skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I think JavaScript's "floats everywhere" is worse than most languages. I prefer languages like Python/Ruby that have one arbitrary-precision integer type and one floating point type, or languages like Haskell or Lisp that have a rich selection of floating/fixed/abitrary/rational types with well-defined performance. But some (not all) of the WTFs here exist in all of those languages too. Eventually, programmers working with numbers really do need to learn how to use different numerical representations.
I can attest that your first presumption is true. My girlfriend works at Google and internally it's not that big a deal to share information to your most frequent contacts, since you're generally not doing anything inappropriate or private on the internal corporate network anyway.
Ask HN: From desktop to webapp - where to begin? 
I've been coding desktop client/server apps for a few years (telnet as the protocol). I've built basic websites in the past. Now I'm in an environment where I work exclusively with rich web applications.

What's my best bet for getting up to speed? Should I learn about web servers and HTTP in depth, focus mainly on the platform I'm using (asp.net/iis), or some other approach?

Thanks!
And I'm not exactly sure how your hypothetical example of the government doing something illegal, irresponsible, dangerous, and unconstitutional is supposed to support your point.
Science Valentine
It's not a failure of literacy, it's a failure of URLs as a system. Which company has which URL is determined by a long set of events having to do with competing businesses, events and plain luck that even people here wouldn't care to unravel for most of the sites they visit. The best example I can think of now is when pitchfork (the music review site) was at pitchforkmedia.com, and pitchfork.com was owned by a company that sold hay.

Search, on the other hand, has failures, but those failures are rapidly fixed.
Ah, looks like the headline's been changed: it read "Google may remove Buzz from GMail" when I saw it.
What REST actually is, is not explained on this page. More information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
Point 6 (Sessions are Irrelevant) is really tricky. Fielding says much the same about sessions as this article but there's a lot of room for clarification.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
Just pick up JavsaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. He has a chapter called "The bad parts".
Doing this manually via USB drive is about an order of magnitude faster than over your average broadband Internet connection.

Some downsides to using flash drives over DivvyShot:
a) Not everyone has one;
b) Not everyone knows how to use one;
c) Limited space;
d) Inconvenient--everyone has to be together and wait around while the other guys transfer their files over. With Divvyshot, you can upload/download photos whenever you want.

one of Facebook's greatest contributions to my life was that it completely solved the photo sharing problem

Facebook is definitely a convenient way to share photos, if you and all your friends have profiles and set them up properly. For people who just want to share photos and not deal with all of Facebook's features, DivvyShot is quite compelling.
On hacker news, you respond to messages using the "reply" link below the comment rather than using twitter '@' style replies.
Totally with you on git pull --rebase. Thing is great. More skeptical on git push --force, I think it's better to just revert/make new commits to fix your screwups.
`typeof null` is 'object', not Object. (It's a string that contains the word object.)
The original headline reflected a common interpretation of what was said, but either Google didn't intend that interpretation or they changed their minds.
Point 6 (Sessions are irrelevant) is where REST really falls down as a way of explaining the success or practical operation of the web.
Yup; Number.MIN_VALUE has the minimum possible mantissa and exponent, for example. If you want the most negative possible number, you don't need a separate constant, you can just use -(Number.MAX_VALUE), as 754 reals are signed-magnitude.
I am sorry, I missed the reply link. I will know from now on. Thanks!
Google TechTalk: The Evolution of End-User Programming
Just because I tolerate people doesn't mean that I don't believe there is a special level of Hell reserved for people who require tolerance.
All I see now is:

We're sorry, but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

Maybe it was his real address.
The author, Stuart Kauffman, is known not to be a crank, but when paging through the paper I find a disturbing lack of mathematics.
Interesting stuff. I read a few more articles here and walked away with more questions than answers. CassFS definitely looks fun learning project.

What I'd really love to see, is an article that explains the goals/niche/maturity/strengths/weaknesses of various distributed storage solutions.

Can anyone here offer a recommendation? (For example, here's something similar: http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distrib... )

I've been casually researching this topic for months and I still feel so overwhelmed! Not many people are giving a clear picture of what they're trying to accomplish, when/how their system should be used, and how they compare to others.

I'm mostly asking because I recently ended up writing my own. It's just a Python script that sends a UDP message to all our servers asking who has the file. First person to respond wins and the file is downloaded via nginx. Replication is accomplished with durable message queues which are consumed during off-peak hours. It took days to code and suits our needs perfectly.

I learned from this project that reliable, scalable, distributed data storage is very simple, if you focus on solving a very specific use-case scenario.
This may be more theoretical than you are hoping for, nonetheless, I'd like to suggest Dan Pink's TED talk on The Surprising Science of Motivation http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Pink explains how financial incentives often have the opposite effect on motivation than we would want or expect. He suggests that the causes of true motivation boil down to autonomy, mastery and purpose. The video is worth the 20 minute investment.
A "contact" is someone who you email frequently. That's it. It's entry in an address book.

A user signs up for email from gmail. They don't sign up for "networking". Whatever the fine print might be, it would be clear to her and to any neutral judge that she didn't ask to have Google give her information to her contact.
I use Feverº by Shaun Inman. It requires that you have a hosting account somewhere, but has an interesting twist to it:

You set up your subscriptions as either "Kindling" or "Sparks". Kindling are your essential feeds and Sparks are your supplementary feeds. So Sparks just kind of sit in the background (though you can read them too), but when enough of them start pointing at an interesting story, that story becomes "Hot" and is prioritized by "temperature", kind of like Techmeme does, but for your personal feeds. It has completely wiped out my "Unread Items" issue, because that number isn't really surfaced in the UI. And with the Hot items, you're unlikely to miss something important.

http://feedafever.com/
"A BMW plus a phat apartment in a high rise is difficult to turn down for something that appears, for all intents and purposes, to have about a 1 in 1000 (at best) shot of success."

What's a good place to find actual statistics on success rate and financial return for startups?
seems like it took years before there was any interest in mining facebook and twitter data for stuff like this - the google buzz mining has already started after three days.
Tool For Thought: Devonthink Pro
We gave a whole lot of feedback on our Theora concerns in public:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jul/0078...

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jul/0093...

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jul/0124...
Anyone tried pairing this with rspec? I could see using this to make some more robust ajax tests.
Everything search. Changed my life.

http://www.voidtools.com/
There is a meta-problem here: we can't really know how big that red slice of the pie - the "don't know what you don't know" slice - really is. I think he captured the essence of the learning process correctly though, the "know what you don't know" slice just keeps getting bigger as you get older, thus the oft-cited expression, "the older you get, the less you know".
I pretty much agree with you, but just to clarify one point that you made: this was an issue in the W3C, not the WHATWG.

The whole reason for the creation of the WHATWG was that the W3C was getting absolutely nowhere with HTML standards (XHTML 2, anyone?) and the browser vendors that were actually still improving browsers and adding features decided to get together to create a separate standards body that would standardize on features that people actually want.

Eventually, the W3C realized that WHATWG was stealing all of their thunder, and agreed to adopt the WHATWG Web Apps 1.0 spec as the basis for HTML5, and agreed to some concessions about a more open process and a somewhat different structure from the usual W3C body that heavily favors big corporations which can devote people full time to creating baroque standards instead of actually implementing anything.

Sadly, it's looking like the W3C group is starting to devolve into the old behaviors that killed it in the first place, with confusing private lists, with decisions being made in face-to-face meetings and teleconferences that favor professional standards people instead of actual implementors and users.

Luckily, the WHATWG still exists, and still retains the option of just going off and doing its own thing again if the W3C gets out of hand. I don't believe that it will come to that, but it can if it needs to.

Just wanted to clarify, since the way you phrased your comment made it sound like this was a WHATWG issue, while in fact it was a W3C issue.
I really like Brief, a Firefox addon. I like minimalism.

It has folders.
I can't recall any other sources other than that Robert Lustig talk, but from what I've understood you gain more fat by metabolizing sugar than by actually consuming fat.
I have a startup idea surrounding this that I think could be killer. I'm working full-time (on another startup) but I'm applying to YC anyway because I think it would be an easy hack with huge benefits and the possibility of making a lot of wealth. If you're interested I'm looking for a cofounder -- email me at daniellefong at daniellefong dot com.
Confucius said it well: "To know what you do not know is the best."
While I have nothing against the sentiment/content in this post, I think the structure leaves a lot to be desired. Why anger your readers if you're going to give in anyway?

Far too confrontational, imho...
Classic brands vs a new breed of iPhone games
DropZap:  Upcoming split-screen two player mode for iPhone/iPod touch version.
"So I start wondering how many times I do exactly the same thing."

Not so many times. People who fall into your description do know they are BSing, what they don't know is some people actually know they are doing so. I have seen a few of these who actually know their words are total crap, know that everyone doubts them, put keep going with a straight face. They are also the kind that usually get promotions and pay raises.
I don't think the article is exactly right. Young managers stick around at hedge funds not just because they get incentivized with a percentage of their returns, but also because it is hard for them to raise sufficient capital to start their own fund. Most of them would probably prefer to manage that 25-100M in their own fund and take the entire 20% of generated returns instead of sharing it with the fund. Generally when they have the experience and contacts to do so they _do_ go out and start their own fund.

Quite the opposite, it doesn't take much capital to start a web company any more. Consequently, lots of teams of engineers can leave a big company and build up value on their own with out the support structure (i.e. capital) of a bigger company. Then they have the freedom to get paid the market value of their work in an exit, instead of their returns being determined by a single party (the company they worked for) with no competition.
Google desktop anyone?

It's fast and searches in your outlook email. I get about 120 emails a day and reply to a lot of them. Any effort to organize them (I recommend CleaContext for this task) will include some errors at which point only a powerful search tool like google desktop can help.
Draft of a book on natural language semantics in Haskell
GF: A framework for parsing and transforming both natural and formal languages
I understand that's the case as well. A lot of low-carb diets, such at Atkins, allow you to eat as much fat as you want and you'll still lose weight. Dietary fat is bad for your cardiovascular system, though.

The food that contains 0% fat doesn't contain any fat. That's actually useful information. If people think that 0% fat foods are automatically good for them, that's an education problem not a labeling problem.
Here's a "wtf" from the site:

0.1 + 0.2 === 0.3 // false

I'd say that whoever posted that needs a lesson in how floating point works.
Plus, the iPad has a stylus that ships with every user. Multiple, in fact.
"This is one of the areas of business where the MBA graduates of this century can and should really focus on: restructuring the modern corporation to allow for proper incentives and encourage innovation."

MBA grads might be the worst people to attempt this. A typical MBA grad is no shape to make innovative changes in a corporation.
the pressure is not to ignore but to reduce that complexity. People who ask you questions expect that from you, the provider of information. They expect you to reduce that complexity, and if you are not doing your job, meaning you give them too much information, they will be unhappy. Its not that they don't want to know, but why do they need you if you cannot reduce the complexity for them, i guess this is what most people are getting paid for - for reducing complexity for other people.
Someone who have read C. Shannon may add something about entropy etc, but i know i don't know information theory, even though i suspect it is relevant to what i just said
The cost of Ubuntu's Success
This doesn't solve one problem that sends me running to nano a lot: having very old Emacs versions (usually 21) on the server that don't work with my configuration.
Why does someone go to these lengths and then only measures the least interesting metric?!

Nobody cares about absolute throughput, unless your business happens to be a download service. What matters is latency (above all things) and streaming performance.
Reminds me of the quote from Rumsfeld.

Reformatted by http://www.slate.com/id/2081042/

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
The IETF has its own set of problems: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2009/07/royalty-free-codecs...
Can anyone confirm that blocking everybody like the article advises can be done, erm, subtly? I'd rather not have my mom, sister, and best friend get a message saying I blocked them. OTOH I am supremely annoyed that suddenly I'm part of Google's dumb social network (I am one of those avoid-Facebook-Myspace-etc.-at-all-costs people.)
Issues with Bing’s User Experience Philosophy
Ubuntu 9.04
Or you could just drive around their campus on your cell phone, that seems like a good way to get an employee's attention.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/a-googler-has-his-tiananmen...
Been there, done that, didn't work. We don't even know why GMail was black-holing our mails, but we did everything on their suggested list for getting out of the world-o-pain and still often our mails were landing in the spam folder, hence the switch to SendGrid.
> The world rewards those who cause motion, who act.

I hate to bring Godwin into this, but Hitler acted/caused motion, so did Stalin, so do a lot of bad people. Did the world really reward them?
Seriously, couldn't someone from the Barbie team wandered over to IT for more than 30 seconds? ... Stupid question. Of course they couldn't, you only talk to IT when your magic typing box doesn't work. -_-
Perhaps also have a look at SimpleCDN. Their pricing looks fair and no need to mess with tailor-made quotes over 3 digit amounts...
I've had clients ask me a question and say, "I don't want to know how, just if it is possible?" and I suppose because I think they think it is really hard, I just tell them how to do it, it's like 2 clicks.

But then half an hour later they ask me the same question the same way and so I just say, 'Yes.' and start answering like that, yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes... and they tend to like that better.
I've been wondering the same thing: why does it bother me so much that Buzz auto-follows frequently-emailed contacts, but it doesn't bother me that gchat automatically adds frequently-emailed contacts? I think it might be because having contacts added in gchat doesn't mean I'll actually be communicating with them, whereas auto-follow does mean that some communication will take place... I'm not sure though. Also, I guess that having a strictly professional contact's name sitting in my gchat contacts list is different than that person being notified that I'm following them.
Besides, the problem isn't educating the kids but the parents.

In one episode of Jamie's School Dinners some parents were giving junk food through the schoolyard gate to their children when Jamie had convinced the school to start serving healthy and delicious meals. His Don Quixote like crusade to improve the food culture of the English is worthy of praise and makes him much more remarkable than most TV chefs.
Here's the description. Can anyone tell us if this seems secure? http://lavabit.com/secure.html
Buzz: The perfect spam platform?
You wrote a good post. It reminded me of 'The Origins of Wealth' by Beinhocker. He spends a lot of time exploring why most companies spend most of their time playing it safe and why so little is spent on exploring new markets/business models.

He also makes the point that most companies don't survive very long. I don't think tech is especially unique in this regard.

People probably don't leave the hedge funds because they are in a great situation. Hedge funds managers get to play the heads I win tails I get a management fee game. People, once they have wealth, can be surprisingly risk averse and don't want to risk substantial portions of their own wealth as capital in a new venture.
I think this is my favorite thread of all time.
Architectures for interpreters
My life on the web is open to everyone, and that paradigm isn't going anywhere.

I think the problem that most people are having is that Google is blurring the line between our lives on the web and our lives in our inboxes. Specifically, it seems that auto-follow is particularly offensive because who we frequently email might not be who we want to include in our social networking sites.
They only profit from the sale of the authoring tools; the runtime is free. (In fact they're probably paying everyone to preload Flash.) Their content authoring suite has no real competitor. I can see culturally why they are so wedded to Flash (they spent $3.4 billion on it four years ago) but it's not like CS* sales would crater if everyone switched to HTML5 (assuming Adobe tools started writing HTML5). If anything the market would grow. I think Adobe knows this. The writing is on the wall so far as Flash is concerned.
I've lived in London and in the US for a while and English is my third language (after Romanian and German). I'm quite proficient in English, not as good as my mother tongue, but I understand everything that is said to me and my vocabulary is quite extensive; however my accent is east-european with no doubt.

What I've found out is that while Americans are a lot more insensitive (tolerant?) to broken accents the British absolutely can't stand it. They avoid talking to people with bad accent and will generally walk away form any conversation with somebody of a non-british accent. I've observed this with brits around the world, not only in the UK and for sure it's not related to talking among conationals only: generally they are willing to engage in conversations with people that are obviously not british as long as they speak proper english with proper accent.

Of course you can not generalize the above to every brit in the world however this is my observation.

About blogs I observed in a comparative study that pages not ending in .com are just a bit less likely to be clicked.

About a written message, what can I say? If the English is badly broken I get annoyed too. If there are minor spelling mistakes it does not bother me, substance prevails over form.
That doesn't necessarily help you. If somebody has pulled from you, you'll rebase your supposedly local commits and screw over the person who pulled from you.

Whenever you're rebasing, you should make sure you understand how git works and what the consequences are.
A Clojure tribute to Steve Ballmer
tie goes to the runner, type of deal?
How predictable? Do you mean that for any input x you can predict y?
I find it helpful to think of these three categories as answers, questions, and neither. Being able to articulate your lack of knowledge as a question turns out to be a very powerful way to convert the last category into the first. Questions are important, according to Douglas Adams ("42") and Picasso ("computers are useless, they can only give you answers").

I also think of it as a doorway. Some doors are open to you; some are closed. And some doorways you haven't noticed are there. It's fun to notice a doorway - behind a wardrobe; plastered over - for the first time when you return to a place you've visited many times.

But, for me, it's also humbling each time I realize there's more to it. It feels unpleasant at first (I guess that's my ego imagining I know everything), but then it's freeing and reassuring. Nature's imagination is greater than my imagination.

edit Unfortunately, I feel as though I know all the principles, and it's just uninteresting details - data, information - that I lack. I hope this is wrong, but I can't imagine how...
Great! I watched it.

So now i'm really thinking if we should have financial incentives ...

The thing is most articles that say incentives don't work area about pay for performance, but the problem is if performance is not measured in money it's kind of hard to compare.
Have you seen Joel Fuhrman's ANDI rating system? It's being used at Whole Foods.

http://www.examiner.com/x-672-Disease-Prevention-Examiner~y2...