skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't want faster as in more throughput, I want faster as in lower latency.
Imagine if we could actually develop software that could depend on the internet being lower the 1/60th of a second. All the logic we have to do in games hide latency would go away. We would then be able to just pass back and forth input streams and have our simulations sync by exchanging them back and forth. Perhaps 1/120th would be ideal so that both parties feel a sub 1/60th of a second response time.
oh im not directing at you at all!! sorry if you got that impression. more angry at sensationalist journalism that is so far removed from reality. sometimes it's good to submit stories like this, since they spur discussion that argues AGAINST them :-).
Thanks! I commented on the article mentioning that since Mark Liberman was asking for empirical studies.
It's extremely naive to brazenly ignore a police officer and expect no reciprocal action.
According to what criteria?
isNaN() will return true for anything that can't be coerced into a number while !(x == x) will only be true for the NaN value itself.
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I'd argue that it's legitimate in the same sense as "What You Can't Say" http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

It's a specific instance of some unquestioning assumptions in our society, which, in many cases, are quite dumb. And the "quick few facts", which I did give them, didn't help at all.

Also I'd consider being pulled off the streets during an afternoon run quite egregious, but then again, I lean libertarian.

As far as shoes go, I use FiveFingers (when I use them at all).
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My first attempt at using LUA as a web scripting language. What do you think?
If you know Ruby, you could check out AuthLogic.
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All of the best republicans I have known are their own biggest critics. All of the best democrats I've know have been as well.

The problem is that its the most cock-sure on either side that get into the intractable arguments with each other, or worse, rush into action so sure that they are correct that they never even consider the unintended consequences.

Sadly, it also makes them much more likely to be elected.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. - Douglas Adams
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That it works more like Emacs than Vi, which is an advantage to someone who uses Emacs "for long haul editing".
I'd bet you're maintaining legacy C++ code. If so, while it's good to look at good C++ code (like Boost and the materials you can find on the C++ FAQ) chances are you're going to run into some fairly gnarly code--especially if code has been maintained over several years by several developers. Having maintained C++ legacy code in a commercial app for the last 5 or 6 years--I wish I had some good advice to share. There are a few things:

1.) May sound obvious but good version control is essential. A seemingly innocent change can have nasty side effects. You need to be able to revert to a known to be good state easily.

2.) Watch out for side effects. If something looks odd it may be because there was some very valid reason for the odd construct. Some of the developers working on this commercial app decided to add a copy constructor to a class which never had it before. Ironically, when they added a copy constructor, it trounced all over some bitwise copying code that had been hacked in years before. Hence they had to go back to an older version to straighten things out (see point 1 above).

3.) Add intermediate variables to help yourself understand the code. You'll probably see constructs like this:

func1()->func2()->func3();

This means that func1 returns a pointer which is then used to get func2 which returns a pointer which is then used to invoke func3. This is horrid code but it seems to be a very common antipattern in C++ code (at least in my experience). Adding variables to hold intermediate pointers can help a lot in understanding what the code is doing and in checking to insure that you're testing for bad pointers.

Those are just some thoughts off the top of my head.
Honestly, I haven't even tried anything else because I'm just so used to HotChime. I've been using it for 7-8 years now and can't work without it. I know it's not polite to toot your own horn but I would have said this about HotChime regardless of who wrote it. While I can't compare it to Launchy or others, I can tell you how HotChime works.

No matter which app you're in, press [pause] and type anything. If it has a space character in it, it will Google it. Otherwise, it will launch default browser to www.[whatyoutyped].com. If you have predefined [whatyoutyped] to something else, it will open that (website, file, folder). I have HN mapped to 'h', Slashdot mapped to '/.' (literally) and my local weather to 'w'. You can also setup custom %s searches for F1-F5 key. I have F2 = Wikipedia (mapped to chir.ag/wiki/%s e.g. http://chir.ag/wiki/hacker ), F3 = Dictionary, F4 = Thesaurus, F5 = PHP manual.

It's not that useful for average users but for powerusers/keyboard-types, it works great. Also, it's a single 37kb exe, no install/uninstall. Do realize that I wrote this in 2003, long before every browser had a search box and before Google had maps/local-searching. Yahoo was the first browser with zip-code searching. If I made a new version, I would add lots of small features like built-in calculator, suggest, file-browsing etc. But for now it works well for me.
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At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life

Can apply to almost anyone reading it:)
Just because most people don't share your viewpoint doesn't mean you are correctly questioning the mainstream assumptions of society. There has to be some novel or persuasive reason why your viewpoint is correct and I don't see that here. A minority opinion does not automatically qualify under the "What You Can't Say" test.

I have many libertarian views as well and I want police to stop all barefoot runners in the middle of winter. I especially want them to stop barefoot runners in the middle of winter who appear to be speeding up after asked to stop. What would you say if tomorrow in the newspaper you saw an article about a mentally handicapped kid who ran away from home and was hit by a bus and killed? Would you be angry at the police because they didn't stop him? I wont trade my liberty for anything, but I will allow myself to be inconvenienced for one day in my life if it means I increased the chance of survival for another human being by 0.00001%. Would I allow an illegal search of my home or car for that? No. But I will certainly cooperate with the police on a minor issue.

Also, cool about the shoes. I thought about buying FiveFingers but honestly it was just too big of a leap to go straight to those. :-p How long have you been running barefoot for? I'm wondering when I can get even less supportive shoes, but I want to avoid injury.
Good point, thanks for elaborating.
I like to think "hackers" (or those with engineering knowledge) have a small "shit we don't know" area. If I am to, say, put up a wall where there was once a door my first reaction would be, "Oh, I need to look this up." I would find it via some search engine, read about it, and then find the specs for a wall. Find that I need drywall, footers, etc., see if there are any special circumstances that apply. Is there shit I don't know? Possibly, but I think "we" do research twice and action once.

Edit: Or who knows, maybe I don't know that we don't know when enough research is enough.
The report the article is based on

http://www.jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/2010%20Index-...
In the left corner we have an advertising company whose flagship product is closed source software, and in the right corner we have a software company whose flagship product is closed source software. Linux users, declare your tribal affinities!
Ask HN: What happened to Winamp?
I was avid user of Winamp 12 years back when I was in high school. I am trying to figure why people really stopped using it? Shifted to different Mp3 players? or online audio/video?
Read "Judgment Under Uncertainty" first.
Nothing to see here. Linux guy bitching that yahoo paid more than google to be the default search engine of Ubuntu.

Also, he mentioned Ubuntu-one, but doesn't point out that it's just a dropbox clone...

Flagged for inanity and inapplicability to HN
Why is this downvoted? This is exactly what the experimental results coming out of the field of heuristics and biases say.
No, that would be a gigantic waste of money. I can't imagine why I would use Yahoo (what does it really do again?) right now (let alone in five years!)

I signed up for a Yahoo account thirteen years ago (1997), which let me chat on their boards, play simple games (a little while later) and use Yahoo mail (later still). When Gmail came around, I closed my Yahoo account and I haven't looked back since.
> The largest observed difference in support for spending was between the traditional category "welfare" and the two variant forms "assistance for the poor" and "caring for the poor."

It's the same reason unpleasant jobs have the name of the job changed every 10 to 20 years. Janitorial services, custodial services, sanitation technian, etc... in the beginning, it avoids the stigma of what it is - cleaning up dirt/filth/etc. Over time, people catch up, and you have to change the name of it again. Arguably "Secretary" to "Executive Assistant" is the same thing.

Welfare works similarly - when it's rebranded, it does well for a while, then sinks back down into unpopularity. When someone says "social safety net" these days it tends to evoke a more favorable response, but they usually don't mean anything significantly different from general welfare, unemployment, and other state-provided assistance. But a social safety net doesn't have the same associations with welfare, so it's more favorable right now. If social safety net acquires the same connotations as welfare, the name will be changed again in 10-20 years.
That's fine then. It's better to use high level components to build a product that's correct (i.e. does what customers want it to do well) and then make it fast then build a fast, but incorrect product.

Be careful, however, with treating scale as equivalent of performance. You have to design for scalability, not optimize for it: given the same algorithm, sorting a list of items in python might take 50 times as long as doing it in C; yet using an n^2 vs. n log(n) algorithm a 1 000 000 item list would take 50000 times as long to sort.
The analogy with a driver's license is completely inane. What's the worst that can happen if you go about blogging the wrong way? Some people get upset, maybe sue for defamation or something? Big deal!

Go about driving the wrong way and people can get hurt or killed; that's the motivation behind requiring a driving license. There is no comparable public-safety issue behind requiring a license for operating a computer, nor is there any need to regulate access to a scare shared resource (e.g. radio frequencies). There is just no compelling reason to bother, apart from the creepy, coercive ones.
Also, Netflix clarified that they aren't doing 1080p this year: http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/netflix-1080p/
Coming from a technical family (as I assume you are technical) it's probably easier to get him in to some of those things. For younger people who perhaps don't have the same level of guidance from an adult it can be useful to identify areas or professions that they may not have considered or even been aware of.

I remember when I first started programming - I tried it out because it seemed interesting. I realized something was different when I was completing week long assignments in 20 minutes and watched everyone else really struggle.

Sometimes people need whatever help they can get in finding some direction. If they aren't fortunate to have a person or environment to guide them something like a website with information about the MBTI can be a rough substitute.
> Flagged for inanity and inapplicability to HN

Flagging is new downmodding.
Was that an app that came with Windows 95?
Same here. I think the reason why we used Winamp was because it was the fucking cool edgy underdog. After it was sold to AOL (which is as uncool as can possibly get) and got loaded up on corporate features, we moved on.
Because it's not particularly insightful? Also, humans aren't "fucking crazy" so much as they make near-instant judgments sometimes in flawed ways, with associations, context, language, and thought getting jumbled up and being hijackable sometimes.

(That said, wow, it's so cool to be responding to a comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky, you're like a hero to me and brilliant and thanks for all your work on Bayes, rationality, and thinking, and tsuyoki naritai, and that three worlds collide story, and all the rest - seriously, huge admirer of yours here)
Freemium Founders: Start Charging for Things Today – Tony Wright dot com
"... Four or so of them ordered PIHKAL.... They all got delivered, except for one. The last guy had a knock on his door and the rest of his order hand delivered by a customs/federal police officer/similar who advised that it probably wasn't smart to be ordering banned books from overseas ..."

Interesting. You can sort of understand the correlation between specific recipes for elicit drugs like amphetamines which are dangerous. I'd never thought about classes of information restricted that way. Nuclear physics is another I can think of. Whole slabs of nuclear theoretical physics have been removed from common knowledge. Another, military information of which Paladin Press is well known for.

The irony, the information in each of these areas are still mostly actively used, or at least only a locked up "instruction manual" away.
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I think Napster happened, and frankly had a great music player interface (for it's day). Then iTunes came later and (at least back then) it was light and fast.
I question the validity of any assessment that is presented to assessors (the paying customers) as a verified and reliable instrument, but then presented to the assessed as a "starting point", and who should be instructed "...that the respondent is the expert; the only person who can verify which type fits best."[1]

It may test something to some degree of accuracy, but when the makers of the test turn it into a game of picking which of 16 all-positive self-descriptions they like the most, I have to wonder what the point is beyond being a well-marketed horoscope.

[1] http://www.myersbriggs.org/myers-and-briggs-foundation/ethic...
AOL bought Nullsoft. After that, it was pretty much all downhill. It went from an mp3 player to a mp3 player / video player / web browser / digital media library / online radio / toolbar / etc...
I think the point of a stylus or mouse is precision. It only has a side effect of being a familiar writing device.
Main graph and video take aways from the presentation:
-obesity related deaths are responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths than homicide

-typical families have extremely poor knowledge regarding food consumption, eating mostly processed, unhealthy food.

Some suggested solutions from the presentation:
-food education in grocery stores (cooking presentations)

-food education in schools

-labeling improvements

-a new standard of fresh local food in schools

-every child should know 10 recipes that will save their lives by the time they finish school

-better food in the office

-pass on good food preparation and cooking as a philosophy to friends and family

All pretty basic stuff. Know what to cook, how to cook it, and how much of it to consume. It's sad how people live their entire lifestyle on processed junk.
They still refuse to approve that what they should make was a browser instead of investing in an outdated middle-layer, or say it differently, a modern browser now is what flash or java was ought to be? =)

The game of "You need our special VM here" is over.
Or "vim". "vi" is the editor wars' straw man. Never heard of mg.
Interesting idea. I've had prime for a few years, and I'd probably buy a kindle if they gave me $100 off of one.
No problem. At least once per game I end up having to track rogue NaNs. Learned this trick a while back and it has saved my bacon many a time.
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hey guys...

i'm at a complete loss here. working on a project and the owner is looking for a way to allow people who he partners with (his advertisers) a way to be able to provide coupons to users who come to the site.

he wants a self serve solution for the advertiser, so the advertiser can create their own coupon(s), and then the user coming to the site can see the coupons that are available, and select the ones that they want to get. the app could also allow the coupons to be sent to/emailed to the users who've opted-in..

i've been searching all over the place.. anybody have any thoughts on where this kind of tech might be???

thanks
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Ah. I don't know the inner workings of Javascript so I'm not surprised I was wrong. Just at a glance, that problem to me screams floating point limitation.
Isn't that the decision to stop acting for the rest of time?
Or: Shoe racks become a technological breakthrough in Mozilla's Faraday Cage.
What a crock. The things we know amount to nothing compared to the things we don't, and education doesn't even move the needle on that dial. So what? What matters is what you need to know to accomplish some goal vs. what you know right now, and that's much more tractable. Focusing on the (incorrect) idea that no one else knows anything either so you're just fine the way you are is pabulum designed to boost self-esteem at the expense of actually learning something.
new String("foo") === new String("foo") is false. === does not mean value and type are equal, it means that the left is the same object as on the right OR that both the left and right are primitives with the same value.
I tend to agree with this line of thought. Winamp is so bloated feeling now. I recently switched to Foobar2000 and love it. I can play videos with a million other apps, just play my mp3s well!
"... Because it's not particularly insightful? Also, humans aren't "fucking crazy" so much as they make near-instant judgments sometimes in flawed ways, with associations, context, language, and thought getting jumbled up and being hijackable sometimes. ..."

"fucking crazy" approximately equates to "make near-instant judgments sometimes in flawed ways, with associations, context, language, and thought getting jumbled up and being hijackable sometimes" and it's shorter. As a rule I don't downvote these kinds of remarks, just ignore them.
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It doesn't seem very secure that they give out their security measures. I mean, "To increase the randomness of our hash outputs...combines the password with the account name," so now I know they use an account name so what is the point in that tiny part? Many little parts of this just give away stuff that should be secret in my opinion. That doesn't necessarily make it insecure, just a dumb idea if something ever did go wrong. Overall the process sounds good if you just want to store data on their server and not have it be readable if someone happens to come across a "dead" HDD that lavabit threw away.

Oh, on a similar note: how do they decrypt these messages after you have verified your user/password during sign in if it requires the plaintext password to decrypt each message? By storing the password in a plaintext session database?
Funny how the article is talking about slow page loads and the page itself has a little advertising popup.
> Also, humans aren't "fucking crazy" so much as they make near-instant judgments sometimes in flawed ways, with associations, context, language, and thought getting jumbled up and being hijackable sometimes.

With respect, and with gratitude for your compliments, I ask: Is there really that much of a difference?
false & true as the results are how floating point is supposed to work. It's exact for small enough integers and inexact for decimals that are not powers of 2. I don't see the problem here.
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Well, Google followed up on it and she wrote another post about that. http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/screw-you-google/
> Where did you get 95%?

Of course, I just made it up based on anecdotal experience with friends and family. For all I know, my friends and family could just be weird. However, I wonder if you encountered significant selection bias by polling people that are technical enough to participate in Mechanical Turk. Have you done anything other than an MT survey? I bet Flickr has some really good data on how many images get viewed at the default medium resolution and what percentage of people click through to the high resolution versions. Even then, Flickr may skew towards artistic images, rather than just people sharing photos of social events.
It would be great if you created a Linode StackScript. This would allow anyone to replicate your configuration on their own Linode easily.
Some useful tools:

http://www.woodmann.com/collaborative/tools/index.php/Catego...
Related: "Caring for Your Introvert" http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch
foxnews just took me 8 seconds to load. All the JS took 1.42 seconds and flash took about a second as well; 3MB for everything. I have a fairly fast cable connection.

Tested in chrome 5.0 dev
A few billion lines of code later: static analysis to find bugs
There are some technical advantages to charging users from the outset that he does not mention. A whole class of spam problems goes away, and your app doesn't fill up with ghost accounts from people who signed up just to take a look around, never to return.
obviously its not a uniform experience, and there are problems with the article, but i do think it stands to reason that rich content, and in my mind especially Advertising, grind the experience which I recall was faster in many cases.
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I think you might be wrong about the 'underlying protocol'. HTTP is an application layer protocol. If something feels dirty it is to put another protocol on top of it especially if it doesn't add value.

With REST, you are not adding more special meaning than the HTTP methods. Using those methods according to the spec is all there is to it. If that's enough to do your business, why add more to it? Things should be simple as much as possible.
Actually, the last time I did a lot of measuring, Firefox was slower for our app than IE. Admittedly this was a few releases of Firefox ago (FF3 was significantly slower than FF2 as well). I'm no fan of IE, but it isn't nearly as universally bad as the web dev community says it is, and generalizations are risky.
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I think this is great, normally I'm against government involved in things like this and let the market forces decide on optimal choices, but I think in the case of nuclear power -- the amount of regulations -- it might be the only way to get them built.