skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 'Painful' is a perception. It's painful to you, because you're used to something else - it is blessedly familiar to my grandfather; it was the only thing I showed him that didn't need explanation.

Well no i was not talking about the perception. Even your or mine grandfather would agree that an actual calculator is better than the calculator you have in windows, because you have real keys instead of drawed ones. And if you start using the ones on your keyboard, which actually makes much more sense, the drawed ones become useless suddenly. The workflow you have with one of those fakes calculators is not only worse than with a well designed one, it's way worse than with a real one, and that's the whole point.

> If I'm going to use a tool once per month on average, then a slow, clunky interface is far superior to a faster one that I don't know how to use yet.

This deserves to be quoted because it's very true, but i still think, in the case of the calculator, and maybe in the case of other apps, that a way better compromise could be made.
One significant advantage that Selenium seems to have is that it accepts CSS3 selectors as target element patterns. Chickenfoot has XPath, but not CSS3. A bit of a bummer because this otherwise looks like it will be fun to play with.
Muphry's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
I wouldn't go as far as sex offender. It's true among prudish areas of society there is stigma (but then would you want to deal with those type of people anyway).

A lot of former porn actresses/dancers/strippers go on to marry wealthy businessmen, and many enjoyed their work. The same can't be said for factory workers.
There are two parts of this piece: the Anecdotal and the Macro.

Anecdotal evidence seems irrelevant to me. My experience with the U.S. system is completely different from his. I've never wanted to go to a Doctor that was "out of network", I can always get an appointment next day, my co-pay is $10, meds are never more than $20 or so and my insurance company has never come back wanting money from me. Does that make me right? Of course not.

On the macro he's still against France's system for it's "punitively high tax rates that will have to increase unless benefits are cut" and he still endorses a free market system so I don't see this piece proving anything in that regard.
The Ultimate Start-Up Challenge? Hyper Growth
So Microsoft scrabbled to jump on the mobile bandwagon
much later

Uhm. MS released Pocket PC in 2000, Windows mobile in 2003.
Apple announced iPhone in 2007. Google aquired Anodroid, Inc. in 2005, Open Handset Alliance was announced also in 2007. So no matter how you count MS jumped mobile bandwagon earlier.
I just read what I wrote, I sound like an advert! I actually have quite a love/hate relationship with them.

They generally work through things blundering on one thing to the next and I'm not sure how they made it this far. At times they cause more trouble than they're worth but when it's all good, it's brilliant.

They're bandwidth can also be pretty hit or miss outside of Europe (and random spots within Europe and even France too). They disregard it with little interest but that's a bit insane considering the Internet is an international phenomenon. Oh, and not to mention peers can get 5kb/s to one server but then their full connection (700kb/s+) speed to another server in the same datacentre (again, met with little interest).

That said, I have been told (explicitly in an incident ticket by staff) that the monitoring on the 10Gbps servers do not yet work with their routers. As a result they have no way to track the bandwidth usage and impose their 40TB usage on them.

10Gbps for 300/month!
Very nicely put, thanks for sharing
A lot of the general notions about computing embodied in the iPad are revolutionary. The only question is whether Apple will succeed. Microsoft already tried this same revolutionary move with tablet computing and failed. (Because they were trying to drag along Windows. I can see this as I Write this reply on a Windows slate PC.)

From the comments:

The idea of shackling an old business to a new business rings true in so many industries right now.

Watching media companies try to get the web to pay for operating a printing press, for example.

Apple is in danger of falling into this same trap as advancing tech enables form factors that change how people use computers. Their closed strategy could be a serious anchor as such new form factors blossom into a "Cambrian explosion" of unexpected new uses.

The difference between a Jailbroken iPhone and a shackled one is stark. (I can have say app in the background. I use this to make Google Voice calls over Skype on Bluetooth. My normal cell calls are 10¢ a minute Prepaid.) Someone smart could leverage a more open platform correctly and seriously wound Apple. Lucky for Apple, the telecoms are 10x more shackled than they. But that will only save them in the short term.
RE2: Google open-sourcing their regexp library
>People against systems like the one in Canada claim they will cost too much and be of a poorer quality than what the U.S. has now.

They might claim this, but they would not have the data to back the claim up.

* Canadian health care costs less than half the money, per capita, as American health care.

* Median wait times in Canada are the same as or better than in the US.

As someone who lives in Canada and has had many opportunities to experience Canadian health care - from head injuries to electrocution to infected burns to pneumonia - I can state anecdotally that the publicly funded, single payer medical care I and my family have received has been uniformly timely, professional, skillful and professional.
Being a Canadian expat in the US, and having experienced both health care systems, I'll throw in my data point: US care is not significantly better quality than Canadian care, and costs a ludicrous amount more (I know a couple of doctors in Canada and have an idea of the rates they bill the government).

Heck, last time I was in the ER the wait times are just as bad as they are in Canada (4 hours in my case), and one of the primary arguments for privatized care is that it reduces wait times for urgent care. Er, not so much.
Well it's the hills around Seattle, and the Omni founder with the Lotus Elise left to found Delicious Monster.
I am on the pro-porn side since my job and company is built on its existence. Luckily, our technology works well and if you don't like pornography, you can easily buy products/services that will block porn (and other harmful content, e.g., hate, drugs, abortion, etc).

Leveling-up I see pornography as content that will exist irregardless of laws, restrictions, etc. It is human nature that is simply exploiting the Internet medium to the fullest. I.e., it won't go away that easy.
Indeed, programming is more about conceptual understanding than typing speed. I see bubbles as being more useful for understanding how an entire code base fits together than emacs buffers and windows.

Though, if we had a desktop that is infinitely expandable, then emacs, and any other windowed application for that matter, could be put to the same use. Really, bubbles is best as a general workflow paradigm, of which programming is a sub problem.
Secretly, most, maybe all, women like be objectified to an extent, it's part of their dna. Find me a woman who says they wouldn't secretly like to show a bit of flesh in a magazine and i'll show a liar.
Abercrombie feels the sting of bad customer service
A lot of the general notions about computing embodied in the iPad are revolutionary.

Are they?
> Libertarians, on the other hand, don't know or understand the philosophy from which many of their political conclusions were copied

You are aware that libertarianism predates objectivism?

I invite you to consider that to be rational is to WIN. Libertarians, unlike most objectivists, understand this (or at least appear to, in that they tend to take the pragmatic view, with pretty much amounts to the same thing).

If you want good health care, and one system gives you good health care, but is somehow philosophically impure... don't you think maybe the philosophy is irrelevant?
> 10Gbps for 300/month!

That's hilarious, if they actually can deliver.

I might go and try that for a bit :)

My current total commit is 6 Gbps, and I'm paying substantially more than that.
As a stockholder in a corporation (but not an officer or member of the board of directors) your liability is limited to your investment. In a partnership you have unlimited liability for work related activities of your partners. In a C Corp, S Corp, or LLC your liability is limited to your investment as long as you are not an officer or director. The worst case scenario is that you lose whatever money you have given your friend in exchange for the equity.

I am not an attorney, this is not legal advice.
There are some circumstances (e.g., mobile phones) where the efficiency of ECC is useful. But in the vast majority of applications, RSA is not going to be your bottleneck and nobody is going to be attacking the cryptographic primitive itself.

The only difference between AES-GCM and AES-CTR-HMAC-SHA256 is the MAC -- for encryption, AES-GCM just uses AES-CTR. So the question comes down to which MAC is better -- HMAC-SHA256 or evaluate-a-polynomial-over-a-finite-field-then-AES-encrypt. The latter is possible to do in constant time, but takes some work; the former is almost impossible to do not in constant time. As for performance, I haven't done any tests, but just given the bit-complexity of finite field multiplication, I'm sure HMAC-SHA256 is much faster.

For the record, I would never recommend AES-CBC-SHA. That's an absolutely horrible construction which nobody should ever use.
The estimation is wrong, too.

1. Many apps can be written in 2 - 4 weeks time.

2. Many developers aren't paid $125/hour.

I wrote an app for a client that's now on the app store. The development time was six weeks part time, and my rate was substantially lower than $125 per hour (in part because I have ownership of the source and the client has a royalty-free perpetual licence). The client was responsible for the graphics work (custom button designs, icons, etc.) and the content. Counting his own time, he probably spent around $5k total.

I'm not sure if the app has made its investment back, but I suspect that a large number of the 150,000 apps are $5k-or-less investments and a few of them are $10k-or-more. A rarefied few will be even more expensive.
The state of Washington recently passed a law that replaced every mention of "marriage", "husband", or "wife" in state law with "marriage or domestic partnership" and "spouse or partner". This had the net result of conferring all of the same (state-level) benefits on same-sex couples and on elderly people who didn't want to remarry but were in new relationships, while completely avoiding the social/religious question of whether person X thinks relationship Y is acceptable or should be called "marriage".

From a database perspective, there's no reason the Washington state database needs to track gender. It needs to track who's involved in the legal relationship and what legal rights they have regarding each other's person and property. (If we wish to make things more complicated by allowing arbitrary graphs for relationships, we need to write the laws governing those rights more carefully.)
It's interesting how much of HN comments are devoted to media criticism, often focusing on the sad state of science journalism. Maybe with the demise of Editor & Publisher there's room for a start-up here.
Yes, and she repeatedly dismissed any non-Objectivists pursuing minimal government as anarchists. Anyone not under her sway simply couldn't be correct. Like the GOP, she talked a fine game about capitalism, but that is all.
> A lot of the general notions about computing embodied in the iPad are revolutionary.

I've seen the ipad referred to as a large iphone that you can't make voice calls with, and I can't really fault that description.

Which general notions about computing embodied in the ipad are the ones that you consider 'revolutionary' ?

The fact that your jailbroken iphone can do a whole bunch of stuff the 'regular' issue ones can't is actually a strong point against apple being 'revolutionary' in this sense.
> A lot of the general notions about computing embodied in the iPad are revolutionary

Name 2.
Not to snark, but there's a great deal of material on both subjects readily available, and I'm not interested in getting into an argument with a random Canadian or Brit who says eir health care is just awesome. (Hell, my health insurance and health care is pretty awesome, but that can't be generalized to US health care.)
Image links fixed.
I think the idea is that most porn focuses on the woman as the object of sexual gratification. The men involved are merely instrumental to getting the desired reaction out of the woman.

Of course, pornography makes victims of all of its constituents, viewers and participants included.
Excellent ideas in the article. I think it's interesting that he mentions iPhone/iPad apps that emulate page turning. I remember when that was a popular fad for newspapers/magazines that were moving to the web. They all had to have fancy flash/java, whatever interfaces that emulated a magazine complete with page turning animations. It was the kind of thing that must have looked like a million bucks when demonstrating it to the CEO, but was universally hated by actual users. :-)

Other good examples from the web would be the many attempts that have been made to create web based "shopping centers" and museum interfaces that would try to recreate the experience of walking through a shopping center or museum. Of course those all failed wildly because it's a hell of a lot easier to just click on a menu than to walk down a "virtual hallway". :-)
I'm optimistic about our ability to develop technology that addresses climate change, and perhaps some sort of function based on increased efficiency (or the development of new technologies altogether) should be introduced – some sort of constant growth of technological breakthroughs. That's a legitimate criticism.

However, I take issue with the idea that people shouldn't try to dial back (or change) their consumption now to deal with the issue. Until someone invents that car (very low emissions energy, for instance), we still have the horseshit piling up, and there's no guarantee the car will be invented any time soon. I don't want to simply sit around watching it accumulate until someone invents a car, especially when its accumulation could potentially have large negative effects that would be hard to undo (a whole other technological problem).

We do want to help introduce people to these technologies as they emerge (reduce your load of horsecrap, drive a car!) – we just also want to allow people to try to deal with the problem with the tools at their disposal.

PS: Our site is written mostly in slide rule.
This article seems to miss the point.

First, it starts off talking about the iPad and how Flash may not be the CPU hog its made out to be. It then goes on to say that HTML5 is more efficient than Flash in Safari. The iPad runs Safari, in effect contradicting their previous argument about the iPad.

Next, they say that Apple could allow Adobe to make Flash faster, all they have to do is open up access to the hardware APIs. Who exactly wants a browser plugin to have low level access to the hardware APIs?

Seems kind of ridiculous to say that something else is at work here. Does Apple want to kill Flash? Probably, but even if they didn't want to, they've got plenty of reasons not to allow flash on the iPhone/iPad/etc.
Well I was sort of jumping on the same theory as the blog post. i.e. Windows Mobile was a passing thought - and it is only recently their trying to make more serious inroads.

(I clarified my original comment)
I think you just had the wrong expectations about what a PhD is. The idea isn't just to work on interesting problems for 5 years. You're also meant to learn how to function as an academic, which necessarily means learning how to write papers and (maybe) get grants. There's nothing "cargo cult" about that. After all, cynicism aside, one of the best ways to get a paper published is to actually have a good idea.

>Most people I know get a PhD for career advancement, not to engage in the scientific and discovery process.

If you're in your 20s you'd have to be a bit crazy to take 5 years out without thinking about your future career. If PhD programs didn't cater at all to people's career needs you'd have an even heavier bias towards wealthy students in grad school. That wouldn't be good for research.
Works for me. Maybe you are running an older version of OS X?
Similarly, I just use IRB. Languages with interactive shells are great :)
It is important to note that with the current tax rates as high as they are (on the caugh rich, $150,000+), we can't feasibly move to a system like France's would (all things constant) raise tax rates even more, without reducing spending[1].

The key point the author suggests, and which I agree, is the breaking down of market barriers such as:

- Why do I need a $200+ doctors visit to a "specialist" to get a prescription anti-fungal creme? (Answer: FDA)

- Why does a visit to a "doc-in-a-box" cost me $25 (copay) and my insurance company $75+ when I was only there for 15 minutes (after a 30min wait)?

(Answer: AMA regulates supply of doctors. We may have needed that before technology basically automated routine doctors visits, but we don't need such stringent accreditation for a bad cold diagnosis (flu scare).)

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124958049241511735.html
Great article. I've been interested in compilers since my college class and this scratches the itch.
Quote from the article: " The only thing they had in common was an automatic transmission."

I have an answer to this problem: ban automatic transmissions! Now, I say this as someone who drives a stick shift and who believes that is the only Right Way to operate a car, BUT let me give a serious logical defense of this position:

1. This would actually prevent the situation described in the article: modern cars with standard transmissions require you to depress the clutch to start the car. So if you accidently put your foot on the accelerator instead of the brake while starting, the fact that you also have to have the clutch in to start the car means that the engine is disconnected from the transmission. So instead of an out-of-control vehicle you'd merely rev the engine loudly.

2. When driving a standard transmission car, a reaction gets burned into your brain that, any time the car does something you didn't expect, the first step in recovery is to jab your foot down on that clutch pedal. Examples: if the engine revs because you put it into the wrong gear, if the engine dies because you dumped the clutch on a hill, or when you're braking to a stop, the first thing you must do in all those situations is depress the clutch. It becomes a reflex that you don't have to think about. So I argue that anyone used to driving a stick shift is going to press the clutch and disengage the engine immediately even if, or especially if, they are in a panic situation.

3. When you take into account the actual small number of incidents compared to the large overall population, compared to how many other ways there are to have an accident in a car that people are NOT looking at, requiring a physical modification to all car designs for the lockout pedal is a reaction out of proportion to the issue. I argue that either banning automatic transmissions or requiring a brake/accelerator pedal lockout are both outsize reactions, the difference between them is that lazy people who drive automatics would get upset over banning them, while putting in the lockout switch gives lazy people who won't learn to properly operate dangerous machines the ability to be even lazier.

At least, though, a brake/accelerator lockout switch might finally do away with those drivers who drag their brakes all the time (one foot resting on brake pedal while the other is on the accelerator).
He's still against France's system on a macro level vs a true market based system... which seems like an unachievable alternative, unfortunately. It sounds to me like he thinks "Free Market" > France > UK/Canada/etc > ... > Current US system.

And the macro level influences your anecdotal experience too. Will you still have that same care you're happy with if you lose your job?
Then use python 3.
Yeah, but the problem with that claim is that it's provably false, based on statistics from every single OECD country. It's not like one of them happened to make it work in spite of it being such an awful idea -- it works for all of them.
In my experience (physics graduate student), American students and European students do not differ significantly based on work ethic, planning, or organization. Certainly, the variance within each group in those categories is much larger than the difference between those groups.

The significant difference was that Europeans had completed more math and physics course before they had to choose an advisor and commit to a research topic.
Reading your comment I was under the impression they stole someone's design. Looking at your links, there is no resemblance between the two save the dinosaur.

Can you please clarify?
If 255 billion is fatally wounded, someone please shoot me.

I understand they have their problems. Windows 7 is doing well. Bing has been growing. Mobile they're actually doing something with now. XBox division is wiping the floor with PS3.

I think it's the long term stuff that worries me about MSFT. ie- windows and office will one day disappear. what are their plans for then? Maybe they'll just evolve?
The F5 Dog Food Program
I think the biggest problem right now is the lack of standardization of formats. I know that when I was writing sections in our VMM we didn't really think about VM formats. The thing is that your data representation tends to be heavily influenced by the VMM design and therefore VMMs with different designs tend to have different data formats. Hypothetically it's possible to develop a standardized format, but we'll see how far that goes practically.
There is a slight problem, in the US a botched operation leading to death can result in the victims's family getting compensated. In canada you're told to shut up.

Also the banning of private care and noninclusion of drug benefits in most of canada is draconian and half assed at the same time.
Did you actually use the link? In the description there is: "High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!" (emphasis not mine). That'll probably count as an attribution.
Funny that you cite an example meant to satirize British politics. Or in other words, welcome to democracy. :)

The alternative in the US of course is bipartisanism, which has given us wonders not limited to every iteration of the PATRIOT act, including the recent renewal.
I don't really get the point of your examples. No doubt one could also point to cases where academic researchers discovered something that industry didn't. And businesses also tend to have a hierarchical organization.
Ways that video games get you addicted
I use Selenium regularly and while it is exceptionally useful, it's also quite buggy. I heard mumblings some time ago about Google contributing to the Selenium project or even forking it, but I'm not certain what's happened there.
I've done enough marriage counseling to know of the existence of serious downsides to pornography, which is all I asserted. This is not an unfounded opinion.

Had I expressed some statistical conclusion (say, that the downsides outnumbered the upsides, or that under some particular weighting scheme the downsides were 62% worse than the upsides) your criticism would be valid.