skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel I was a pretty good programmer to begin with, and everything I ever learned only added to my knowledge and professional sanity, not to my raw skill. Metaphorically, I don't seem to run faster every year, but I do get better at choosing the path.
The evidence for evolution can stand on its own.

You've never tried to talk to a Creationist, have you?
Just in case you haven't looked, delivery sites (e.g. seamlessweb, delivery.com) incorporate restaurant hours as a core feature. Not that they're great reference sources, but they're working with the same types of data.

Restaurant sites seem to suffer in much the same way as many other industries with typically bad websites (say, real estate, legal firms, and local services). I think this might be due to the difficulty of marketing to small businesses and a general lack of (or perhaps ignorance of) technical savvy.

Thanks for the effort to make local restaurants more "usable" -- this type of endeavor can only help if it manages to catch on.
I have a hard time imagining some sort of weird result where we have radically superhuman AIs that just can't seem to convincingly fake being human.

I have a hard time imagining it too, but I see no good reason why that couldn't happen (which was the whole point of the article I think - our current technology can easily make many different things that can fly, but we are still incapable of making something that really flies like a bird).
"I think expecting everyone who drives to be as knowledgeable as a NASCAR driver is foolish, just as I believe expecting everyone who has learned a behavior to adapt every time something subtle changes is too far."

The discussion at hand is about whether we can expect people to have at least an acceptable level of competency. The shock that we are collectively feeling at the iPad and the RWW incident is that we have perhaps over-estimated our audience, and that we DID expect users to adapt to our interfaces, because we were already designing for usability.

I'm not sure if our expectations are too high, but I think they arise from our own experience in interacting with the world, which is likely characterized not by impatience and confusion, but by curiosity.

So no, I would not proffer economic advice a serious investor, but neither would I throw my hands up in the air in a discussion about federal money policy. And yes, I don't expect everyone to be able to disassemble their engines, or build their next dining room table (hobbies I pursued before coming to electronics and programming), but I am often disappointed when people exhibit no curiosity about the objects around them or the circumstances of their existence.
You're probably right. I remember reading in his book "the road ahead" about his obsession with actually using the Corbis collection in his own home, with photos that updated all over the walls etc . . .
I was lucky with my then girlfriend, now fiancée. We were moving into a smaller place so she had no choice but to heavily cull her belongings. Although the process was painful she has now been converted and regularly voluntarily gets rid of more stuff just because it makes her feel good to have less junk around the place.

Your method of dealing with gifts is a good idea. I've always found publicly opening a stream of gifts a bit vulgar. Whenever possible I deal with any gifts in private or with only the gift giver there. Having an audience, celebrating the giving and receiving of stuff just seems distasteful.

"gift feeding frenzy" That is the perfect name for it.
Hey there. I've used Urban Airship with client projects, and have been extremely satisfied. I don't work for UA, but I do know one of the founders, in the spirit of full disclosure.

UA's API for push notifications is best described as the API Apple should have provided for APNS. At first blush, it doesn't seem to add a lot of functionality -- but once you spend some time with the API, you realize that the UA folks put a lot of engineering effort into making your life easy. Feedback service? Much easier. Push to a group of devices? Yes. Device tagging? Yes. Scalability? Not your problem. Easy-to-use control panel for debugging during development? Yes. Getting started with UA literally took me all of five minutes from installation of the python UA client library to first device registered & notification sent.

Given how little they cost (recently lowered prices, too) and how much potential headache they take off your plate, I would warmly recommend them. I briefly considered a "build-it-myself" approach, but scalability questions made it an easy decision. The first 250k messages are free (IIRC), and if you get to the point where you are actually sending a million messages a month -- you probably have enough revenue to cover the $1-2k in UA fees. There's no contract, so there's nothing preventing you from DIY when it makes financial sense to leave UA.

To top it all off, the UA team is friendly and responsive.

I haven't used their in-app purchase framework yet, so I can't speak to that.

Hope this helps!
Open Standards Throughtout the Globe
Well I see that now in his other comments, but the phrasing of the comment I replied to wasn't quite right. Discrimination outside of businesses can still be immoral and affect minorities heavily.

And last time I checked, a couple decades ago also includes 50 years ago.
Wow, 5 million is impressive. More impressive, that the US is not even 1/3rd of their user base. Talk about global adoption!
I'm really curious about this as well.
I seem to have accidentally linked to the #disqus-thread version of the link. If anyone with mod powers (?) happens by and can fix it, thanks in advance.
Its worth moving every 12-24 months just to avoid this. Even if you only move 5 minutes down the road. The process of culling Vs packing and shifting tends to help you dispose of junk you've accumulated. The prospect of moving again in the near future also makes you view potential purchases much more critically.

People talk about being broke so they have to hold onto all this stuff. What they neglect to to mention is the money that they paid out acquiring it in the first place. You know what's cheaper than buying that thing on sale? Not buying it at all.
Justice lawyers try to define cyber war
Factor (language) 0.92 released
Seems like a simple and reasonable approach. Thanks.
I see what's happening here. He's taking a shot at Flash. Right? No, he's taking a shot at a terrible web designer. Wait, no again. It must be taking a shot at a restaurant owner who saw a moving website with flying cheeseburgers and thought it was really cool and demanded the same thing from the web development company he/she hired.

So, "Website" that's totally ignoring me, I apologize for accusing you of being Flash, when in reality it's your advertising and marketing decision makers who are clueless.
Why there’s no such thing as "the music industry"
Thanks for sharing the info!
Jeff Beck, Guitar Hero, Won’t Play the Game
Photoshop Cook
and hey, why not? i was amazed at the attitude difference between his blog post (extremely angry, implying that tumblr SOLD it to pitchfork and did not care of his interests) and the letter he sent to tumblr (polite, to the point). whats more, it doesn't look like he waited to hear back from either party before the letting loose the slander and finger-pointing. did he even email pitchfork for an answer???

hopefully tumblr will release some sort of official position on it like pitchfork did. and 3.5 months is not very long, but the its not like the posts were actually anything important accorindg to that screen shot. maybe tumblr should add a new feature that shows a message on login to let the user know that their domain may be reclaimed.
The point is that the owner should be interested in what please their customers not what looks pleasing to them, but it unusable by their customers.
due to the fact that the decision is made without the coercion of a punishment by God

Except this isn't true, at all, so you can throw out that invalid assumption. The things a religious believer does (at least, speaking for myself) are done out of love for a God greater than them, not done out of fear.

religion as a deferment of curiosity

Religion, in fact, holds science to a higher degree of authenticity, because it demands logical, empirically validated reproducible processes for someone to believe it. The entire basis of quality science is empiricism.

At least religion calls certainty in the unempirical "faith".

In science, that f-word is a big no-no. It would be heresy to admit that science has no greater certainty about the true unknowns (aka "why") than religion.
Yes we've definitely looked at those type of sites - our whole project started out of the fact that we hate the review sites out there and the delivery sites just want to make a buck on providing the menu, not providing a good source of information on the restaurant themselves. It's becoming more strategic but was borne out of frustration with not finding a good source of information, or seeing bad reviews always at the top, or irrelevant reviews. along the way, opening hours became a source of pain so we detoured a bit to focus on it.
I have a popular local restaurant as one of my clients (and have worked off-and-on for others), so here's the scoop: the more technically-savvy restaurants get their websites from the same people that provide their point-of-sale systems, and those people are part of the "industry software" problem, such that they're constantly running about 5 years behind everyone else.

This applies at least to Restaurant Manager ("RMPOS") and Digital Dining, both of which make life much, much harder for restaurant owners. Same deal for grocery stores, too. Have you ever wondered why you couldn't just load your local grocery store's website up and see what their current price for bread is, or if they're almost out of eggs? All business reasons aside, it's largely because their databases are (probably) running some hinky form of Pervasive SQL or Btrieve, which stores their information in a hard-to-decipher, proprietary format, which among other wonders "deletes" records by replacing them with nulls in the monstrously large flat file that represents their product database. (The registers communicate with the server over Samba with the help of a shared file...)

For this, restaurants and grocery stores pay tons of cash. Wanna make a bunch of money? Go fix this. Restaurant owners might even name their children after you.
SeeqPod Founder Goes Back for More Bludgeoning
sounds like playdar, which was written to ease the load on streaming services. http://github.com/RJ/playdar-core
One thing that I find to be very valuable is to perform self assessments after significant milestones. I consider what I did well and what I could improve upon. Then I consider how to improve. Always exposing myself to new ideas and trying them on toy projects amplifies this technique, because it gives me a source of ideas for the "how."
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned allmenus.com - a bit menu-centric, but still lists the hours of most restaurants.

It's a spin-off of campusfood.com, so it has online ordering capabilities built-in.
Blogs and sites

* Joel on Software
* Coding Horror
* Paul Graham

You don't have to agree with them all, but knowing others' opinion help you make yours.

I also hang on Hacker News and StackOverFlow a lot, HN gives varieties of news and StackOverFlow programming related. The interesting in those communities is the user base (smart developers), so you can learn a lot from them.

Try to browse the HN archive and read it. Use google

site:ycombinator.com "Ask HN" or "Ask YC" +a keyword.

This will give you discussions on niches you want to know about.
> What's worse still is that it took the iPhone not supporting Flash for everyone to realize that Flash actually isn't needed for most things.

In the case of restaurants, it's even worse though. These are the kinds of businesses that people will want to look up information about while they are out (and presumably away from a desktop/laptop with internet access). So making it inaccessible to the kind of people that would want to look for your hours before deciding to become your customer is a detriment to you bottom-line.

Note that it mostly has to do with iPhone/Android making web browsing on a phone a less painful experience. Phones had browsers before that didn't support Flash.
It sound like they did not try very hard to contact anyone, this is pretty bad even from a free service. If this was a facebook or google doinging this there would be a huge shitstorm from you guys.
> I personally see religion as a deferment of curiosity

I can only speak for certain branches of Christianity here, but this "God of the gaps" notion of God's role in the universe can't really even be called "antiquated." It is a fairly recent invention. Early Christian philosophy (the "church fathers") and much of Orthodoxy espouses a constantly unfolding creation.

I really hope that this notion, that theists just use God to explain what they don't understand, can be dispelled in the next few years. Unfortunately we have plenty of Young Earth Creationists in the spotlight here in America and they only seem to be getting louder and getting more attention.
Somewhat ironically, the image of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is a Photoshop (among many other debunkings, see http://www.hoax-slayer.com/elephant-moon-quiz-question.shtml ).

It's a minor point, but somebody commenting on how stupid users are to believe anything that Google says has himself fallen for a common Google-powered meme.
Yes, that is how security should be done. I read that report and am simultaneously amazed that this system is being embraced and disgusted that it isn't more widely adopted.

All the TSA does is turn people off US travel - it is 'letting the terrorists win' by having huge effects on the USA's standard of everyday living.

Once again, all rhetoric, no evidence. I keep waiting for the TSA to realise that this is all security theatre and change to an invisible, but effective security system.
I don't mind the missing 'e'. People still use Flickr.
Did you relocate away from family for a better job or another more interesting experience? Minus one

Not buying it. I like my non-immediate family (as in other than my wife and daughter) but if I didn't see them for several months it wouldn't bother any of us. Communications technologies and modern society mean that physical contact with our families isn't as important as it used to be for quite a lot of us.

Do you have fat friends? Plus one

This article is hokum.
"According to Association of Independent Music (AIM) '(...) A 'major' is defined in AIM's constitution as a multinational company which (together with the companies in its group) has more than 5% of the world market(s) for the sale of records and/or music videos. The majors are (currently) Sony BMG, Warner, EMI, and the Universal Music Group (which incorporates Polygram).'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_record_label

Four labels control 95% of the market? Sure seems like an industry to me...
I am a huge advocate and fan of empirical science and all that has brought us, but when people go clobbering religious believers with the science bat as if they're somehow "more certain" about that which they cannot empirically experience, nor empirically reproduce, then that's when I call BS.
On existential issues (the only legitimate grounds of disagreement between science and religion), Science and Religion are equal. They are equally uncertain, although many people can't understand that. Both have a mountain of faith-based assumptions about things we cannot EVER determine empirically.

Faith, after all, is being certain of what one cannot see.

By your argument you should personally be equally uncertain about whether gravity works on the surface of Pluto and whether I am a giant octopus. After all you are unable to travel to Pluto, and you are unable to track me down and verify that it was not a giant octopus who wrote these words. In your words, both are claims about things that you "cannot empirically experience nor empirically reproduce."

Yet despite your inability to empirically experience or empirically reproduce either gravity on Pluto or any data pertaining to my octopus-hood, I confidently assert that you do not find your uncertainty on those two issues to be even remotely equivalent.

Why not? Because you have established mental models of how the universe work that make it difficult to believe that gravity doesn't work on Pluto and make it difficult to believe that there are giant octopuses posting on HN. Yet this is exactly the type of certainty that you say you'd call BS on in others. And if you met someone who strongly believed that I am a giant octopus, and expected you to accept it, I'm sure you'd be rather flabbergasted.

Science is nothing less or more than the distillation of the successes of several centuries of work on producing and testing better mental models of how parts of the universe exist. Mental models exactly like the ones you used to tackle the data points I gave you. (In fact every part of the mental model you'd use on the Pluto question, including belief in the existence of Pluto, came out of that scientific process.)

Please think about this example carefully. Then try to apply modern mental models of the universe to questions such as whether people get possessed by demons, water can turn into wine, and people can come back from the dead. You should find that those questions all look far more like the giant octopus claim than gravity on Pluto.

Whether or not this list of dubious factual claims in the Bible changes your belief system any, I think it is sufficient to make concrete why it is not just BS for people with a strong science background to look at a concrete religious tradition (Christianity in this case) and dispute specific claims that religion makes. Even though it involves reasoning about events that you "cannot empirically experience nor empirically reproduce".

And once someone has disputed the basic facts of the central story, what grounds are left to accept the other beliefs of the religion?
I tend to agree with you about the value of ethical behavior, but I would assert that many people who claim to be religious act as though they are not coerced by their God to do anything. Therefore, ethical behavior is quite valuable, from wheresoever it comes.

It's true, there are some highly ethical religious people, and some highly dogmatic and unthinking atheists.
Roger Ebert on What It's Like to Not Eat
Square's On-the-Go iPhone Credit Card Scanner Will Cost $1
There was a bit in the news a few months back that a woman from mainland China used surgically alterated fingerprints to gain entry into Japan (after multiple deportations). Notably she was not caught because of the fakes, but simply after they arrested her later for other reasons. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8400222.stm
Correct me if I am wrong, but you cannot trademark the name of an everyday object, such as a pitchfork, and then have rights to any use of the word in a domain.

So do they have the rights to pitchfork.wordpress.com, pitchfork.heroku.com and pitchfork.github.com ? Of course not.

This is not about IP, this is about a company doing their friends a favor. I will now stay away from tumblr. If I cease posting for a few months they could take my domain away.
Credit for this goes to jcdreads: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130429
The good news for video pirates is:

-- Every time a video is encoded, it hashes differently. So a studio could find a torrented file and find people downloaded that exact copy, but they couldn't just ask for every copy of a show.

-- If this became a problem, you could toss some random metadata on a file and it would hash differently. Or zip a file/program with a text file containing a guid. Etc.
One explanation I've heard for the PDF menus is that they have to have PDF versions anyway for printing, so the least-effort solution is to just put the same PDFs online.
Here's why I am an agnostic - because you can never absolutely certain of the existence/or lack thereof of God ! But the main problem is, IF there is a god, and if he created us and left us all here to kill each other and try to survive by not getting oneself killed, that is a very cruel, sadistic and uncreative god, by the modern moral yardstick! So even if there is a god, I don't think I would respect him by my present morality !
Google App Engine Blog: Scalability means flexibility
TSA agents are sworn law enforcement officers. They train at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy.
http://fukisushi.com
> Correct me if I am wrong, but you cannot trademark the name of an everyday object, such as a pitchfork, and then have rights to any use of the word in a domain.

You can trademark the name of an everyday object. See 'Apple' computers vs 'Apple' the music label. Now they only have a trademark dispute is someone in their industry has the apple.com or apple.github.com or whatever (e.g. if Microsoft or Dell registered apple.wordpress.com, Apple might have a case to take it away from them do to brand confusion -- which was the original reason for trademarks).
google is a trademarked term but it is a also a scientific term describing a certain number. It is illegal to use the name 'google' for business but not as a name. Again, it also is a word to describe a certain number.
Prince Rehearsal Videos from 1984
Mozilla Jetpack 0.8 adds Places and toolbar integration.
I get a mention in this. It's clear that "the reason why I'm not using Lua," which is what I talked about, is not the same as a discussion of "the reason why Lua isn't talked about."

But I think I can weave my first comment into a comment on the second: The amount of discussion is dependent on the scale of useful projects. Bloggers, as a rule, try to fit everything into sound-bites. The big, complex projects where Lua gets used successfully are not easy to sound-bite, and the (hypothetical) average programmer can't relate to them; instead, blogs focus disproportionately on "tiny code-snippet hack" cases: take, for example, the "reddit in n lines of foo" meme. Those things are not particularly useful or informative, but they drive a lot of programmer traffic because they're just interesting enough to get attention without being difficult.

A project like Sqlite fits in great in the "code-snippet" case. It fills a certain application need - persistent storage and queries - and has lots of bindings so you can use it from most languages. It reuses well-known concepts from SQL databases, even if the actual implementation is different. So it's easy to talk about, and it's easy to include by default for a broad subset of projects.

Lua, being a "full" language, has some unique concepts and syntax, and an integration process requiring a little bit of thought and effort, which makes people feel uncomfortable. The benefits aren't immediately obvious. They'd need a bigger push to habitually include it in _most_ projects. So it fails the code-snippet test.

Rails is another good example. "Look at how easy it is to get a useful webapp running!" That was the original draw. It worked because, as it happened, when it came out, programmers were desperate for exactly that kind of solution. The people who bought into this soon generated additional waves of hype, because they realized that Ruby was more expressive than Java/C++/etc. that they had been using before, so you got a lot of "Why Ruby is better than x" follow-on posts from people who had never seen a dynamic-typed language in their life.

It is a case of "stupid gimmicks," of course. Sqlite would still be useful without using SQL query syntax, and Ruby would still be useful without Rails, But I think that's the kind of thing Lua needs to gain hype. A Lua-based project that, within a specific application domain, makes it easy to create cool, useful hacks.

(LÖVE seems like a pretty good example for this, honestly.)
Mildy apropos, I was talking to an aeronautical engineer this weekend, who dropped the phrase "You can make anything fly if you can make it go 200mph."