skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the difference is that smart people can cloak such proscriptions in pseudo science (see: happiness research)"

How is that any different from cloaking the prescriptions (or proscriptions, I suppose) in biblical claptrap? Or historical or cultural nonsense? A lot of people believe things are in the bible that are actually not there, at best. Why? Their minister told them. I was one of these people in my youth; I assure you it happens.

Personally, I think this is a classic example of anti-intellectualism. A lot of people get angry arguing with "smart" people because they seem to have "an answer for everything." This is far more infuriating to deal with than the relatively static arguments of Wu Proponents or Creationists, who simply reiterate the same tired nonsense over and over until you can simply ignore it the way you do any droning, repetitious sound.
+1

Silence is the ultimate luxury right now, it needs to be democratized.
I'm not saying that school has to teach you every piece of procedural knowledge, but there's a baseline of what someone needs to know to succeed in life, and that list gets longer and longer each generation.

I agree that we also need to innovate beyond our current "shove knowledge down kid's throats" approach, but I think that's a separate issue. Doing that would be an improvement in results over our current system. I'm saying we need innovation just to keep the same results our current system is getting. I definitely think we need our education system to do a better job teaching kids how to think and how to learn and it needs to install in them the desire to keep learning once that diploma's in hand.
This is the angry comment where I note that this topic has been-upvoted quite a bit and has dozens of comments, but the post on terribly important issue I care about has received no such attention.
We have tried to take on the social bookmaking world with out site www.favilous.com - we will take on board all these comments. Some people have said they want to read links later; you can do this using our site. We also introducing a Yammer type service for networks of people to bookmark and share their bookmarks and documents with each other on their network. Thanks for the comments-really helps.
Good point, and probably symptomatic of a wider problem. Sites with a ton of "good enough" information will outrank sites with a very specific set of "excellent" information. The high ranking of wikipedia and the various answers sites is a similar effect.
Forgetting to use a DOCTYPE is a bad idea, since it throws most browsers in to "quirks" mode meaning they won't render things according to the published standards. That makes debugging problems a whole lot harder since you first have to work out if the bug relates to quirks mode v.s. standards mode, and quirks mode problems are far less widely documented.
Actually, in paying attention to the certificate chain active in my Gmail sessions, I've noticed that, since last fall, early winter, they may be moving in this direction.
Facebook's Green Data Center, Powered by Coal?
HTML5 Offline Image Editor and Uploader
However, it will not notify of comments to entries that you post but only replies to your comments correct? So it's not a complete solution unfortunately
There may be a reading of 'anything I want' that the poster intended. I don't get micromanaged much. I do 'anything I want' as long as the end results are the results that my feature team is driving for. No one particularly cares what tools I use or what approach I use as long as it's going to get the job done.

The rest, I agree with you (JamieEi) about. People seem aware of the competition, but typically discussions are about how we can provide a better experience.

As for the username, I was developing on linux before I came to MS. Presumably the poster was a big linux fan before being hired at MS.
Yup, you have more links above the fold than below the fold. How does it prove below the fold links don't matter much?
That's puzzling. Don't know if it will help, but for reference I'm running the dev channel build on OS X.
Also, http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/04/07/4991
Logitech app turns your iPhone into wireless trackpad or keyboard
Won't you be sitting down at a table most of the time, as if you were writing? Or sitting with the iPad in your lap, like you would a book?
This is just more evidence that it's one of the greatest pieces of open source software ever written.
Scaling lessons from Second Life
This is the comment where I try to recast this argument in terms of the two major US political parties, while clearly showing my allegiance to one.
The functionality could be implemented now with in-ear Bluetooth headsets. A small device with an array of mics would process and localize the 6 or so closest speakers and transmit the output via Bluetooth. One could also include some miss in the headsets to provide correlation data.
This is part of my set of gripes, that the chain is buried. Put it up front. Even "clueless" users will be somewhat likely to notice when it changes, especially if the popular media nudge them in this direction.

Mathematics aside, the basic concepts are not that difficult. (E.g. chain of trust) Let the users know what's behind the padlock icon; they'll pick it up.

(Oh, and stop making https calls from http pages that ask for security information. The paradigm of "look for https in the address bar" and "the closed padlock icon" was a good start. Then everyone went and started breaking it.)
Ask HN: Please review my weekend side-project.
This is essentially an online version of the unix 'file' utility that I hacked together quickly over the weekend (it
actually uses 'file' on the backend).

There are many obvious directions I could potentially take this - for example improving recognition accuracy,
suggesting more programs and websites for working with each file type, providing in-page previews of files, etc, etc.

But before I do any of that, I thought I'd just get version 0.1 up and ask for some feedback. Any questions or
comments are very welcome. By the way, you need Flash (at least version 10) to make it work.
Either design can be aesthetically pleasing or it can serve the business goals, it rarely satisfies both.

Case in point - Basecamp bounce rate 25% http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/basecamphq.com

Checkout app bounce rate 50% http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/checkoutapp.com

(I admit Alexa isn't accurate but for comparing websites in relative terms, it is good enough)
This is the comment where someone having a bad morning decides to jump into the fray with the parent commenter by arguing back just as intemperately.
So it converts PHP into C++?!? Woaw.

Didn't people accuse Joel Spolsky of jumping the shark for doing that kind of thing (Wasabi script => php or vbscript).

.....wait this means that Wasabi can now technically convert into C++! :D
Mature Market leaders don't usually have the network effect lock-ins that Facebook has. In a traditional market, I'll swap to the new Product (Product X) as long as Product X does a decent job on the features I use in the original product and something new that makes it better for me.

The problem is that a Facebook-Killer has to be able to attract everyone at once, because of the network effects. It can't just be better than Facebook for me, it has to be better than Facebook for most of my friends (who use completely different subsets of the Facebook features), because I'm not switching unless they do. The end result is that the Facebook-Killer, in order to build its network effects, has to have replicated features and new features that make it better than Facebook for a large segment of the population.

A traditional app-killer can duplicate the most used 40-50% of the App's features and toss in a new revolutionary feature, and it'll take off (since most people don't use App's features that AppKiller didn't implement). However, Facebook is like Word - most people only use 20% of the features, but everyone uses a different 20%. So if you want to grab even a third of Facebook's users, you have to re-implement 60% or more of Facebook's features in addition to your killer features.
http://jasonsantamaria.com/ started using this format slightly before Dustin. I'm not saying anyone copied anyone else - just that it was probably invented multiple places.

And of course, before blogs took over the web, a separate design for every page was quite common. Look at JWZ's old "stories" pages for a particularly horrible example. :)

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/toothbrush.html

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/zombies.html

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/license.html
I wonder if that is like cheating in a sense? I would think it's easier to work with people remotely who you have built relationships with. You understand them, you have seen how they operate in person and gain insights beyond what is spoken/written and have a certain common culture. I work with outsourcing/offshoring and now work remotely with a partner who used to be local. I don't think it would work if we hadn't spent all the face-to-face time first.
Darwin, DTrace modifications, WebKit...
If you interested in existing pen-based UI that is pretty awesome check out Ken Hinckley's work. He's a researcher at MSR and has plenty of cool videos on his website. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kenh/
Jonah Lehrer: The Effectiveness of Sex Ed
Searching for the Higgs Boson.
Bold. This makes me really happy. Comments sections are the cesspools of the Internet, so it's great to see someone say "This is going away until you think about what you did wrong."

P.S. Yes, I'm aware of the irony in that I'm commenting on a comment-centric site about how much I hate comments. Let's just say HN is the least cesspoolish place I've found so far.
Feet have good reflexes for avoiding debris. But the choice isn't just between risking stepping on glass barefoot and ruining your feet with Nikes -- cf. "barefoot shoes" like Vibram, Vivo, etc.
I agree with your sentiments about force but you were probably downmodded for not having read the article... The socialism line was admittedly a bait and switch to get people to read the article.

Also, the commenters cited in the article who originally raised the notion were probably trolls and/or being sarcastic.
I wonder if it'll let you convert things out of the box or if it was optimized for the way php is written at facebook. (eg. it doesn't support eval() but eval() is bad anyway)

Also, how hard would it be to do the same thing for Ruby and Perl? I'm sure there have been other attempts at compilers, but as noted elsewhere, having FB behind it makes HipHop more stable...

Oh, and atleast one thing from this anonymous interview came true: http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-interne...
Honest to God, this just happened:

I went to the site, tried clicking the penguin, then the iceberg, then the article squares at the top. Saw something about how I can't spell.

I then came back to HN.

I had second thoughts. I returned to the site and THEN noticed I could scroll down.

...

I get it, we're all so tech savvy, but I'm telling you, the pixels above the fold are extremely important. If they don't MAKE you want to scroll down, many people will not.
It sucks he didn't put a date on that post. Kind of an egregious oversite, right.
The segregated buses of 200 B.C. were set up by the ROMANS.
This can be true, but it can also point to a constant state of emergency / "need to put out fires".
This is the comment where I thank the previous commenter and complain that people shouldn't vote down things they disagree with.
For serious input, I'd have it lying flat or slightly inclined. For meetings, I'd have it on a stand on the tabletop. For Augmented Reality, I'd be holding it out in front of me, possibly with both hands.

This post was made with a Windows tablet, BTW, as have all my posts for a week. My tc1100 works best lying flat for serious input. I suspect that will also be true for a non-stylus interface.
The CPU is benchmarked slightly slower than the 17" Lenovo I got for $500 last summer(974 vs 1154 on the Passmark CPU Mark comparison - 999 with the upgrade option), but with much better video, and DDR3. I consider that fairly impressive for a netbook, even a $799 one.
This seems long on hand-wringing, and short on actual problems.

For example, the article notes that cars recharging at night will help utility companies to even out their demand-curve. The article then worries about whether the utilities will want to run their network at full-capacity, and how having it always running would be a maintenance problem. But that's ridiculous, of course the utility companies want to run at higher capacity and sell more utility. If their network is being taxed, they (or a competitor) can build more power generation and the problem is solved.

Similarly, if the concern is around the peak/off-peak power pricing, these times can be adjusted (if, for example, the car recharging 5-7pm the new highest power consumption times).
In your 'sayings' early and late are ambiguous. As far as investing is concerned being right in a prediction means you profited, so the early-late error bar is defined by the time in which you could profit by your prediction. Applying this same rationale here the early-late error bar is harder to define, since profit is not clear and somewhat subjective. So taking some liberties with early-late and right-wrong is I feel appropriate.

Taking into consideration that these predictions are 5+ years old I think they are pretty good. He clearly spotted several trends whose future significance was at the time not obvious. If someone started a business believing one of these trends had promise it is possible that the business would have been successful. I do feel that for what he was trying to accomplish being early or late by a couple of years or off on a detail but correct in spirit is not significant.

Also, I think it is important to add that making predictions like these is very important becuase the future develops from our perceptions of what it will be.
I tried it with an epub file before I read your comment about its mimicking the unix 'file' command, and was disappointed at the output.

I'm in the process of writing a routine for checking the validity of epub files (i.e., to unzip the archive, make sure the required directory structure and xml is there, etc.), and at first glance, that's what I thought your app would be able to do.
We Fog Creek developers were just mentioning this hilarious possibility.
Well, from what I've heard its more like FB had a mountain of PHP they couldn't ever rewrite, so they made PHP faster by turning it into C++.

Fog Creek rewrote everything in a brand new language they invented that compiles down into multiple other languages.

So, in actuality, the projects are the exact opposite of each other.
"There are a lot of obvious benefits to making software configurable, and these benefits are plain to all."

I must no longer be part of all. There are many websites that offer little configuration and work just fine for the vast majority of users (look I'm on one now!).

I've worked on enough projects to know that users will always want to be greeted by LOLcats instead of "Welcome to boring-corporate-system" or be able to change the background to lime-green. Focus on making a system usable from the get go, instead of letting each person craft usability out of a tangled web of configurations.
Adobe CTO on the state of Flash
A portable machine that (a) lets me carry a little portable keyboard that can be separated from the display, and (b) doesn't also make me carry around a useless extra keyboard that is attached to the display.

HP's tc1100 already does this, and it's 5 years old.
I've seen live journal entries evolve into weblogs, wordpress templates, tumblers, and now apparently blogazines. One glance at iampaddy and i noticed enough characteristics that made me immediately think of dcurtis. Dcurtis probably took some inspiration from Jason Santa Maria (who started the current blogazine craze) but made it his own distinct design. iampaddy has some work to do before he can say that. Yes, the guy is creating stuff, but that doesn't give him a free pass on criticism. Without criticism how will he improve? He can go to his parents for blind encouragement.
Agreed. There are too many trolls out there. Newspaper websites in particular are bad; I avoid visiting the San Francisco Chronicle website both because it's a dreadful website for an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, and because the 'comment crew' there are so obnoxious.

I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20 years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly stupid.
There's no real irony. While anonymous-account sites can have reasonable comments, that's a function of size, really.

Back in the day slashdot was great for quality comments. Then they grew and added a karma system which... didn't really help, just buried the dreck for a time. Now it's mostly a mess.

Similarly, Engadget used to be alright, then they grew and added the voting system... etc.

Frankly, what works for smaller sites doesn't scale. At their visibility, Engadget should either go comment-less or do subscriptions for early-access and comments. Anonymous comments just don't provide enough value with that much noise.
Yup, that's what I meant by improving accuracy. Unix's 'file' is a good start, but it could definitely be improved on.
We haven't enabled comments on our blog precisely for this reason.

Are there any success stories or best practices for quality comments and discussions on blogs? What makes Hacker News commentary successful? User accounts required and therefore no anonymity? Guidelines?
I think he's trying to make the point that influential idealogues, more often than not, are intellectuals.

I'd like to note that, even if they are correlated, this does not in itself show that there is a causative relationship between intellectualism and dangerous ideology.
Noisy restaurants are no accident. Young people (who spend money) supposedly like places that feel "alive." Old people (who don't spend as much) hate noisy places and won't go. So, restaurants who want to fill up their tables on a Saturday night with young people drinking $12 martinis play loud music and avoid sound dampening decorations.

I'm not suggesting that the Cone of Silence wouldn't be a good thing -- I'd buy one! However, the way to attack the problem is social rather than technological. Imagine starting a grass-roots campaign to tell restaurant owners/managers that you hate how noisy their establishments are. Print stickers that say, "I wish this restaurant was more quiet" that could be stuck on credit card receipts so management would be forced to hear your message. There's no business model in this, though.
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch Defends Flash, Warns about HTML5
So if this case succeeds and the two party consent law isn't valid in public, does that mean that the police could follow a suspect around and record their conversations with a directional mic without a warrant? (as long as the conversations took place in public)

This might end up being a case of "be careful what you wish for".
Actually, the point of Wasabi was to avoid rewriting anything.
I think where most people chokes on Wasabi is the perception of compiling from an "insane" language to a sane language. No matter how cool it is to work at Fog Creek, it's very 1965 to work in a proprietary language, especially for web development. If Joel wasn't famous, anyone leaving Fog Creek would have serious problems finding a new job.

Facebook compiles from a "sane" language (PHP) to a less sane, but twice as fast language (C++). The alternative was to get their devs to work in C++, which they decided was an unattractive solution -- this seems reasonable.
I thought police in LA were going to start wearing cameras on their heads to record everything!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,580667,00.html

Isn't that fairly strong evidence that it's OK to record public interactions without consent?
Ask HN: Experiencing delays and timeouts on HN responses?
For the past couple of months, I've been experiencing a lot of delays and timeouts with HN responses. Either altogether, or no page contents returned. I wonder whether others are, as well. I like to look at a post's comments first, for some context, so I may be triggering/observing more of this behavior than some others.

This is not by way of complaint. I'm grateful for the site, and I know I receive it "free". I'm just asking whether others are having a similar experience. (I guess a bit of desire for an improvement might be implied, but again I'm not writing from the frame of mind of "expecting" anything.)

EDIT: I wanted to sound neutral, but my wording seems a bit off. Of course, I'd like faster responses, if the problem is not just mine. But I'm sitting at an empty table drinking my gratis glass of water, and I'm not exactly complaining if it doesn't get refilled immediately. Just glad for the seat at the table.
Given my html as described above, what would you recommend to use for the DOCTYPE line?
Fog Creek didn't really rewrite anything. In fact, that was the whole point of Wasabi, to not rewrite anything.

Wasabi did extend VBScript to add objects and other language features, which were gradually incorporated into the code base, but just on changes going forward.

So, really, it is almost exactly the same thing.
I'd love to get an Android app for Vark, or be able to access it through SMS. It works fast enough that you could use it in many of the same use cases shown in those kgb commercials.
Well, in addition to epub, it would nice if it could validate other complex file structures, e.g. docx or any of the other OpenXML formats: http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx
Configurable settings are like diamonds and herpes - they are forever.
Ceci n'est pas une comment.
> "the chances are that most people the RIAA are going after really did do it"

Unfortunately, our legal system isn't supposed to tolerate that sort of process. 'Better guilty men go free than an innocent man be punished' and all.

Very real, very serious consequences are befalling innocent people. Very real laws are being broken in this process with little to no repercussion.

If my store is looted during a riot, we don't simply round up 10 people without proper evidence and due process, just because it's extremely likely that 9 of them really are guilty. That just is not how our system is supposed to operate.
Google has actually talked about testing results with more than 10 search results:

"So, Marissa (Myer, Google VP) ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.

Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it?

After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds."

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20....
the reason comments are good here is because the moderators are serious as a heart attack. you don't get to make many jerk-like comments before your account gets banned.
Perhaps you could make money through affiliate marketing. Let's say someone asks what a svg file is. You could provide links to svg->pdf utilities.
Let's just run a Flash emulator of Firefox - a tempting plot to kill IE6