skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think teh 'mad libs's tyle helped (a guess), but I agree that the two forms are different in other ways.
I am quite sure not all packages available for download on my Ubuntu box are compilers or text-editors.
This sentence: "Bloggers ... spent a little more time than expected studying the battery indicators, as opposed to the incredible advancements in web browsing for mobile phones." Having Flash on my mobile is not an advancement in web browsing, on mobile or desktop: People block Flash for a reason, and that sentence just comes across as arrogant.
Isaac Asimov told stories of faster-than-light travel and the Three Laws of Robotics (which no robot-maker in the galaxy could avoid). Both are fantasy.

Of course, Asimov was a Humanist.
I was thinking more along the lines of "we tested this, and it doesn't help condition X", not "this will harm you". The article's down now, but I recall the lowest level being "no evidence". That implies that no tests have been done.
The Gmail issue you highlight I believe would only happen when the original outbound smtp server goes dark before it reattempts delivery. I say this because I have been receiving emails from Gmail with greylisting on for a week now.
To say, "There's no discrepancy here" may be literally true if you focus on the issue of scope, but it misses the larger point. TBL said no to what Adobe wanted. You also left out key parts of the respopnse. Here's a fuller version:

The work of the group has grown since it was chartered, and the charter document itself is no longer sufficiently explicit. (See recent W3C blog post on this topic [2]).
This message clarifies what I consider to be within the scope of the group.

I agree with the WG chairs that these items -- data and canvas -- are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area.
And at this late stage the realization comes that reciting poetry in interviews was the silent assassin of my career! Just the other day I was asked to explain a concurrent design and I just couldn't help but recite the immortal words of Halyna Krouk:

Two couplets and a refrain
a carousel
of non-stop passing
at each turn one more door closes before us
with a rusty whinny
legless horses tear into the prairie –
racing
two couplets and a refrain
eyes gaping
two couplets and a refrain
catching up from hind to front
reach out to me
throw me the lasso of a glance
who made us so hopelessly distant
who conceived us such irreparable losers
on this overplayed record
– two couplets and a refrain –
where even love leaves only scratches
Mysterious Hexagonal Feature Floating on Saturn's Pole
The only latest hardware OSX supports is the hardware Apple sells. Even Plan 9 has better harware support than OSX.

The latest version can't even run on non-x86 boxes! My OS of choice runs on just about everything from an ARM-based smartphone all the way to a zSeries mainframe.

That is hardware support.
Yeah, there are a lot of differences here that could increase conversion. The second form actually includes some information about what this message is about, while the first form is completely bare and doesn't clue users in to what they are inquiring about. The first form has a wall of 9 input fields (with no indication of what's required or optional), while the second has 6 with a relatively discreet link for adding an optional seventh. The second has a lot of friendlier language overall, and has the less relevant links at the bottom separated out from the form better, reducing the amount of information that you need to pay attention to when submitting the form.

I think the mad-lib form technique is interesting, and I'd love to see some good A/B testing of just that one change, without all the rest. You could also test reducing the number of input fields, which is also likely important, clearly marking what's optional and what's not, and hiding optional fields behind a link instead of presenting them all at once.
Funny, I thought the exact same thing when I saw it.
I wonder if this had any noticiable impact of the number of spam send. I haven't noticied it on my inbox.
It sounds like your philosophy of testing is about what mine was a year ago. Since then, I think I've modified it in two big ways:

1) I've found that potential bugs, and design problems, are often easier to spot at a lower level. Because of this, I've started using more integration-y tests to build out my initial implementation, and more unit-y tests to fill out additional details.

2) I've found the GOOD use of mock objects: when I have a class that wants to expose its data by calling a method on a narrow, well-defined interface, rather than by providing it through a getter, I'm happy using a mock version of that interface.

I wouldn't advocate it as The One True Testing Dogma, but I thought I'd share it in case you find it useful.
(in caveman speak)

MP: Grrrr. Spec is too big! Burn spec with fire make it smaller!

TBL: Arrrr. Spec is too big. Break spec into pieces with club!!

W3C: Uuugghhhh!!! Spec is good!
Hertz to Rent Nissan LEAF Electric Cars in 2011
i love those dudes. ;)
I was talking about registration mails from 'poorly written' applications. Mail comes after one hour. I am cool.

I am aware that most prominent site do this the right way, but just wanted to mention that some do not.

About the problem with gmail, I was not aware of that. Thanks for the info. I will go grep my logs now. :)
The idea is that you don't move beyond the 1st phase until you've thoroughly proved that your business model will scale. At that point, you DO want to hire managers, and grow your team. You've spent a lot of energy up till that point ensuring that your business formula will work, and it makes sense to take advantage of that by growing quickly.

It is different than the stereotypical valley mindset because the dotcom companies scaled before they knew that they had found a real problem, created the right solution, and sorted out a business model that could scale with more manpower behind it.
I'm a big fan of demo videos. I like to see something in action before I download anything. That in the works?
well why not?

obviously we've let you into HN comments, & you're doing the equivalent of not wearing any intellectual pants... ;)

--

why are you quoting "sponsor"? why use "clique"? you're just trying to use specific questionable punctuation to indict a broad group of people w/o any real analysis of why their motives or ethics are in question.

job creation is likely to be a good thing. if you have specific solutions / suggestions on better ways to measure job creation effectiveness, please state them.

again, happy to argue about these topics rather than you simply ripping on the general proposal. at least we can get to constructive criticism, rather than whether you or anyone else aren't wearing pants.
I was a huge fan of SunOS, I loved my Sun 3/60s and my 4/110. Even though I hate Solaris with a burning passion, I am sad for Sun.
Refactoring and unit tests conspire to play against every inexperienced programmer's greatest fear -- deleting code. If you are dramatically changing the internal details of some code, you will have to throw away the tests that touch that internal code. You're deleting that code, after all.

Your refactor is not unguided, though, because you still have tests for the thing that consumes the unit that you are refactoring. That's how you know you didn't break anything -- the tests for the rest of your program stay the same during the refactor. (And you write new tests for the details of the code that you are changing, so that when you change something that depends on, you still have tests.)

A technique I find helpful is for classes to generally not call methods directly on objects that they old references to. Instead of calling $self->foo->bar, delegate $foo->bar to $self->bar. Then when you get rid of foo, either by refactoring, or lack of need in a subclass, you still have a bar method. Something else can provide it, or the class can provide it for itself. If you follow this rule throughout your application, classes will only be coupled to themselves; and this means that more tests survive refactoring. (Use of this technique is pretty tedious if you don't have a language feature to do the delegation automatically. I use Moose, and it makes delegation to has_a members trivial. Other languages are not so lucky.)
The author here is responding to my comment in another thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146091

I was asking how I could approach making money with my group's hobby MUD, at least to cover server costs, and I had various concerns about how that would affect our team of volunteers as well as our players.

I think the response is reasonable, but I also agree with other comments here that said that the "covering server costs" is the first milestone towards hauling in some more serious money. If we can get at least that far, indicating that the Dark Mists community has interest in supporting its growth, we can then look into some expansion.

For example, we are in need of interested developers who are not about to run off with the source code to host their own MUD or use for their characters' and friends' characters' benefits, as has happened to us in the past on several occasions. A little legal support would be nice.

I recognize that the trust factor is its own ballgame and indicative of the management as well as the community. Every online project has to figure out how to handle these kinds of issues. I am not sure if it is harder with the project being an RPG, since you have to keep a large number of secrets in order to allow your Explorer player enjoy the game.
The Mozilla Corporation (which employs many developers and has revenue deals with partners like Google) is a for-profit company, owned entirely by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

This lets Mozilla have a taxable, revenue-generating entity that is not subject to various restrictions on activity of non-profits. But because the sole owner is a charitable non-profit, the corporation can act in altruistic (i.e. non-profit-maximizing) ways without compromising its "shareholder" interests.

I thought this was a neat legal hack because it uses existing legal structures in an unusual way, and lets Mozilla use the best parts of the non-profit and for-profit structures as needed.
Exercise and Weight Loss: Shouldn't somebody see if there's a relationship?
Right, and here's a message from Masinter:

I think it would be fine to update the charter to include
2D Context as actually within scope if that's what the
working group proposes and the Director and AC agree.

I wouldn't object to that.
(see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2010Feb/0004...)

Compared to the recent message from TBL: I am asking the domain lead to annotate the charter

Unless there's a massive difference between update and annotate the charter that I'm unaware of those sound like exactly the same things.

I'm not saying that Masinter didn't have any ulterior motives (but I'm also not saying he did). But the facts of what people have said in this debate always seem to get ignored in favor of the evil Adobe storyline.
but then why tie people down with minutia that only matters to newbies? forcing people to get over the hump of learning to mine perfectly is silly.

also: you should try Go if you haven't ever played it.
Look at the logs and you will notice a lot of initial attempts that are never "followed through" on, and these are from Google's IPs.

And BTW, spammers have figured out RFC822 now, so this doesn't even prevent a lot of spam.
Interestingly enough, Apple doesn't even allow developers to use the Mac OS's hardware acceleration for video. I assume that is also the case with the iPhone OS which is based on OS X. Is it not? To me, this highlights one of the drawbacks to developing for Apple's platform.

Also, Apple could support the most common Flash scenario (flash video) very easily by using "click to activate" in Webkit. So then if you have a webpage with 20 flash banners on it, they are not all running simultaneously.

I agree that you could still make a Flash game or animation that could use a lot of CPU, but Apple also has the ability to throttle the amount of resources that a single process can take up.

In my opinion, Apple just doesn't want to lose control, as usual.
Heh, I always assume I've broken my mailserver when I don't get any spam. Unfortunately, I am usually right.
That's true. The thing is, if I see why an industry should change, but notice it hasn't changed, there are only two conclusions I can reach. Either:

a) My analysis is flawed, or
b) I've discovered an opportunity to profit.

I tend to assume a), if only because b) takes more work.
Why is it crazy? It's completely true when you take into account that he wasn't advocating a "means of production" that you rent (aka hosting) but one that you actually own.
Having been (or been close to) all of the above types, I'm pretty sure this isn't correct.

You actually want someone who has 1) an eye for the future 2) an understanding of risk 3) a clue as to how to run companies and 4) the ability to say no.
Compare correspondence chess and speed chess to OTB chess--the game is the same, but the experience of playing them is quite different.

that's a good analogy.
Certification aside, OS X's treatment of X applications as second-class citizens make it sufficiently not-unix-like in my mind. Apple is definitely not pursuing the almost-big-iron server market, but their easy to use sharing features do make it an attractive server choice for some (many?).
I see your point, however, I don't see a compared alternative. If you had compared it to a canvas-driven animated banner or a HTML5+JS driven video player perhaps? Still 1%?

Doubtful.
Hate to say thing, but I too had similar problems. Turns out that postgrey works for a while, but the spammers know how to work it better than you think. So for a few days it worked, then slowly started to degrade back to where I was getting 50+ spams a day that should have been greylisted...

Gave up, postini... $1/month -- more than worth my $$/hour.
Do Toxins Cause Autism?
And fixing all those Acrobat vulns
So you'd rather be protected by the feudal lord (Google) than stand on your own? Make no mistake that's what you're saying.
Aaahh.. google is inside my whitelist. :) That explains it.

btw: anybody needs to see a list of 'no-retry' servers, check out:

/etc/postgrey/whitelist_clients
I want a editor! Not a samitor or an emacsitor or a viditor!
I actually said I think services like S3 / EC2 / Rackspace should have safe harbor protection, as they are as content-agnostic as possible under the law (like landlords, not nightclub owners.)
i'm conceding about as much as you are, except i'm arguing from specific economic goals & benefits. you're arguing about "distortions" that appear to be subjective analysis.

if you want to have a discussion where we have the chance to change each others' minds, then perhaps we should be talking about what parts of investor mentality are in question, and why that isn't better than doing nothing / status quo.
But of course, OS X implements many Unix constructs wrong. Renaming a file is not atomic on OS X / HFS+, for example. (UNIX certification is "did they give us money", not "does it actually work".)

Also, of course GNU/Linux is not Unix. GNU is Not Unix! (I like GNU a lot better than Unix, personally. Much more sugary. "rm foo -rf" actually works, for example.)
As far as making the tech easy for civilians, it turns out that's what I spend the majority of my time doing. Slowly. Working my way up the stack takes time.
I second this suggestion, and also recommend reading about Gestalt psychology, since that's really the basis of design principles.

Anecdote: I bought Universal principles of design in university to help me learn to do web design that didn't suck (only partially successful). At the time, I lived with a friend who was studying studio art. The book was assigned reading for one of her classes, so independently she bought a copy at the same time. Universal, indeed.
Gmail will handle those final 20 :)
Demand to know why Citibank shut down gay networking site fabulis' account
The Destruction of the Creative Class
One possible reason people are reluctant to study this: high-intensity exercise is, or seems to be, much more dangerous.

I sent a marathon-runner this:

http://lupoleboucher.livejournal.com/30217.html

She tried it once, threw up, and could do any serious exercise for about a month and a half.
The issue there being that if Google ever changes their internal network structure, you lose mail until someone notices. Personally, I don't like coupling myself to other networks that tightly, and I also don't like losing email.

So no greylisting for me.
Shucks, I didn't know we had HN Chicago meetings. I joined the Google Group. Will be there next time.
Then can we also look at how far the standard would have advanced as open-source? Maybe considered that H.264 is in fact NOT an open standard?

I want to live in the magic world where open-source development moves as fast as proprietary as well, but I can't.
The article's title is inflammatory. A truer title would read, "Chase and Citibank seeking out new forms of revenue to replace that lost by new credit card regulations." That is, they're not side-stepping the regulations; they're looking for new income. The income outlined in the article--charging a yearly fee for credit cards, for example, or cutting back on rewards--seem fine to me. The first discourages credit card use, the latter, while annoying, doesn't hit the user with high fees like the old system.
Cool, but how long until it auto-registers new domain names according to some algo? (see Srizbi)
I used postfix-policyd for a while. I whitelisted the major email providers. You can also run the policy daemon in 'training mode' for a while.

http://www.policyd.org/tiki-index.php?page=Greylisting&s...

I still had the same problems others have mentioned though, where crappy registration systems were sending their confirmation mails directly from their PHP application, rather than relaying it through a smart MTA that actually understood the SMTP protocol and would do the retry.

Ultimately, too many users complained about mail delays and missing email. This is one of those scenarios where the cost of not delivering an important email may outweigh the benefits of blocking a few more invalid ones.
"studies that claim that exercise doesn't lead to weight loss, and noticed that the exercise intensity is quite low. For instance, one of the studies had people exercise for an hour at "55% of aerobic capacity"; a different study had people exercise at "70% of maximum heart rate."
I like to paraphrase the notorious showing-movie-piraters-in-prison campaign as "Bootleggers are murderers.".
You must love working with IIS.
You're doing it backwards. The DVD is already copyrighted, so the copyright-ability of a tweet is irrelevant.
I'm not much for dressing up, but I feel like this is asking why someone was meditating when they could have spent that time thinking about stuff.

Some people use clothing as a means of mental preparation for entering a non-casual situation. I agree there's some empty ceremony to wearing a business suit, but I don't think that's all there is to it.
Well, it tells us something interesting about people, if not necessarily about the subject of the phrase.
That's usually the way it works.

Google also has a bunch of ex-Microsofties (dream company of the 1980s) and ex-Amazonites (dream company of the 90s).

It pays to get into a dream company as soon as possible, and do cool things there, because other companies will see those cool things and give you your pick of jobs.
Ask HN: How should I get started with Ruby & Rails?
I've decided to finally learn Ruby. As the majority of my coding is for the web, I'm also looking to start working with Rails; however, I'm getting more and more flustered.

I have a basic Dreamhost account as well as an iMac running Apache/Rails/SVN/et al. On both servers I've put a CHMOD 755 Hello World test.rb file that will only run properly in my iMac's cgi-bin. My Dreamhost account doesn't have a cgi-bin that I'm aware off, and attempts to use .htaccess 'AddHandler cgi-script .rb' have failed.

What's more, I'm just not sure how to get started with Rails once I have everything running smoothly. Should I be bothering with Rails 2.3 or should I be "looking to the future" by learning Rails 3? There are an overwhelming number of tutorials--are there any that you would recommend above others?

I've been banging my head on my keyboard trying every idea and googling every question, but I'm at the point where my morale is dipping. Can anyone help?
This article worded pretty nicely my doubts and fears. At first I wanted to do a PhD (computer engineering) but I would probably have to leave my city/country (Quebec/Canada, small city ~ 600K ppl) to find a job as a teacher/researcher. I'd close myself many doors by doing a PhD. What for ?
I can understand that you do now want developers to use their knowledge and access of the code to benefit in-game. But why be concerned about clones?

You could luck at how NetHack gets developed for some inspiration.
At this point, the uproar is about Microsoft's DMCA takedown more than the document itself.
I think his point is no matter what Adobe fixes or does right, many people on HackerNews are strictly anti-Flash and insist on adding Strawman and other noob debating responses.
I just felt an intense love for django and python ideology reading this
<< ModelForm:
If you’re building a database-driven app, chances are you’ll have forms that map closely to Django models. For instance, you might have a BlogComment model, and you want to create a form that lets people submit comments. In this case, it would be redundant to define the field types in your form, because you’ve already defined the fields in your model. >>

from http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/topics/forms/modelforms/#topics-forms-modelforms
I think the author makes a similar point (about third party hosting services needing safe harbor) when he points out that Amazon EC2 is like the landlord, who of course can't be held responsible for underage drinking at the club. I agree that appliance-esque simplicity is what is needed to allow/encourage "civilians" to host their own content, and I hazard to guess that the author would too. And what is stopping us from creating that?

I remember in my freshman year of college when students discovered the library sharing feature in iTunes. Word spread pretty quickly, and soon most folks were using their laptops to do what the Zune tried to popularize: sampling the music of peers for free over the network in order to connect over musical taste and find new bands. I think what the author points out is that other programs have similar features (such as iPhoto being able to share a folder of images to the network), but they are limited to local networks and can't be reached from everywhere. Why not institute a system that allows that same "share my photos" check box to make them available on the web? Then I, and many of my friends who have faced the same problem, won't have to create a facebook account just to be able to see a friend's wedding pictures...
I own this book and refer to it all the time. It is really well written and well presented. It's essentially a crash course into the principles of design.
Should You Switch To NoSQL Too?