skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Some websites require JavaScript to display images nowadays. What's wrong with <img>?

Lazy loading. By default, browsers will load all images as soon as the page loads. If you have a long article with potentially megabytes of images, this behaviour will seriously slow down the initial load, and many readers who jump early will still download a bunch of images that they never see. That's why many sites only load images as they are about to appear, but to do that, you can't use regular <img> tags.

You're right in that JavaScript shouldn't be a requirement though. A good implementation will provide a regular <img> inside a <noscript> tag.

> Others require JavaScript to use the correct font. What's wrong with CSS?

Avoiding "flashes of invisible text"[1] when using web fonts. Unfortunately, different browsers have very different strategies for loading web fonts. Some of them will wait for the web font to load at any cost rather than showing a fallback font in the meantime. This means that you can be stuck for ages with everything in place except for the text, which is seriously irritating.

I've never implemented FOIT mitigation myself, but I assume that you could (and should) again provide a fallback in a <noscript> tag. Even without it, the text will at least still display without JavaScript, just in the second font in the font stack.

[1] https://css-tricks.com/fout-foit-foft/
This reminds me of a "memo" I wrote to myself in June 2013. AAPL was going down for a year for no "real" reason until it hit $385.10 (before the 2014 7:1 split).

I found it odd and since the numbers told another story (record high earnings, consistently decreasing debt, etc), I wondered what was the reason, so I made a prognostic about what I thought made sense and wrote it down to learn, tracking my thought process and prediction (verba volant, scripta manent)..

You can just look AAPL up to 5 years and see what I was looking at Sep 2012 peak to Jun 2013).

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/12592771-jugurtha/2009662-...

You have to divide the figures given in my note by 7 to make up for the 2014 split.
Also smurfiness.
Why not do to google what the government did to the big bell to create all the little bells. All the R&D money would not have been spent if there was only one! Google's Ad platforms are limiting how we are able to see and experience different forms of exchange without without advertising imbedded.
Ah! reminds me of the dot com bubble where everyone was profitable! ... uh by EBITDA [0]. A measure that caused all sorts of problems since a bunch of companies also manipulated their Earnings [1]. For every cycle, the line swings back and forward between "grow at all costs" and "profit, profit, profit", with the associated attempts to create "silk purses out of a sow's ear" by using bad definitions. Not that this fools VC's or investor high-net-worths, since they know (and create) many of these games themselves.

Every business should know profit by product/shipping-unit, line of business/division and overall (gross/net). If we don't know them, we're not running a business, we're running an experiment.

Though I much prefer the phase when the industry is talking about "profit" at some level, rather than just buying temporary growth and selling it as "innovation".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnings_before_interest,_taxe...

[1] https://hbr.org/2009/11/how-ebidta-can-mislead/
I didn't even bother clicking through because I saw the domain name (ontolo.com) and assumed it was a PR piece. Also, Betteridge's law of headlines gave me my answer already (spoiler: it's "no").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_return :)
The CFAA forbids both "unauthorized" access and "exceeding authorized" access. A CFAA case involving a bug bounty program, either criminal or civil, would allege that the accused exceeded authorized access if it was thought that the existence of the bug bounty program was authorization.

There are other factors that come into play here too depending on the specific wording of the site's ToS and the bug bounty participation agreements/whatever. Access may be totally unauthorized, if, for example, one uses an automated scanning tool like sqlmap, as most sites have a ToS that bans any "automated access".

And there is the first factor, which is that if you're being sued by someone who is big enough for a bug bounty program, no normal person is going to be able to fight it, and if that company tells the prosector's office about you, you're going to have a hard time shaking them off as well.
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I also thought this was a very important quote in today's world. Compare these two quotes:

> The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes.

vs. this famous quote from Jim Barksdale:

> If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.

Now that everyone is praying at the altar of big data, I find it important to keep both these quotes in mind. In my mind, it's not that the data is wrong, but too often I've seen attempts to interpret data it ways that can undercut long term planning and vision. For example, Steve Jobs had a famous saying about why Apple never put a ton of "xyz inside" stickers on the bottom of their laptop keyboards. It would have been easy to look at the data and say "Company pays us X million dollar to add this sticker, but only 0.001% of people decide not to buy us because of the sticker, so we should add the sticker." Judging the long term damage to your brand because you cover up your machines with crap is harder to put numbers to.
> For me, the biggest downside of Google shutting down Reader is that from now until eternity every post to Hacker News about a new Google service will be chock full of witty comments about how it's going to get shut down.

I'd argue that most of them aren't witty[1] and it's not just Reader either. Plenty of things shut down before and afterwards[2].

[1]: Obviously not counting my own rapier wit...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...
That doesn't really matter, does it? Non-Apple laptop manufacturers are trapped in the low margins that commoditization results in. Apple's margins are rumoured to be a large multiple of that of other laptop makers.
The UX of Learning UX Is Broken
Twitter Picks Russia Over the U.S
Never knew that. Today I learned. Thanks a lot.
Introducing Google App Indexing Validator
Looks very promising. Combine that with Dan Abramov working on a followup to his original Redux video series at Egghead, and plenty of good options out there for video-focused learners.

Beyond that, I'll toss in a link to my collection of high-quality React and Redux-related tutorials and articles, at https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links. Specifically intended to be a great set of resources for someone trying to learn the React ecosystem.
It's really hard for huge companies to disrupt themselves. You need a strong visionary leader like Reed Hastings or Steve Jobs to make it happen. When the decision making power is distributed and consensus is the operative selection metric the chances of radical change become almost nonexistent.
Because it was snarky and off topic in a classic bikeshedding way, making for uninteresting discussion.
I think you're right on both counts.
This is correct. When the Decentralized Autonomous Organization/Corporation is a term that has undergone quite a few changes, and Ethereum projects definitely use it very loosely. As you pointed out, not much is autonomous at all. The DAO in this case appoints one company per project who is responsible for the entire project and its management. They are free to be as competent or incompetent, until voted out.
I suppose the UK industrialised early. It industrialised first, with workers often in appalling conditions, and unions formed in response to awful conditions and in opposition to the businesses trying to keep them down. And this was absolutely necessary, but it set the culture for a long time.

Other countries didn't necessarily have that history, and other factors - like the need to rebuild the country after a devastating war with everybody starting from nothing - might have fostered cooperation in ways not possible in the UK.
If that's true though, then the failure is not making these changes on a constant basis (100s at a time) and instead saving it all up for a massive blowout.
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> A big company created from scratch is never profitable and cannot be patched up to become profitable. You have to start over with a profitable small company

Is this true? You mean you are sure Uber will never get profitable?
No, a corporation is a legal entity that must have directors and officers, aka people. Without that, you don't have a corporation.

And after reading the article, they aren't a legally recognized corporation.
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CFQ as it's the default since 2006. I'll try deadline on USB storage.
> I don't think Google's ever really given a product or service less than a year from release to shutdown.

Nexus Q might count.
What does this do that you can't do with http://puush.me/ or ShareX?

The only difference is this is limited to the browser.
Another +1 for Ting. I signed up back in February or so and they've been just brilliant across multiple phones, including one situation where, due to a replacement for bogued hardware, the IMEI changed but the ICCID didn't - their website doesn't handle that very well, but their customer support took care of it via website chat in five minutes, which certainly counts as a win. I'm paying a third what I was with Sprint, and even buying the phone up front, I come out ahead; if you're looking for a better option, and Sprint has coverage where you are, Ting is definitely worth a look.
Nsone.net down due to DDOS
An an European startup I had a bright smile when reading this article. Always fun to see how out of touch can startup founders be too often led believing that VC money without balanced revenue/expenses is "normal".

They'd certainly be quick to get some cold shower around here. Too often a startup already needs to be profitable in most cases and have some heavy references before even getting 500k of funding, if at all.
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Better still:

http://archive.is/9Y8jf
I guess I've been reading that documentation from the wrong perspective. I thought they were trying to show me the right way, or at least, a good way, to create apps and add features to them.
Most decision making is in fact choosing between choices, it's not that different from a regular CEO.
Last time I checked, Apple Computers is worth $500+ Billion and is a public company.

Don't forget that the stock market is the original mass-crowdfunded project. Anyone can become an owner if you go to a brokerage account, and ownership rights entitles you to a vote for the board of directors and a share of the profits (ie: the dividend)
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Additional background and relevant industry commentary here:

http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/facebook-in-talks...
If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN". Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Curious as to why Explorer over Powershell.
https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/programmable-blockchains-in-co...
Normally, I'd agree with your optimistic assumption, but having spent a bunch of the early to mid 2000s writing code for Windows applications, the oddness of this API relative to the simplicity of what you're actually doing was, IMO, nearly universal across Microsoft, including for APIs (like Direct3D in the first couple of releases, DirectShow, COM in general from any non-Visual Basic language, etc) that were wholly intended to be public facing APIs by their very nature.

I can't speak to the conspiracy-theoryish idea that Microsoft wrote bad APIs on purpose to make it easier to compete with other software companies at the application level, I suspect the issues were more subtle than that (an overly bike-sheddy code review culture, maybe?), but I did find them nearly universally bad to use as a programmer for a Windows "ISV" at the time.

Having said that, most modern Microsoft/Windows APIs I've used have been quite sane. Not bashing Microsoft in general here, just their APIs from about the mid 90s to the mid 2000s.
http://sinfest.net/view.php?date=2005-02-15
And there you've identified the nuance that makes Apple successful where other tech companies have failed. They may be technology driven, but they indeed produce consumer goods. Apple wants to be in every household. Look at their product lines vs. some of the other software/hardware integrated companies trying to push consumer products. Put on your average idiot hat (mine is stuck to my head) and it becomes plainly obvious that Apple makes products for you and markets them in ways that you can understand.
> No, a corporation is a legal entity that must have directors and officers, aka people.

OR, a corporation is a legal entity formed by a corporate charter that is treated as a person under the law. In any case, whatever these ethereum-based things are, they aren't corporations.
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And in fact, in many countries, the DAO actually is a legal company/association, just not officially incorporated. But incorporating is not required everywhere for the normal laws to apply.

Just the fact that people put their money together and are acting as a group gives them various legal requirements. The fact that the DAO limits what they can do might interfere with their ability to follow the laws; that does not mean that the laws do not apply. You don't get to throw your hands in the air and say "we cannot pay taxes on our profits, it's physically impossible" when you made it impossible yourself by creating and/or associating with the DAO.
Not sure about IntelliJ but JetBrains has an upcoming C# IDE similar to IntelliJ: https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/
I would argue that Kodak was right to jump into digital photography, but made some really bad decisions about how we'd take pictures. Sony made the correct call by concentrating on the cellphone market with the experience from their pro offerings. Kodak got the digital leap but didn't quite get the form factor leap.
what happened to the download counts? pypi day/week/month counts have been off for months and were removed in the last few days.
"Safer than drunk" is a poor choice or words, irresponsible even.

If you drive within an hour or two or three of smoking sticky buds, the risk is not reflexes or reaction time, it's getting distracted by your own thoughts, or zoning out. That can easily translate into driving through a red light. The mind wanders when stoned, which is the opposite of what you want when operating machinery.
unless there's an exploit that we don't know about yet.
And in a quarter, they may disclose another contrarian buy to dollar cost average that down to $100.
Well, we don't really separate walking and hiking in the Norwegian language (I actually had to google the difference).

According to Statistics Norway[1], 85% of the Norwegian population has taken a walk of 3 hours or less in the last 12 months (of 2014) and around half a walk of more than 3 hours.

I didn't find updated stats about frequency, but in 1998 46% of Norwegians went on walks for longer than 30 minutes at least 2 times a week [2]. I don't have a reason to believe it has changed significantly.

[1] https://www.ssb.no/kultur-og-fritid/statistikker/fritid/hver...

[2]http://www.vg.no/forbruker/typisk-norsk-aa-gaa-paa-tur/a/303...
You only need enough volume to compete. If that lets you command a premium and skim off the bulk of the profits, who cares about marketshare?

It turns out you can enjoy network effects as well: at one point iPods accounted for over half of the global flash memory market. That was surely useful in bringing the iPhone and MacBook Air to market, no? I'd also say the PA Semi investment is paying off since Apple has owned the mobile SoC performance crown for a while now, with no competition in sight.
I suspect that IBM fits his understanding because he views it as a services company, rather than a hardware or software company. Services he does understand. I think he also likes that they give most of their cash back to the shareholders. (Which makes them a value play rather than a growth play) I was still surprised by the investment though.
Do you think legalization will cause usage to increase? Seems to me just about anyone who would use marijuana in the first place is already using it. I don't expect an increase in consumption per capita at all.
Anyone can 'split' the DAO at any point of time, which renders the 51% attack moot. A 51% attack works only when the attacker can get more than what he puts in.

Consider this obvious attack vector: Let's say today is the last crowdfunding day, and the DAO has raised $150 million so far. A wealthy attacker can immediately put another $150 million, effectively controlling 50% of the voting for the DAO, and then vote to send all the money to his own Ethereum address. This is perfectly possible, since this is all written in Ethereum contracts anyway.

To avoid this, the rest of the people can 'fork' the DAO, effectively leaving the attacker with 100% control over his share of 50%. The attacker gains nothing. The other 'fork' can now continue on.

This forking described above is also going to be used (I think) when it comes to funding new projects. I am sure some people will disagree with some proposal, and they would fork the DAO away to not invest in that proposal even though the majority agreed they would. They are free to do so.
> There are behaviors that are definitely creepy and should be avoided. People are willing to overlook them if they find the person attractive. That doesn't change the fact that it's best to avoid those behaviors

That isn't what people are talking about. Girls welcome being hit on by guys they find attractive. They hate it from guys they don't find attractive. It's not that the attractive person is doing something they'd be better off not doing but their attractiveness overcomes it, it's that the same behavior is good when an attractive person does it and bad when an unattractive person does it.

Just look at your sibling comment -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11706332
Overall agree with the rest of the comment. Just wanted to comment on this:
"The only mystery to me was why Intel never just sucked it up and made a low-margin x86 chip to compete directly with ARM. "

the problem is that any low margin x86 chip that would work phones could be used for cheap servers, low end desktops and laptops and Intel wouldn't want that and there is only so much you can do with crazy contract restrictions on manufacturers. It is a dangerous gamble, but it seems to have worked for now.

Intel did feel the possibility of an attack on low end servers from ARM, and did release the Xeon-D which, at least for now, crushed any hope of ARM breaking into the datacenter.
Seems public to me. What am I missing?
That's what i was thinking, this is totally a google+ feature they had planned (which others are pointing out is similar to Waves) but took off the platform.
Which kinda does make sense. Instead of forcing G+ they basically made android more flexible allowing them to do this kind of feature without the G+ platform.
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Apple has high margins and has been slowly but steadily (I think roughly during the last decade or so, maybe for longer) outgrowing the rest of the PC industry.

They are very successful despite not selling the most units and not seeing explosive growth.
The ownership chain also has to ultimately go back to people.
Even if all workers have equal bargaining power regardless of their skills and location, that only applies to the private sector. Teachers or Firemen or whoever else mostly only have one employer - the state - which can collectively bargain on behalf of the citizenry, so the only reasonable response by employees is to collectively bargain as well.
No, it's a bit more like saying a car can't be autonomous because it still has people telling it where to go.
Web browsers. For example if I'm on Hacker News and want to visit the "Ask" page, my options are a mouse or navigating to the URL bar and hand editing the text. Why can't I just type "ask" and go there?
The files on that page wouldn't load for me-- the podcast that's being drawn from is here, and the Direct2D portion is around the 1 hour mark:

https://mollyrocket.com/jacs/jacs_0001_0050.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11706032 and marked it off-topic.
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> I know accountancy and law students who were socially well adjusted that played more Counter Strike than I did messing about with my Linux system when I was a student!

Sure, there are individuals at any point on the scale. We're talking about averages though.

I have no qualms about disagreeing over where the averages lie. In fact I would widen my generalization and say that younger people are, on average, more comfortable talking through screens than directly person to person. Young engineers are just a subset of that who I think are more likely to be screen focused.

I'm okay with embracing some elements of stereotypes. Denying them entirely seems like an equally useless generalization.

This sub-thread was started by someone who felt open office environments aren't effective. Yet, open offices can be a tool for getting people used to person to person interaction. Every person, group, and organization will decide whether they think that's important or not.
> Which works out great for the top few percent of workers
It works out for any worker.

It's not just about quitting Microsoft to Join google, It's also about quitting Mcdonald's to join Subway, or quitting Amazon to work for Walmart.
The only workers who aren't able to quit a job are public sector workers, where the government has a monopsony on hiring.

> I've yet to work anywhere with mandatory vacation days in the sense that I can not give them up
In some countries you can give up your paid vacation days. At a cost to your employer who would have to PAY YOU additionally.
These all add up as additional costs of employment, and simply reduce the salary you earn in the first place. (As compared to what you could earn if there weren't paid leave laws in place).

Do some workers and employers prefer a lower salary for more vacation days? sure. Just agree on that as part of a contract. Don't force a one size fits all solution on everyone.

> Women leave employment in droves to have children whether or not they get paid maternity leave
I wasn't addressing that. I was explaining that in countries that have paid maternity leave, women might not even get employed (or only get employed for certain roles) in the first place.

> Mandatory insurances and pensions are not about workers protections per se most places I'm aware of.
Take Israel as an example. Mandatory pensions are considered a "triumph" of the unions, who are able to strongarm employers in to paying more into worker's pensions:
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-histadrut-employers-agree...

> Not being able to fire a worker is not a common feature of workers protections anywhere.
It's never about "not being able to fire". It's about firing flexibility. Can an employer simply send you home, or do they have to go through lots of legal beuracracy first?

It's easy in Denmark:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/business/worldbusiness/the...
But difficult in France or Germany:
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-its-impossible-to-fire...
https://www.wbs-law.de/eng/doing-business-germany/employment...

The bottom line is that if it's difficult to fire someone, you'll be a lot more picky and careful before hiring them.