the ideas discussed on the web page.

Even on pages (such as the page where this comment will appear) where selecting text with the mouse is relatively straightforward, I would prefer to be able to select a contiguous series of lines (or paragraphs if individual lines is too hard) by dragging in the left margin the way that it is possible to select a contiguous series of lines in TextMate 2 or in Sublime Text 3 by dragging in the gutter (the left margin where the line numbers appear). (Neither Firefox nor Chrome lets me do that with HN's pages.)

In general, I would prefer for my browser to be optimized for "active reading" or "reading broadly understood" (reading plus related activities like copying a short passage from a web page and pasting it into a text editor).

I would probably make heavy use of such a "browser optimized for reading" even if it barfed on "complicated" web pages (i.e., failed to render all or part of pages that use a difficult-to-implement modern web API) provided there were an "Open in Firefox" or "Open in Chrome" item on the right-click menu whenever the mouse is over a link -- or some similar easy-to-implement convenience.

In other words, I think I'd use it and love it even if it was unusable with most pages on the modern web as long as it provides a good experience on certain sites with relatively simple pages, like HN and Wikipedia.
Google’s new project could convince you to buy solar panels
At the start of the page I was really curious as to what image sensor they'd be using. Then I felt like an idiot.
Given the URL fragment /humor/ and the author's other pieces, I think this is indeed very dry satire.
In most of Europe, the website just returns 404. This is like... the worst link ever.

I’d prefer if a mod would replace the URL with a link to either the About page or the video. Or to an archive.org cache of the site.

Linking to a site that 404's for almost everyone is inacceptable.
This is great work, and neighbors very closely to what I am doing with http://github.com/amark/gun. But the caveat of Falcor is that it does not have realtime updates (unless they have since changed this, please let me know). I think this will be an Achilles heel for their architecture, so I hope they improve on this. Otherwise, really exciting news!
I studied Lojban (http://lojban.org) a bit out of curiosity many years back (in High School in a deep CONLANG phase), which is a fork of Loglan. I'll speak from the point of view of Lojban, as I know it better, but the fork doesn't fall far from the root so it should all mostly apply to Loglan as well.

Essentially, Lojban and Esperanto come from different intentions: Esperanto wanted to be a common tongue that speakers of various natural languages could learn relatively easily and use for multicultural communications. Loglan and Lojban were started as experimentation around the "Strong" Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language influences mental structure. The goal of these languages was then to see if people used a language with more formal mathematical rigidity/"logic" to it might more easily "think" as better mathematicians. The jury is still out, of course, on whether any of these languages actually do what they set out to do.

Essentially, the concept of Lojban/Loglan is kind of a "What if people actually spoke a natural language that was very similar to a programming language?" (Loglan actually predates most programming languages, and Lojban incorporated some things from programming languages over time.)

From that respect, the grammar of Lojban is stringently less complex than most natural grammars (and Esperanto). There's an official PEG [Parsing Expression Grammar] specification of Lojban these days and Lojban has worked very hard to keep the language grammar Context-Free (in the Chomsky's Hierarchy/Computational Parsing sense). The language's grammar is much more like a programming language than a natural language.

As for the consonant clusters, even the morphology of the words follows a fairly strict parsing pattern. For the most part when reading Lojban/Loglan you only need to pronounce three letters at a time. (This is part of the play in the name LOGical LANguage of the three letter syllable pattern in the language itself. Lojban uses the language's own symbols in its case.)

Is there a benefit to Loglan or Lojban over Esperanto? Ultimately I think it's a matter of whether or not there is a benefit of Apples over Oranges: it's more a matter of your particular taste and what you want out of a conlang. They are all beautiful languages trying to do interesting things.
And advancements in fusion, fission, wind, etc that could make today's solar less worthwhile.

No one can predict how much the landscape can change in that time and I wonder if Googles 20-year savings model tries to account for predicted advancements -- and also importantly if their "savings" accounts for the time value of money -- the amount that could be had just by investing generally instead of investing in your own solar. Time to investigate....

Edit: Google "Assumes 2.2% annual increase in electricity prices." That's interesting. We should be talking present value terms so inflation is irrelevant. Are they assuming no tech advancements in the next 20 years? What would be driving up those costs other than inflation?
Why do you think that is? It seems like they are really open with most of their stuff, so why haven't they exposed the wayback with an api?

Then again, wouldn't it be pretty trivial to scrape?

(I say this as I'm working on a hellish scraping project, and the wayback machine seems like it would be a walk in the park to scrape)
Ditto. I've a go-to playlist for work that is repetitive music I don't really like but don't find too offensive - Enigma's back catalogue. I used to do the same with a movie soundtrack but it was too interesting.
5) dynamics!!!!!!!!!!
https://github.com/witheve/Eve/blob/dev/design/bibliography....

http://incidentalcomplexity.com/

:)
Given the "naked and unapologetic elitism" of the institution, I hope not.

"Yet, Nelson’s goal was to train only the best of the best, a category of students he describes as being in the upper fraction of entrants to Ivy League schools."

I fail to see inspiration in the idea of a rich guy grooming 18 year olds to be future master of the universe types.
I was right about to buy it, completely blind, based on the similar title, because a good deed deserves a good deed: I support anyone who gives their book away for free online and offers a hard-copy (Learn You a Haskell, I'm looking at you) for purchase.

Let me know if you have an Amazon affiliate link, tipjar, or need help with any projects.

Edit: whoa, at least 5 redditors had the same "do you have a paypal?" sentiment. I suggest you have a header on visit and start collecting opt-in emails. That way, people like me will be emailed the second you get all setup.

Edit 2: Also, this definitely is a good "resume" for consulting work. I'd put an "Available for Hire/Retainer" notice at the header of every page, in case someone has an overflow of work, and/or a corporate manager wants a flexible contractor asset available as an insurance policy for behind-schedule projects. Don't charge less than 150/hr in 20 hour blocks per month for retainer work (use it or lose it), and 175ish/hr for active work.
You'll need to be more specific, since there are startups in many different businesses. Some startups sell t-shirts to people on the web, some implement messaging services on mobile devices and still others build custom hardware with embedded software. The programming needs of these businesses are very different.
Introducing the Shodan Real-Time Stream
How many average joe developer do you see adopting Haskell in the industry?
> I'm no expert,

Whereas I have hands on experience with this stuff. So I guess I should thank you for giving me first-hand experience of being on the receiving end of that mansplaining thing people complain about.

> I imagine IBM would claim that they'd have the lower TCO.

Yes, they will. The funny thing is, the man from HP was in just last month explaining to me that Xeon Superdomes have a lower TCO, too, and last year the lady from Oracle was telling me how I shouldn't balk at the headline cost of ExaData and ExaLogic because, from a TCO perspective, they'd save me money.
It's not a governmental institution but an NGO which unites many local governments and other participants.

http://www.zonatlas.nl/home/over-de-zonatlas/

They use high resolution 3d surface information (elevation data) and weather reports to assess the efficiency of solar panels. The map for my house accurately shows how much efficiency can be expected on each part of the house. This takes into account neighboring buildings and trees. The site also calculates a number of scenarios and allows you to easily request offers and show how long it takes to earn back your investment. They cleverly compare this to interest rate. E.g. on my house, investing in solar now would yield 4.5% interest over 20 years (given certain assumptions).

It is a very impressive site.
Try dragging within the colorpicker rainbow sections... Its super slow, for every drag event React-engine will perform a diff on the domtree.... This is not the way to implement such components. React is nice for non-continuous dom updates. But it will be never quicker than drawing to the screen yourselve, or updating the components yourselve... Its a lot faster than diffing a tree every few milliseconds.
Sometimes, Google releases some really cool new APIs or a new design language, and when that happens there's an opportunity for apps to show up that disregard all the other legacy stuff and are built specifically around those new APIs or with the new design language.

That's how they manage to capture a large percentage of the few users who have the latest version of Android. That's how the app builds a strong brand for the "new stuff", and then can usually maintain that brand as all devices start being replaced by devices that support those APIs.

Other time, they don't improve that much on their app, and someone else comes from behind and makes a better alternative with the new APIs, though.
The HTML spec defines how to parse any arbitrary stream of characters, and it is what is implemented in browsers and hence is what best supports badly-formed HTML (because it's typically written aimed at browsers!). Therefore, by not following the spec, TagSoup has worse compatibility with badly-formed HTML.
What do you think why German electricity companies are trying to sell their gas and coal business and focus on renewables as much as possible?

In Germany, the effect is even stronger: As we are taxed per kWh, the electricity is quite expensive. On the other hand, this money is then spent on subsidies for solar and wind. Overall making solar and wind so extremely cost effective that anything else becomes stupid.

And, at the same time, it leads to people saving really a lot of energy. A family of 4 using 3000kWh per year or less is common.
Build one with "spare parts" you have laying around and then try it out first and see if it's for you. I've seen a few people go out buy a fancy standup desk and then decide it's not for them. Don't worry, they aren't for everyone.

If you really like (and it takes a good month for you feet to get conditioned to the change) then you'll have your answer :)
Ah, so it's no longer a "new advance (sic) wikipedia"?
I don't think the law specifies what form of agreement is required - however, an employer must confirm all changes in writing. Agreement at this point is implicit - if the employee does not agree with the changes, they have the right to refuse to work, to take the case to a tribunal, or in some cases to resign and claim constructive dismissal.

I know that if an employee doesn't agree with contract changes, they should take action immediately; continuing to work and not expressing your disagreement with the changes after you've been informed of them can be construes as implied agreement.

Employment law in the UK seems pretty worker-friendly in the sense that most companies will take great pains to avoid the risk of employment tribunals and other employee action, but I concede it's a bit less formalised than in other jurisdictions.
> The hardware redundancy benefits are pretty huge.

Not really, IME.

> You really need a full proof-of-concept to get any picture of how your workload might run on System z.

Absolutely. Some workloads can make sense. For others...
LinuxONE: IBM's new Linux mainframes
Developer Fitness: Getting Back to and Staying in Shape
Or guarantee that two separate coordinates on space-time can have identical values... which would mean breaking some laws of physics.
I have to ask: are you familiar with Blizzard's GUI script programming? It introduced me to programming and allowed 10 year old me, terrible at logic (and never before programmed!), to make games without reading much external references (it is completely self-explanatory).

For example, by reading those I think you get immediately an ideal of what it does:

http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd195/thehelper-andrewgos...

http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd195/thehelper-andrewgos...

You can build those from a predetermined set of Events (if you're advanced you can create custom events), so just by reading from a list of events/actions you an figure out how to do whatever you want. I think it's similar to Scratch but it does away with the clutter -- it's not exactly trying to make programming "visual", it's more just merging documentation and code, so you have all the building blocks needed to build any application right in from of you.

I think this kind of rethinking you're doing can truly change how programming is like for beginners or people who want to make specific tools/application (and not learn a plethora of things they'll never use)!
I originally wrote this as a reply to a Quora question, and then it got picked up for this Forbes blog. It just hit me that some of you guys might find this interesting. Firefighting is a pretty fascinating field, with a lot of "stuff" going on. I was a volunteer firefighter for about a decade and was a NC Fire & Rescue Commission certified Fire Instructor II with qualifications to teach Firefighter I and II certification courses, LP Gas Firefighting, and Incident Command. Feel free to ask any questions you might have and I'll be happy to answer if I can.
Charles Babbage
What irony?

To me, this isn't irony at all.
It shows that google can't defeat the algorithmic complexity of things like consensus and shared state editing, and so gracefully degrades functionality.

That shows a very good understanding of scaling - realizing any solution you choose has limits and tradeoffs, and thinking about and handling those limit cases sanely ahead-of-time, rather than waiting for it to fall over and hoping for the best.
The Flic button did just that, except it uses bluetooth instead of wireless. https://flic.io/

The extra usability and generic-ness means it'll cost you $35 vs $5 for a branded WiFi button.
> Then then we have the decadent white folks with first world problems complicating things with crazy vegan diets.

What does skin color have to do with veganism? Nothing at all. And most vegans are actually brown, as the sibling comment has pointed out. This is not a "first world" problem, since in fact the first world is clearly consuming the most meat. (+)

Want to know what's decadent? The scale of industrial meat production. Keeping animals who never see any daylight in a much too small space for example. Eating beef everyday despite climate change.

(+) And, by the way, I have always disliked the term "first world problem". On average, life tastes pretty much the same for everyone, though obviously it's different in extreme circumstances. Suffering and pain and real and imagined problems feel essentially the same for everyone. By all means, let's improve the economic conditions in the third world but let's stop pretending economic abundance somehow equals happiness and a lack of problems.
Extensive prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065710
What kind of non-critical services would a team need to share an account for?
Drupal Is the Right CMS for You. Here Is Why
We know that other approaches work better, and many of those approaches avoid counting calories. They work better because they focus on life-long behaviour changes; and on being maintainable.
I'd take it with a grain of salt.

- Benchmarks are only for Safari and without good documentation for how they
were performed. Measurements are only in the 100ths of seconds where these
measurements should have much more granularity.
- The TodoMVC (arguably the most real-world) benchmark is nearly 50% slower
than virtual-DOM.
- virtual-DOM is fairly mature at this point where as MorphDOM looks very
young.
- virtual DOM implementations allow you to do things like React Native
For plutonians.
working on a giant campus that's isolated from
the outside world

You don't have to work in Mountain View! The remote offices are really nice, and are generally well integrated into their cities.
I spent about 5 years at Google starting in 2006. When I arrived I was assigned to one manager, but I wasn't _super_ excited about the project. A week in, another manager offered me another opportunity and got me permission to transfer. Problem solved.

A couple years later, a new hire got assigned to a team I was on. He was a little bummed because he'd really had his eye on another project. So we talked to our manager about it and he was allowed to transfer to the team he'd been hoping for.

I have more anecdotes like this, but the long and short of it is that in my experience Google is a lot less capricious and uncaring an organization than you imagine.
One simple metric would be the number of lines of code:

https://github.com/jsog/jsog/blob/master/src/JSOG.coffee
I was surprised that I had a physical queasy reaction to reading that.
I can't see us using CALM for anything in the near future. The focus right now is just on making the basic programming experience smooth. We chose Dedalus because the discrete, synchronous model of time makes it easy to separate things which are truly stateful from things which are not and to handle both in a live, interactive environment. CALM is just a bonus.
I interviewed over the phone a while ago with this company, and talked to the founder. I am totally forgiving of interviewer attitude, because I used to hire people myself, and also understand that bad days happen.

But this guy was so arrogant, so conceited, and treated me like the most boring person in the world that was wasting his time. He talked exclusively about himself, and how he was "making this project happen for his kid". He said his motivation for founding the company was because he didn't like any of the schools available to his child. I'm not of the opinion that people must save the planet with a startup, but when you specifically say that you're doing it exclusively to serve yourself and the uber-wealthy, I am not interested. He also abruptly put me on hold two times while someone came into his office during our interview, with no apology whatsoever. We had talked for maybe ten minutes when the second interruption happened, and when he came back on the line, I apologized and said "the culture" wasn't right for me, ending the interview.

My interview with this company is memorably one of the worst interviews I have ever had in my twenty years in the industry. There is no way in the universe I would work for (or invest in) that company.
(IANAL)

It might instead be beneficial to you, in terms of unemployment benefits and such, to instead refuse to sign and allow them to terminate you instead.
A guy resisting arrest makes front page on hacker news because its near twitter HQ? Seriously?
Managing Latex packages
I get the analogy, but it just doesn't quite... fit this problem for some reason (maybe because there are a lot of crimes I feel aren't crimes, and crashes are just random fate most of the time).

Plus I could think of numerous ways to argue against the analogy that would literally make me sound like a "think of the children!" person...

Maybe I just need to think more about my internal attitudes and justifications for certain things in a more critical, rational way.

Thank you for giving me food for thought.
Well, it's a reasonable solution to some distributed problems. I imagine that many distributed algorithms can be simplified a lot of you have a reliable and accurate time source. If you can build a reliable clock at less cost (development and/or overhead) than a time-insensitive algorithm would cost, then why not do it?
"I can't think of many things that I would want to work on that aren't the moonshot crazy experimental projects (and, let's face it, most people won't be working on them)."

This is true of almost everyone, of course.
Every year i read the incoming intern abstracts, and they all literally say the same thing "I really would like to work on <whatever really popular crazy project was in the news lately>". Literally all of them.

That said, often you can work on them if you are good enough at what you do.

(But yes, often you have to prove that first, either internally or externally)
That may or may not be the case, but the claims that these systems are "cheaper" prey on economic ignorance.
This can be solved by having sensible defaults. So instead of having to specify everything, there's a baseline behavior. Most may be acceptable, some is not. Fine, then the user can change what needs to be changed.

The most important part is that the user is not spec'ing in the dark, instead they are modifying existing behavior to suit what they want.
There are no paths to evaluate, just unique synthetic ids. The JSOG transmutation process is a simple recursive function; most of the implementations are just a handful of lines of code.
Why are micropayments worse than the current web? People have differing opinions on the advertising-pays-for-content-so-don't-block-it issue, but are you referring to something technical?
you don't have the right to make laws that violate other people's rights.
If you don't mind pulling your phone out, IFTTT launched a new app called Do that just lets you push a button to "do" something on one of their channels. They have pre-made recipes for putting the current time into Google Spreadsheets etc. https://ifttt.com/recipes/227069-track-your-work-hours

I think IFTTT is working on a Pebble app as well, but it hasn't launched.
How cheap could these get? Which would be cheaper, bluetooth or wifi?

Amazon obviously can subsidize via product sales.
The horror! The hygiene!
Jobs was a good guy. Wasn't he known for being outright cruel to employees? Didn't he foster a culture of infighting and ridiculous hours? Wasn't he a deadbeat dad for a couple decades?

Did he have engineering skill? He had vision and a level of genius, but I'm not sure it applies to Engineering skill. Odd that you give that to him but not to Bezos.
Many security protocols use credentials that are only valid for a brief time. Here is a simple example of a problem caused by my server's time being more than 10 minutes off from the time on S3:

http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2015/04/paperclip_expi...
Really hoping 6.0 and the new Nexus phones have pen support so I can get over my disappointment that the Galaxy Note 5 won't be released in Europe.
Rehash of previously posted article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9945543