skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just an opinion of a long time android user:

I never really understood the need for multitouch in the browser:

On Android, i just doubletap on a column with interesting content and the browser zooms in, rearranges text to fit into the screen and it's easily readable. Best part: i can do this while using only one hand. It's probably because i am accustomed to that now, but i think most iphone users are just complaining because the don't know it can be just that simple and easy. It's really that good, imho. It's very rare for me to want to zoom deep into a picture, where i would understand the benefit of multitouch. (In that case +/- controls appear on the screen when you touch it, so it's not really inconvenient). Yet, as the iPhone is also using Webkit, does it support that doubletap? That'd be nice :)

BUT, i can see the benefit on google maps, as there are no predefined areas (text columns) to zoom in, so i'm looking forward to this update :)

Besides, if you didn't know, the european version of the Motorola Droid(Milestone here) has multitouch. I guess it was because of some legal uncertanity that it had never multitouch in the U.S.?
a) Why does the browser display 2 progress indicators when a page loads?

b) Double tap in browser - does it do the same "smart" zoom that the iPhone/Mobile Safari does?
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1096474
I don't know why Adobe's clinging to Flash so tenaciously anyway. They can't make that much money from it and it always seemed a little tangential to their core competencies of making graphics/DTP software. It's not like they put a lot of effort into it or anything; it has sucked, badly, for years.

Let it go, Adobe. All things must end.
I kinda like the way syntax the parent used. It seemed to make sense and work with the whitespace.
I only ever use short-lambdas in map functions (common lisp), or long-lambdas (for the :callbacks) again in lispworks (a common-lisp implementation) CAPI (GUI from the company that made LispWorks).

Once you have good syntax established for using lamdba-s in any form - they would be used. First users would be as I've put above - callbacks of sort (GUI, IO, etc.)
On a whim ...

http://www.zideck.com/blog/about.php

Working professionally for less than 2 years with a pseudo-rant like this?, he must be in the young-smug-know-it-all phase. I feel like this could be the case because I was in that phase not too long ago.
Pressure mounts to phase out IE6
On that note, I'm a fan of the speculative lock elision in the Azul Systems machines. When the JVM sees a synchronized section, it can create a snapshot of the current register and memory state and execute the critical section speculatively, checking for memory access conflicts with other threads, and roll back the changes if there's a conflict. Actual locks are a fall-back option.

It's a special case of hardware transactional memory. (Specifically, bounded best-effort HTM; it can only track a limited number of memory changes, and aborts if you push it too far.) It can give small but non-trivial scaling improvements on multithreaded code.

For example, suppose you have several threads that want to change a hash table. They could lock the whole hash table first -- or they could go ahead without locking, and abort if there was an actual memory conflict. Essentially it lowers the granularity of locking, automatically.
Yes, the iPhone supports double-tap to zoom, and it works reasonably well. I rarely have to pinch to zoom in or out in order to get a better view of the content.
Dear Starbucks, here's a wacky idea
Do you hate Apple news?
You know Hacker Newspaper does look nice :-)
http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/
This is the comment where I note a moderately interesting aspect of the issue, but as the discussion has already tapered off, nobody will notice it.
It doesn't seem to affect publishing houses that Macmillan owns, e.g. "Farrar, Straus and Giroux". The book of friends of mine is still available: http://www.amazon.com/Our-Life-Gardens-Joe-Eck/dp/0374160317
This works if you want it to be available for just you.

Say for instance you have a dev server, so security isn't as big a deal* used by a team of people, all of whom would want access to the same basic packages. It seems that /usr/local/ or some other world-visible place would be the location for this stuff.

That you don't have to be root is the same way that you don't necessarily have to be root to install programs in the usual MacOS way of running a GUI installer. If you are part of admin, you're already privileged to sudo anyway, so the protection you get is primarily psychological; you type 'sudo', and it triggers the part of your brain that pays much closer attention to what you put on the command-line.

But as I mentioned to rbanffy, it is very possible I am missing a key risk that makes this a very bad thing to do. I am open to enlightenment. ;-)
To quote what Adobe exactly said: "Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."

Ofcourse saying "Back to the dark ages of video due to incompatibility issues" in headline doesn't generate clicks.
The browser text column of the article initially is set to the width of the screen, so it fits and you don't have to scroll horizontically. I sure hope it remains that way, because this feature is really a nice one (see my other comment).

The map screen goes grey because there it is still loading the data for that zoomlevel. While there could be some icon indicating the loading process, it's not that bad, i think.
Agreed. Article makes it sound like those iraqi bomb detectors.
Nexus One gets multitouch, also 3g fix in automatic firmware update
Many sites deliver video by H.264 in the absence of Flash. It is seamless to the user, and there are no blue legos. The fact that Flash is missing from iPhones and iPod Touches, and that people with those devices are using the web, produced this situation. The "Dark Age" is already here, and it's not a dark age.

The link I submitted is indeed both an example of the "Dark Age problem" of HTML5 (that Firefox refuses to support H.264); and that video can be delivered quite satisfactorily via HTML5, without Flash.
While Flash is pretty awful, I think it's plain the only reason Apple doesn't want it on their devices is because it allows for functionality that Apple don't want you to access without you paying them. http://listen.grooveshark.com/, for example, completely voids any reason to pay for music over iTunes. Not to mention the thousands of games and other content that offers an alternative on their proprietary store front hardware.
Ah ok. Glad to hear this, because i really like it. I really rarely zoom other than that, because in general i just want to read some article on a news page..
This is the comment where I stiffly thank the parent commenter for eir explanation.

(Meta: I'd avoided trying to do the latter, lest I punish people for referencing a type of comment I don't like.)
OK, I haven't Read The Fine Article, but an earlier item from the IEEE that I think was submitted to HN pointed out among other things that neighborhood transformers aren't sized for high output 24x7 (they need off-peak nights to cool). California utilities expect to lose some this year in areas like Santa Monica.

There were other issues mentioned, like a Canadian utility that sells cheap "green" hydropower to California during the day and saves up water during the night; if they/California get a lot of nighttime demand they'll have to buy coal fired power from another province.

Hey, the system was build under one set of assumptions; if you change those drastically as the electric car people propose to do it won't adapt automatically or cheaply. You can't fool Mother Nature.
Great advice. I use and recommend Monit for exactly this: http://mmonit.com/monit/
Sort of covered:

"Ideally, you've designed your system such that real-time human intervention is never required; every failure should be handled automatically, with repairs needing human hands neatly enqueued for processing during work hours."

My takeaway: Above a certain scale, one needs to stop responding to individual failures, and start responding to statistics.
Obligatory: http://i.imgur.com/1gF1j.jpg
Multi-line, multi-statement closures are tremendously useful in Smalltalk. They're the "secret sauce" that makes Don't Repeat Yourself easy to pull off. You can use them to implement your own control structures, your own notion of transactions, etc. And all (or most) of the above esoteric hackery looks like ordinary Smalltalk.

People are down on I statement Lambdas because they don't do all of the above so well.
I don't hate Apple news. Or Google news. Or CrunchJooJooPad news.

What I hate is that every 2 bit blogger posts derivatives of the same piece of news. Many times this news snippet is devoid of solid facts or hard evidence, which of course causes all the armchair pundits and fanboys to begin speculating on why this news is the best/worst/biggest/whateverest announcement and how it will change life as we know it.

Layer on top of that the general karma and attention whoring that is so predominant these days, and the tiniest fart is echoed and amplified to all ends of the blog-o-sphere (another annoying term).

I've though about writing a HN-style site where similar stories would all get grouped and rolled up into common topics, with a new-submission throttle (had 5 iPad stories in the last hour? You'll have to wait 45 minutes to submit the next one).
Latest Balsamiq released
It would have been a great freedom for the devs, at a company of facebook's size it wouldn't have been disastrous had they not really achieved a great enough performance boost to justify it's use.
Internet backbone breaks the 100-gigabit barrier
So, a NYT article about nothing, literally.

Also, title needs some grammar check.
How often do you shift into neutral with an automatic transmission? A panicked driver probably wouldn't think to take unfamiliar actions.

I agree that cars should have kill switches, but I forgot to mention a disadvantage of them: killing the engine kills power steering. If a driver accidentally hits the kill switch they could have trouble avoiding obstacles or making a turn. Motorcycles don't have power steering and riders are familiar with the kill switch.
After this, can we still make fun of C++? I use it daily and love it. Sure, it takes someone with a brain to use it, but once you learn C++, nothing else comes close for speed and expressiveness... seems FaceBook just verified that. So while people who cannot code in C++ will still talk about it as if they know it, it continues to kick ass in solving real-world computing problems
I dont see anything wrong with "vote for me" type links/ icons. Mixergy, which has very good and relevant content to HN readers, has the right to promote its content just like any other site, as long as its done respectfully and unobtrusively. We really need to get over this anti-marketing bias - like it or not, its an integral part of startup success.
at least 1 youtube video
If one factor - large reserves - leads to economic problems than this guy is dead on. But it doesn't.

Economic success or failure is due to many factors.

He should have chose to argue with Jim Rogers, who has much more credibility, than Friedman.
Interesting how that ended - "Kelleher lost the match, but the event generated so much good will and publicity that Stevens let Southwest continue use of the tagline." I wonder if that was the plan from the beginning. Everybody wins.
How to Get Your Users to Donate Their Organs & Open Up Their Privacy Settings
I suspect for interoperability, using a single framework is the most likely to succeed. But this is the whole point of open source, right? Let the community enhance it in awesome ways.
FuseJS aims to improve the JavaScript frameworks you already use
How things like fonts and color contrast can affect judgment
> In any case your insight makes me ask - is mainstream OO just a poor outfit for procedural programmers trying to stay relevant?

Essentially, yes. C++ was invented because large companies wanted to add the "object-oriented" buzzword to their products. Needless to say, the language is a disaster.

Java was an attempt to fix some of the problems with C++ -- primarily, the complete incompatibility of manual memory management and exceptions. Java was a success because any C or C++ developer can sit down with a library reference and begin working, and the resulting programs usually worked better than if the same developer had used C++.

Next came C#, which is an incremental improvement over Java in the same way Java is an improvement over C++. It adds a few useful features from more advanced languages (closures, true generics, properties) and restores some C++ features removed from Java (unsigned integers, operator overloading, preprocessing). Again, its most important feature is that it's not very differing -- a C++ or Java developer can be up and running with C# in a matter of hours.
Great point about the evils done in the name of freedom.

I recently spoke at length with an older man who was deeply involved in Vietnam before the Kennedy and Johnson escalations. At the time they focused on killing specific communist leaders and training the South Vietnamese -- pretty much low-key guerilla tactics. But after Diem was assassinated the full military-industrial complex was engaged and they all had a party with Other People's Money.

True about the US civil war. Slavery was part of it. A burgeoning abolitionist movement, both in the north and south, threatened the institution of slavery. Many southerners feared slave revolt ("servile insurrection"), and many northerners feared an influx of freed slaves. The advent of mechanized agriculture was also making slavery obsolete. The other part was tariffs. If the south seceded, the north would be hard up for revenue. Even the governor of New York was talking about secession, and battles were fought in downtown Manhattan.

The industrial and technological change of which you speak also made the US civil war particularly bloody. They fought battles the old way, facing off in lines, but did it with vastly improved weaponry. That's how you got over 20,000 people killed in a single day at Antietam.

I am very happy to see increased awareness of the perils of force. The 21st century is bound to be a happier, freer time. (wink ... gulp)
> Author: If you want to learn Python's real mantra, try typing "import this" in the interactive shell. One of the lines you'll read is "Explicit is better than implicit," which should give you a clue as to why there is no "implied this" in Python.

Among other things being that he's calling it this which means he's breaking loose convention and making other Python programmers who read his code say, at least briefly "Huh? This?".

That said, one point of huge value to the explicit self variable is that it makes it INCREDIBLY easy at any given time to glance at a method and say "Oh, this method attached to this object IS|ISNT an instance method".
Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge
Apple Demands Removal Of USB Sharing Feature
I personally took comments off of my blog. It seems like news aggregators are a better place for commenting.
Please get a grip, this isn't web 2.0 bullshit, for the authors affected here it's their lives. No one worth a damn self-publishes for very simple reasons, self-publishing doesn't pay out over a years salary in a single check to enable you to work on your next title. Self-publishing doesn't pay for your advertising and publicity or even getting your books into a single bookstore anywhere on the face of the planet.

For most authors their job is to write, that's what they're good at and hence is why they do it. They're not marketers, advertisers, or anything. They're writers by definition and occupation.

Macmillan is trying to increase the prices it can sell its ebooks for to what they're considering realistic prices. Whether this is true or not isn't the matter of debate here.

The question here is the unethical behavior of preventing the distribution of titles from ~25 publishing houses, all subdivisions of the Macmillan Publishers group, despite already agreeing to said groups terms. Amazon has already quite clearly stated they're accepting raised prices. Obviously this bargaining ploy was never going to hurt Macmillan in the first place, but it's seriously hurting many genre writers who rely on the online booksellers like Amazon to provide the selection mortar-based stores cannot.

Macmillan has bestsellers for sale, which are predominantly bought off the shelves in mortar-stores. Either in real bookstores or through Walmart, and even drug stores. However, it's the genre writers who have relied on Amazon to distribute their books to their fans, search their websites and, until now, their titles would most likely have been exclusively amazon-linked. Amazon, well aware it sells the predominant amount of Genre books on the market, was willing to pull Macmillan books, including its imprints like Tor/Forge, Minotaur, Griffin, etc. who cater exclusively to genre.

You come off as simply ignorant of the publishing world if you truly believe 'self-publishing' is an alternative to mainstream writers. It never will be an alternative. Novels published exclusively as E-books in the near future will still go through an update of the original process where advances are paid, or it'll never catch on as anything more than a tertiary market like audio books.
Oh haha, the last line of the article says "let us know how it goes in comments once you give it a roll."
Engadget has comments disabled right now :D Funny.
His argument is that large reserves do not protect from economic problems. This is in response to Friedman's assertion that the Chanos analysis is wrong because despite excess capacity, China can use its currency reserves to stave off recession, which isn't true.

In the article he states explicitly that large reserves do not necessarily cause economic problems.
Remember when the meme was "%90 of web apps will not reach a point where scaling is an issue"? Well, of those who do reach it, %90 will not reach a point when PHP's execution (assuming you use on of the existing code accelerator, all which are free IIRC and one will be bundled with PHP6) is the bottleneck.

It's a cool hack, but really targets Facebook-level needs. For most users, the downside (eg compatibility issues) will far outweigh the benefits.
> Why artificially limit yourself to 98% of the Internet?
You shouldn't. But you're telling yourself that 100% of the users on the 'net will be using an HTML5+JS power browser. See how that doesn't make sense?
An Education Syllogism: Why Education Must Change.
True, it would be more surprising, but on the other hand I was thinking you're probably nearer to obstacles such that you don't have enough time to accelerate to lethal speeds before crashing into something.
Will Wikipedia, Wikia, and other major MediaWiki sites use this? (Does MediaWiki code use eval()?)
Unless you're a hockey player.
Dudes, Dan Woods here, A copyediting error introduced that problem. The sentence now reads: "Groovy has its own version of Ruby on Rails, an open source project called Grails, which is now part of VMware."
After looking briefly at their 2009Q4 conference call transcript, they reported "Platforms" (Flash) revenue at around $47 million and "Creative solutions" (photoshop, etc) around $430m out of ~ $750m total. I'm not sure if you can cleanly separate out how much Flash is worth to them, since I'm sure part of that Creative solutions revenue is for Flash authoring tools.

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/q409Script...
Thin Film Turns Any Surface Into a Touchscreen
I tend to agree with you, albeit reluctantly, but let me ask you this: If another country, say China, had that sense of purpose, would you know?

We don't speak their language (at least I don't), so we cannot watch their version of Hollywood movies or read their version of Hacker News. Therefore I wouldn't be too confident in my beliefs. They might turn out to be cliches.
Actually I was basing it off the Language ShootOut. Last time I looked through it properly, Python was 16x slower than C, and PHP was 70x slower.

I wonder why its changed. PHP certainly hasn't gotten faster in the meantime.
In response to your first comment I think the idea that developers that don't use PHP are better or brighter is absurd.

Not that it matters anyhow for most roles you neither need nor can afford to hire the best and brightest away from their current role which they probably love a lot(being the best gives you the ability to choose great places to work). So unless you're looking for a tech lead you're going to be looking for great, much better than average but not specifically the best and for those conditions PHP will give you a much larger developer base to choose from every day of the week.

As for the last point I think you're really reaching here to find a negative. A large community to handle bugs a hindrance? Seriously? And your alternative ideal solution is some people down the hall in your office that know how to use the language well?
Has anyone been able to dig up the patents on this? I tried a quick google patent search to try to get more technical detail on what they're doing and how they're doing it, but I haven't found the patents. They mention patents, but don't say much about them.
Interesting how the woman walked inside to check the television? Sometimes reality must be verified.
Very fortunate for your friends, however it has affected many of their imprints. However, not all books on their imprints seem affected.
This is the comment where I apologize for downvoting you. This is not a comment where I make any reference to the article.
the website was probably coded in Vi and the logo drawn with MS Paint.
Any suggestion as to what particular text or resource I should get?
Why use HAML (and SASS) if you already know HTML?
They've done a few nice things (let's say the baths, but not much else), but their instincts are certainly not friendly towards openness. It's tactical cooperation, kind of like in the saturday morning cartoons where there's always one episode where the bad guy has to cooperate with the good guy for some reason, and it turns out they work well together, and the good guy suggests the bad guy give up his evil ways, but it of course never happens.
You're right, and I guess this shows how driver education can save lives, especially now that drivers really don't need to understand how cars work (I sure don't). Years later, I still distinctly remember my instructor describing what you could do if your brakes fail.

Are you sure that power steering requires the main engine, or does it use a different power source? Perhaps the kill switch could disable everything except power steering, unless it's held down? I've read that turning the car off using the key doesn't disable power steering unless it's turned all the way, so that would provide similar functionality.
Adobe could fix almost all of this by open sourcing the Flash Player.
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Projects
The PHP internal community is disfunctional. If I were Facebook, I'd do an much as possible without it.
I'm responding more to the outburst of (self-)righteousness happening right here on HN right now.
This is the comment where I say you really avoid the problem in the article if you just code in Common Lisp.
Facebook appears to be using C++ the way C++ devs use assembly. We can definitely continue making fun of it.
you'll probably see no changes in your day to day life as a result of this

I'm fairly confident about that... I gave up PHP years ago :)