skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure I follow your response correctly, but it seems like your response is: it's easy to switch image sizes this way. But you still have to edit the HTML, and it's not that hard to edit the width/height. Maybe I don't understand?

The more important point to my mind is that grey is definitely not lorem-ipsum. It doesn't help me evaluate anything except image size. And since it's easy to get a sized placeholder, a server to generate a URL seems not that helpful.
Things I love about Ruby (I have not used Python yet):

- everything is an object, so you can e.g. store code in a Proc to execute it later or add new methods to Numbers (e.g. 1.kilobyte => 1024)

- very clean syntax and expressive method names means you don't need to document much, it's pretty obvious most of the time (e.g. 3.times do print "ho" * 3 end => "hohoho")

- very flexible, allows nice DSLs that read a lot like english (e.g. Rails or RSpec)

- interesting community with lots of free material (e.g. _why's poignant guide, railscasts.com, therubyshow.com, ...)

I'm sure Python is pretty cool as well, but from all I've heard (I had the same question a while ago) Ruby seems to fit me better with its "more fun and freedom" philosophy.
A good comeback for this is, "You can't expect me to correct all the bullshit Gary spouts. I don't have the time or a strong enough speaking voice. I'd be hoarse within a week."
"and have some appreciation for elegance and beauty in a design"

Understanding the big picture is an obvious requirement (and not necessarily easy ... perhaps more important is knowing when you don't have it, see some of the comments here about architects who switched problem domains), but too many people don't grok the correlation between elegance and beauty in design and how they make projects easier and sometimes just simply possible.

One note of importance that's related to how we aren't trained in those critical not so technical skills you cite is the what we're building is fantastically more complicated than anything concrete (so to speak :-) that others build (note that the most complicated microprocessors have a lot of software (firmware) in them). One key sign I've found when I've gotten a design right is that it solves problems that I didn't know I had. I think it takes a lot of experience to get to that point (by then I'd been programming nearly two decades, and studying on my own software engineering and design from the beginning).

Time requirements and logistics in our field can be very difficult, since you often don't know the scope of the project until you're part way into it. The waterfall process works for you (it had better!) but it doesn't tend to work well for us ... and there comes in the least technical other skills you cite ("arbitrary client constraints", oh, yes!).

One final note: we can mostly get away with so many in our field being idiots because what we do is mostly less consequential, but if you noticed the recent stories about how medical radiation devices are still killing people you'll see we really aren't as far as we should be.

Thanks a lot for your reply.
This is an interesting question, one I've been wondering about lately.

When I was a little kid, I had a very strong (and I now realize, unusual) affinity for the truth. I would feel bad if I told someone a fact which I later learned to be false. I felt that if I said something that was false, I was contaminating people's understanding of the world, and this was a wrong thing to do. I didn't frame it this way, in those words, of course, but I remember that this was my explicit thought -- that spreading inaccurate representations of the world was a bad thing to do.

I wonder if many hardcore technical people (I am getting tired of the word "geek") perhaps share this early attitude of mine.

To indulge in some evolutionary psychology, I wonder if this aversion to spreading misinformation was an adaptive trait back when proto-humans lived in small troops -- spread misinformation, and people on whom you relied would be lead astray, to your own detriment.
Nice! Or:

google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {

window.setTimeout(function() {
jQuery('#answer').html(Math.random() < 0.5 ? "NO" : "YES");
}, 2000);

});
>There's a fair bit of good data that suggests that women are, on average, not as good as men at math.

Care to share some of that data? The research I've seen suggests that those differences essentially disappear when girls are taught separately from boys.
a redirect service for Common Lisp documentation
I bet you could do it without "scanning it" per se.

Taking a set of pictures and then using stitching software, followed by some Photoshop touch-ups would probably give you a pretty good start.
By way of http://xach.livejournal.com/243101.html
Google voice only handles your voicemail if you explicitly set it up through the google voice settings interface.

So rather than being a "blatant lie", it is actually true. That's kind of my point.
Whenever I've gotten a newspaper subscription they've said it would cost $x a week, and then when it was time to settle up they'd either charge for 6 or 12 months in advance.
CORRECTION: the newbie had neatly iterated the design and I was able to slip right back into coding with no fuss
I highly doubt they would even understand the question if you asked them.

That page is just about against every bit of best practice regarding sign up forms that I'm aware of.

- don't ask for stuff you don't need
- make it *one* step to register and pay
- ask positive questions not negative questions
- put the form at the top and the benefits to the right
the form is where you make your sale, so it should come first
- make it a light page with black lettering
- make it a secure server
- if you will be using an email address as a login (bad) then you don't need to ask for a username
- do not split your billing step and the signup step

And so on...
Also see:

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-02/msg00247.html
More about Dense Periodic Orbits
In-Q-Tel doesn't list them anymore

http://www.iqt.org/technology-portfolio/index-alphabetical.h...

Any ideas why?
I can't equate 'subscribing to a newspaper' with 'subscribing to a website owned by a newspaper'.
I think Phil is talking about the author of the blog post, not the bookmarklet:
http://www.mobileorchard.com/bookmarklet-as-app-store-paid-a...
I'd also like to see the data you refer to. Anecdotally, my pre-cal and calculus classes in high school had more girls than boys.
I see how packaging up an existing bookmarklet and selling it is an app could indeed be construed as unfair (although, a point could be made about the added value of the package itself). Creating an original piece of software, on the other hand, and making it available to the public for a fee, is the very definition of fair play in my book.
Did you read the article? It seems to address this point at the end: This isn’t to say that Kindle will beat Apple in any quantifiable way (number of apps, number of downloads, number of customers, etc), but I think that the kinds of stories of real businesses being built on the Kindle store will be quite different from the lottery that the iPhone app market appears to be.
Excellent story. Thanks for the share, blasdel.
The wall street journal had an interesting article on this subject, as does Leo from Zenhabits.net

I recently decided to undergo a similar writing experiment on the concept of focus (http://howtogetfocused.com/) in which I use a technique that's like a freemium model...

This philosophy centers on the following characteristics:

Writing the book using a blogging platform (I’m using Wordpress)
Listing one main author, and listing many contributing authors (you, the reader, are a contributing author if you comment)
Releasing the book 100% for free online (and selling the offline format)
Sourcing the book’s editor to the readers (Readers comment on each chapter suggesting spelling changes, organization changes, ideas and illustrations
Crowd-sourcing the book’s design
Daily Mail invents a climate conspiracy
Even that is a very generous description. The guy hand-coded a lot of boilerplate to expose one CUDA kernel to JavaScript.
It is referenced in this version: The researchers speculate that the influence of female teachers on their students results from the tendency of children to emulate adults of the same gender.
For Windows, I like multiple monitors, since it allows you to maximize a window in each monitor.

On a Mac, for the most part apps don't take over a whole monitor without a bit of effort, so one monitor is probably the winner.

There's also a Windows shareware utility called SplitView that divides up one large monitor into a couple of virtual screens, so you can have the benefits of side-by-side maximized apps without giving up full-screen gaming.
A great bunch of papers. I read some of the LaTeX related one's as I spent a good part of my youth trying to tame it!

I'm pessimistic about software in general. When computers were the province of the technically sophisticated, people wrote software for technically sophisticated users. Now, technically sophisticated users are an insignificant niche market. Standards are being
driven by the marketplace, which cares only about the masses. So, mathematicians have no place in the brave new world of computing. They will have to make do with the same ashy but technically impoverished tools that the little old lady in Peoria uses.
So, you can display video animations on the web, but there's still no good way to display a mathematical equation.

So very true.

Thanks for the link.
There are plenty of iPhone apps out there that aren't really apps at all, but just content of one kind or another-books, recipes, music. The beauty of the App Store is that content that could never be monetized on the open web now can be, and creators who could never make money from anything other than advertising can now make some money. This is a good thing, people.

Look at this thing, it's beautiful. It has a UI, for Pete's sakes! Beats the hell out of every other find-in-page bookmarklet I've tried in Mobile Safari. They've all been atrocities. 99 cents? I'm buying it.
Most mortgages in US are non-recourse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonrecourse_debt
Some Lessons from the AT&T/Facebook Switcheroo
How is Google Voice not VoIP? When one uses Google Voice one's voice is transmitted over an IP network, that seems to be the very definition of VoIP. Attempting to claim otherwise would seem to be to play semantic games.
This headline is terrible by the way. The original headline at Mobile Orchard is much better.
Solid Stone Tablet Disappoints Apple Fans
You have to wonder what their methodology is. Hopefully nothing like this:

http://xkcd.com/605/
In the US, you will be accused of being sexist if you say that there are any differences between girls and boys that aren't due to "gender stereotyping".
Absolutely right! Bookmarklets are software like any other and deserve to be treated both by their creators and their users with the same respect and expectations that any other software gets. Great work, by the way-I'm happy you took a craftsman's approach and made something worthwhile.
It's not as much data as one might think, especially if you store the deltas -- there's not that much variation between individuals. That fact has actually been exploited to a great extent in enabling the $1,000 genome.
> but governing China is difficult, and without the ability to censor the internet, they too might fail.

Chinese history is full of fail like this, either the state is over secure, it lost it ability to prosper and be creative, or it's partial secure and ultimately transforming the whole state to a slave factory beneficial for a minority power group, or it was so secure internally but after a hit by the external (nomads) the whole state fail. Or it's not secure at all, it was hit by nomads and fail.

The western world did wrong on many levels during this Google flamewar

1. Never accuse C.C.P. gov't directly & plainly, they already have dozens of counter plans ready, and they are experienced dealing with it. You have to use tactics to play with CCP gov't

2. Democracy, freedom means nothing in Chinese culture, esp. in average people's subconscious mind. Sometimes it even means some fuckedup ideology sponsored by the US Imperialism.

3. Keep the flamewar off politics and there are more chances of winning. We (Chinese) knew Google and the others will lose the battle as soon as the state.gov announcements came out. The CCP gov't has an ultimate weapon, patriotism. Any dispute can magically transformed to national security and ethnic pride by the hands of the official propaganda dept. No matter how reasonable you are, you will be overtaken by the patriotic voices inside this country overnight.

4. Use C.C.P.'s own claim to slam itself. For example, the CCP proudly declares it as a 'public servant', then why should a servant censor the master's mind? During days of the initial introductions of the Internet, many early official textbook in China declares the Internet as something without borders, with no political regulations, everyone can join and speak, but now it says it must be ruled under the Party's law and to keep the state stable.

5. The word 'censorship' sounds trivial to Chinese people, you have to use more severe and native expressions to interpret the concept. For example 'Literary Inquisition' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Inquisition, or Naming Taboo. Because the CCP propaganda actively condemn these actions, it's irony and hilarious to see itself doing the exact shit right now. Another classy example is you can't copy paste China's Constitution Law on most of Chinese forums, weblogs or message boards because the system will prompt you there's 'illegal' keyword in the content.

6. The CCP gov't always accuse the US for it's cold war mentality, esp. in the pre-WTO days, but the Party now acts exactly like its role in a Cold War. There's even a growing anti-globalization hype inside China that the state should abolish foreign stuff and make Chinese alternative completely on everything
Yeah, I thought this was going to be another rant about the app store rejection process or something.
McGraw-Hill CEO: "The tablet is going to be just really terrific"
Cheapskates know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
And it does not seem to work if Javascript is disabled.
Why copying Apple just doesn't work
That speaks to the intolerable nature of working in one of these bureaucracies. I could not agree with you more. There is a lack of talent in this field and a lot of it has to do with the leadership. Decision makers not only do not understand the potential of suggested solutions but also are unwilling to take the risk on homegrown or non-vendor supported solutions. In doing so they alienate the talent that works for them and forces them to look elsewhere.

I'll outline a hypothetical problem... Large institution passes on homegrown solution (no vendor support problem) buys large commercial system. Large commercial system takes years to integrate into med center culture and legacy systems, problems abound. Innovative students/professors/physicians/staff suggest enhancements to better... everything and do things the system does not and was not intended to do. None of this gets done due to short sighted, risk averse administration and lack of integration support from vendor. Nobody at med center knows how to decipher the gargantuan database schema or access their own data (programmatically) outside of the commercial gui. Frustrated talent walks out the door. Rinse, repeat.

Now, if these systems came with documented bidirectional open api's then people could just do whatever they wanted (with appropriate access controls, duh). If someone wants to write a new and better client for Twitter they do not have to ask twitter for permission, they just do it. Although vendors do use HL7 for ADT related activities, there is way more to a modern day EHR than that. And before people start beating me up about protected HIPAA data, simply control access tokens to pump fake data during development.

Speaking to your other point about HL7, it's inherent standards, CCD/CDA and HITSP, I agree, there are certain proposed solutions but how are they actually employed? Whatever incentives ARRA is offering they just are not enough or geared in a fashion that may make a dent, imho.

I don't know if you can tell, but I am highly disillusioned as to the state of the state in this industry. Best as I can tell leadership in this area will come from out of the way, non academic, regional for profit hospital conglomerates that will force change to drive profit. Once the rest of the field sees their results they may join in in any standards those leaders employ. Hopefully they will include the bidirectional open api concept. I'm not holding my breath.

EDIT: When I say "if these systems came with documented bidirectional open api's" I am speaking to your point re "they are rarely implemented properly". These existing api's may get the job done, but they are rarely implemented and if they are, they are certainly not implemented properly. Perhaps that should be incentivized as well?
Playstation and XBox don't appeal to kids-mayhem ensues. (video 2008)
The top level index is a clojure map (a persistent hash-map by default i believe) of strings (stems) to another map of key to weighting. The hash-map is implemented as a Bagwell Trie under the hood. Check out http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/09/08/understanding-clojur... for a lot of detail on the implementation, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie for a general overview of how Tries differ from Trees.
Sadly, no commit in almost a year: http://github.com/fab13n/metalua

(The article itself is from 2007.)
How is the keyboard on the Kindle?
If I were a local paper/news-source, I'd try offering business subscriptions to SMEs that included online access for employees, coverage/feature/advertorial for products and services, and a general online advertising component.

Right now, the advertising presented on local news sites in Australia seems to be a mixture of random AdWords junk and larger-budget stuff (big auto sites, etc) but not much in the way of really localised small-business advertising.

With more information on readers (down to postcode and age-group), I think they could definitely do more to sell small businesses on online advertising; I'm talking about butchers, school enrolments, tradespeople, restaurants, etc. The concept I mentioned would both collect info on readers and bring small businesses into the newspaper's community.
Even with all the free/bundled subscriptions, they admit that traffic is way down:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/newsday.com/

The paywall actually only went up at the end of 10/2009, but even so it's clear that audience loss accelerated, something like a 25% loss in November.
Doesn't Mozilla get most of its revenue from a Google search deal?

(the reason they block Mozilla is this mobile site/app probably uses Webkit extensions that won't work on Mozilla)
Does TV Make us Dumber-er?
Alan Kay: With the Tablet, Apple Will Rule the World
Girls in Tech's Catalyst Conference today
Ummm, you just described half my married life! :-) Perhaps I should take a hint...
They do live up to their agreement.

The non-recourse loan agreement spells: the loan is secured by the property the loan it taken against, and if the borrower defaults the property is repossessed by the bank.

The recourse-loan agreement spells: the loan is secured by the property the loan it taken against and all borrower's assets (except secured protected assets such as 410k or IRA). If the borrower defaults the property and assets are repossessed by the bank via bankruptcy proceedings.

The Paulson's quote is exactly an attempt to guilt people into taking more responsibility than their contract requires. Something GS would never do.
I just bought it and replaced my crummy old Find in Page bookmarklet in Mobile Safari with it, then gave it a test-drive.

It's GREAT! Exactly what I always wished for. Thank you vais for creating this!
Take into account that traffic fell from 2.2 Million to 1.5 Million unique users in the 3 months that that paywall has been up.

So out of the 700,000 uniques that stopped reading, they only converted 35 to paying.
Microsoft's challenge: 90 days to beat Google
McGraw-Hill CEO Confirms Apple Tablet Is Coming Tomorrow
At the core, what's the difference, really?

And it's interesting you bring up the BSD license, as a license is enabled by copyright.
Here's the NY Times home delivery signup page:

https://www.nytimesathome.com/offer.php?id=31&SPTR_ID=hd...

Prices quoted weekly, but appear to be billed bi or tri monthly (depending on payment option).
I really dislike making phone calls. I don't have time to perfect my thoughts as I do when writing them out. I forget questions I wanted to ask. And I often talk too fast and thus stumble over my words. Email is so much better.
Why? It may do things that you can find for free elsewhere but that does not mean it is not an app. At the very least, the wrapper that delivers the bookmark is an app.
Nice, though I switched to using the faster and more capable iCab ages ago. Have even replaced Safari as the system default browser with it.
Don't think of the person you're having a conversation with as an antagonist.
Jobs has got to be pissed.
High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace [2008]
Ironically I had just finished publishing a blog post (http://jeffmould.blogspot.com) on why I don't think Bing is quite there yet. Their engine appears to have a bug somewhere that doesn't index sites unless you have numerous backlinks to your site. While some may not consider this a bug, it makes it difficult for the little players (myself being one) to be included in a real time search engine. Google on the other hand had indexed my blog post within 30 minutes of me posting it.
Nope, and the worst one I remember offhand is the mute button on the Treo. Nothing worse than making a comment, looking at the phone, and not being able to tell if you were muted or not.
Yeah, that's presumably the last time McGraw-Hill get to do any pre-release deals with Apple. It's not clear to me how that stunt is a net gain to them.
Agree with all, but just curious as to your preference for login combo? I tend to use and prefer email/password and sites like Facebook and Twitter use the same.

Never been a fan of username/alias (too much variation per site - can never remember if I used John, JohnD, JohnDoe, JohnDoe77, etc) and no one can remember every account number they might have across the net.
This is a great article, but I don't notice the "awkward silences" aspect of turn-taking to be as much of a problem as interruption and waiting to say something.

That is, as soon as you get an idea you immediately begin plotting to share it with everyone, and you either blurt it out or you stop listening until you get a chance to talk (thereby causing you to say things that don't seem to fit in the conversation or make it seem like you aren't keeping up)

Not yielding the floor when appropriate is definitely a problem too, but doesn't always result in awkward silences.
I have a DX and I don't really like the keyboard all that much, my main gripe being that you can't lock it into numeric mode. So say if you want to go to a specific page number or location 123, instead of just typing 123 you have to type alt-1, alt-2,alt-3 (or at least hold down the alt key). Other than that, the keyboard is about as useful as any mobile phone type keyboard - which for me means entry is quite slow.
iPhone-based OS. I wonder if everything will have to go through an App-store? Annoying if so.