skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So after a lot of work, using poorly documented features that are not consistently adopted and by using very specific versions of very specific browsers that should amount to near 10% of the user audience, I'm able to view an animation that is on par with what Flash could deliver 14 years ago without a lot of hassle. Only a lit bit worse and bigger and with worse performance, since this is using bitmaps instead of vectors.

Awesome.
5 Star London hotel gives guests iPads for duration of their stay
Downvote.

The purpose of the piece, I think, is to relate his experience. And this is certainly a part of the experience, perhaps an important part because it illustrates that the experiment does have some effect on others.

In the bigger picture: why do we write? Is it that we're trying to fool others into accepting an idea? Or because we want to help them understand an idea? I can't see any reason to omit the sentence, short of being deceitful.
Great Article. After college I did what I thought I was supposed to do and work for 2 large corporations for the first 7 years of my employed life. I found the pay below average for the market- especially if you are some one who increases your skillset at a higher level than your peers.

I noticed most of the employees were there to float along with the tide and do enough to stay employed, while very few had aspirations of making changes and doing good things. After that I started "job hopping"- Starting with a contract gig, after 3 months of that went to a medium sized company, and have now ended up at a small company of 100 or so employees. With each subsequent jump I have increased my pay by 15-30%, and learned skills I would NEVER have picked up had I stayed at the "big company".

As mentioned in the article, jumping around from job to job made me realize what I wanted to get out of my employer. Most importantly, I have 20-30 new contacts that I feel I could tap into should I ever become unemployed. Most of the time its what you know and who you know...
Interesting. Are you using Chrome for Windows, perhaps? I'm using Chrome for Mac (5.0.375.29), and all that happens when I click "See it in action" is that the page is scrolled to the top.
I really hate these top ten list articles. How about AT&T is fine in my area, I don't want another contract, and wifi hotspots are not prevalent. Whatever happened to laying out options and doing real analysis? Oh yeah, page views.
Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A financing
Oddly enough, your first sentence describes human birth.
They list every country in the country selection for the addresses.. future expansion I guess...??
We do have wireless transfer of electricity, take a look at your electric toothbrush or Palm Pre charging puck.
Google to Launch Digital Books by Early Summer
What happens when someone has a name on a googlemail account, and that name was already taken in the gmail beta on the original gmail rollout in the US?

I'd be really interested if someone from Google could address this.
Yes you can. But obviously then you're using it out of the normal confines and don't expect any help if the hardware blows up.
Would the minimal # of lines of readable code be a useful metric? It's not an easy to evaluate one as you have to actually read the program, but a smaller program should be more understandable than a larger one if they both have approximately the same information density.
Google To Start Selling Ebooks This Summer
The Piraha? There have been a few articles about them, but most of them have been rather contradictory. For instance, another oddity of their language which is frequently cited is that they don't have any subordinate clauses[1]. And all the articles then go on to show something like the following: a grammar construct which shows the equivalent function, if not the same structure:

Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."

Dissimilar structure may be weird, but it doesn't show they have no way of expressing the same meaning. Similarly with time, from the same article (mirrored many other places), it's not "no notion of time", there's just very little:

They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist.

"Hardly use any" and "have none" are different. Similarly, saying "no notion of time" is the same as not conjugating your verb is ludicrous. I can see no rational requirement for modifying your verbs to show past-tense in order to be understood. Do you understand this? "I run yesterday."

They may be exceptionally abnormal, but the abnormalities have been hyped in the extreme.

[1]: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,414291,00...

edit: cultural influence on language is extremely powerful, not denying that. This is specifically about the oft-mentioned tribe, which has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine; any ill-will towards you detected is unintended, just cross-fire. As I think the tribe does not fit the no-time requirement, we're back to all humans apparently comprehending time in the same way.
To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd

Try to not take life so seriously. The speaker is being philosophical, which will not change the physics we have already documented but could help us think outside the proverbial box.

There is no information in this talk.

Go outside, get some sun, smell some flowers. Not all life is hard math. Most of science isn't even hard math. By the time science involves hard math, we usually have an intuitive sense of what the answer will be and just have to verify it. It takes an immense amount of aimless philosophical wandering to arrive at a question which has a mathematical answer.
It's novel because unlike us, Tesla was a product of a time when telegraph, telephone, radio and distributed electricity were still new. It's easy - even obvious - to note in retrospect how a disruptive technology or cluster of technologies plays out, in part because we are ourselves a product of the environment in which we grew up and formed our ideas about how things work.

By contrast, it's visionary to be able to understand the full implications of a new technology that disrupts the environment in which we formed our ideas. In Tesla's case, not only did he understand the implications of that technology, but he actually invented much of the technology himself.

It would be no less remarkable if Gutenberg invented the printing press and then used it to print tracts explaining how his press was going to undermine the Catholic Church's monopoly gatekeeper status and launch an explosion in the rate and density of accumulated human knowledge.
I've built a website for this purpose though its targeted at people on the Eastside. I live on that side and have some friends interested in it so we're centering it here.

If you're on the Westside you're still welcome as always :)

http://eastsidehackers.org

Meetups coming soon!
I've used whois protection services for years (and for thousands of domains), there's never been a problem for me.

When the whois protection service is provided by the registrar you used to register the domain, how is that third party ownership? They already have a lot of control over the domain.

I don't know about ICANN rules on the matter, however I think they would have pressured registrars to stop offering such services, if that was the case.

If you have further information/links on the subject, please elaborate.
The recent Wired story about Brad Hogan, the guy who found the phone, implies that Hogan did not actually make any of the attempts to find the phone that Gizmodo claimed. Whatever the justification of the police raid on Chen's house and all the other elements of this story, it seems clear that Hogan never had any intention of making a good faith attempt to return the phone to its rightful owner.
I wanted to share this blog post from a friend and entrepreneur, who was new to the idea of Lean Startups (you should read Eric Ries's blog Startup Lessons Learned here: http://startuplessonslearned.com). He attended the Paris simulcast of the Startup Lessons Learned conference ten days ago, and this very detailed and personal blog post is his first take on these ideas.

I think some of use are very familiar with this new frame of mind now, and may have forgotten how powerful such ideas felt when we encountered them for the first time. It's very, very exciting to see the potential of the lean approach through his own eyes, and I wanted to share it with YC.

Do you think the impact of such ideas will be felt at the scale of the whole startup industry, or even beyond? I wonder what the impact of this movement will be on management science as a whole?
If you don't shower for too long, you start to itch and you'll probably have more acne and foot fungus (provided that your showers are fungus free of course).
Firstly, every single screenshot that users have sent me over the past couple of months has been adorned with a persona. You don't like it, but a lot of end users -- where Firefox needs to make inroads do.

As far as speed, well that's just more bullshit. Firefox has never been faster or lighter than it is now. The 3.7 beta includes plug-in isolation which is one of the critical missing features right now. Good on them.

Firefox will do better focusing on end consumers (a better bookmark manager, improvements to the awesome bar, and sadly support for h.264 because it isn't going away), because nerds with nerd rage will always look for some reason to pimp up their own imagined importance by telling you why they lost you.

And BTW - I spend half my day in Chrome, half in Firefox. Many of the recent changes to FF have been great.
Russian DST now owns 10% of Facebook
OS/2 was killed by IBM's refusal to market it, the requirement for developers to jump through painful hoops just to get permission to be considered for developer status, and their total disdain for those developers who did manage to get product out.
I'm really tired of hearing this:

syntactic abstractions dont scale up with the number of programmers

... as an objection to Lisp macros. It has become the invariable staple of these discussions and is accepted (by the people who accept it) without any question. Yet is there any evidence for it? I don't think I've ever even seen any evidence alleged for it.

The fact is, to justify this statement requires more than proving it's true. You'd have to prove that this failure of syntactic abstraction to "scale up with the number of programmers" is worse than the failure of abstraction in general to do so. Indeed, in my experience, it's programming that fails to scale up with the number of programmers.
I guess that's my issue with it. I, for one, am impressed that this can all be done with CSS3, that framerate is pretty good, that image rotating and scaling has great quality, and all that. But with the guy taunting the "no flash!" thing so much, I can't help but compare the two and reach the conclusion that is way worse in all shape and form to what was possible with Flash 10 years ago, and much more so today.
I have a friend who works for the patent office reviewing patents, and I've asked her a bit about the process. Overall, they are incentivized to verify claims because they want to do a good job. Same as any other employee at any other job. I don't think they're penalized for rejecting claims and rewarded for letting things through. Their goal is to act appropriately to each case.

Where any problems occur due to bad patents being approved seems to be due to time constraints in reviewing patents. My friend didn't think that the patent system is "broken" by any means. Her opinion was that they just need more qualified reviewers. They are hiring like crazy, or at least they were a few years ago.
Launching 12×12 To Expand Entrepreneurship In Massachusetts
Luckily for you, many PIs in the research field agree with you and have lax morals when it comes to torturing innocent defenseless animals. Compliance is a joke and doing whatever the hell you want to whatever creature you want (humans included, mind you) is as easy as checking a box on a piece of paper that nobody reads.

Our species is a virus, and we do whatever we can to protect our own kind until there is nothing else left.
I dunno man, I tried it a few times and I started shivering uncontrollably. Maybe I set the temperature too low?
Lines of code and readability are both surrogate measurements for codebase complexity. People focus on lines of code both because it's easy to measure and because readability doesn't go down linearly as codebases increases - there are discontinuity spikes.

Once it grows past a certain size, you need the right kind of IDE, etc. to cope with the conceptual sprawl. People start duplicating functionality because they aren't aware things already exist, minor details that handle historically recurring bugs get overlooked in the noise, it takes much longer for new people to understand the codebase, etc. A 100k codebase is not just ten times harder to maintain than a 10k codebase.
I often find fonts a little too light as well (this post included).

Anyone have a better/quicker method than firebug for darkening fonts?
> "I've been that guy for my whole life, and not a single [employer] has tried to convince me to stay with better perks, none."

Immaterial. You never take the counter-offer.

An employer who refuses to reward you until you're at the point of looking elsewhere is not worth remaining at. Further, you'll wind up on the short-list of problem employees and in the event that they do need to reduce headcount you will be disproportionately likely to lose your job earlier, thus disadvantaging your next job search.

There's no upside to taking a counter-offer beyond immediate convenience.
"I'm not convinced this explanation-by-analogy style is really all that helpful, particularly with regards to "the big bang is an expanding balloon". What makes it such a confusing analogy is that most people were already picturing something like an expanding sphere anyway, just one filled uniformly with matter moving away from a central point as it expands. And it doesn't reinforce that the Universe has no center, since most people can easily imagine what the center of a balloon is."

The key to the balloon analogy is that it only applies to the surface. The interior of the balloon is to be ignored. You say you can easily find the center of the balloon, so I think you don't get this, because I suspect your "center" is the 3D center of the balloon. But that doesn't exist. Only the surface does. What's the central surface point of a sphere? There isn't one. That's the universe, only the surface is 3D, not 2D.

I'm fairly sure that even a large number of people using the "expanding ballon" metaphor don't get that, let alone the poor readers. I tend to be surprised when I see it explained correctly.

Also, in the classic picture of the wormhole, like you might find here: http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schwm.html , the wormhole is not the tunnel itself. If you see someone drawing an arrow that goes down the middle of the tunnel as the path of travel, they don't know what they are talking about. (That's the best picture I could find quickly, they're actually showing something else with that arrow, so I do not accuse them.) The wormhole is the sides; the image is two 2D chunks of space being connected through a 3rd dimension. (Incidentally you can tell Hollywood doesn't know either, because they always actually "draw" the wormhole.) The curvature of the 2D planes corresponds to gravity in these displays.

This is also true of the classic "rubber sheet" gravity analogy; the rubber sheet applies only to 2D, and the 3D "things" usually drawn should be understood to be merely labels explaining where the curvature comes from. You really shouldn't see a "rolling ball" on the surface, you should see it in the surface. Again, this is done incorrectly far more often than it is done correctly.
Why do Gzipped source size is better? I mean, if with the same number of LOC, Gzipped size is different, that means one program is more repetitive than the other, right? I suppose experiments were done to show that Gzipped size was "better" in some sense?

I don't think you can objectively measure readability. It is tightly coupled with concrete syntax, which is highly subjective.
Tax for just a USB stick sent by a friend? Ouch. I'm curious , what was the origin/destination of the package?
This whole discussion reminds me of a silly electronics engineers joke:

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: It can't be done, it's a hardware problem.

The implication of the joke is that if anything is 'hardware' you are not supposed to be either able to 'fix' it or 'break' it using just software.

Hardware is taken as a 'given', no matter how crappy the software you run on it, no matter how malicious your intent, the hardware is supposed to survive.

If you decided to try all possible pieces of software you could possibly run on your machine by simply enumerating them (yes, that's going to take a while) then you should not have to do a full hardware integrity test after every run.
Added to http://mylanguageisbetterthanyours.com/mylanguage/why-Haskel...
Ready to leave? Why you shouldn't give two weeks' notice (2005)
to be honest they're all pretty cool. Aquaria is an Independent Games Festival winner. Lugaru is sick if you're into awesome fighting rabbits. Penumbra: Overture is highly rated across a bunch of gaming sites including metacritic.
"Right now, everything is moving away from us in proportion to its distance from us."

From us? So does that mean that we are at the center of this expansion?
But it does call into question their command of the facts and the small yet important details of the situation. In my opinion it was quite evident throughout the article that Malone had not studied the situation sufficiently and did not seem to be aware of the California penal code provisions which can make lost property stolen, the Wired story which implied that Hogan made no effort to return the phone and what level of actual power over day-to-day decisions Apple would enjoy on the REACT steering board. Are they even in a position to order a raid? Malone writes as though that's an uncontested fact, but that's hardly true.
You're right: the "Observable Universe" is defined only relative to a point of observation. For any spot in the Universe, there's a 93-billion-light-year-wide sphere centered about that point that constitutes the OU for that point. What exactly this sphere means it somewhat complicated. The simplest way I can think to say is this: The radius of the OU is the current distance of the farthest point in space such that if a radio signal were emitted from that point 13.7 billion years ago, immediately after the Big Bang, it would be possible in principle (but by no means in practice) for us to receive that signal. Anything that is outside of the OU is causally disconnected from us as a matter of fundamental principle, and nothing that has ever happened or ever will happen at any point outside the OU can ever affect us in any way, ever.

It was previously (up until a decade or so ago) an open question as to whether the Universe itself might be smaller than the OU. This sounds absurd, but consider the example of a hypothetical jet that could circle the Earth ten times without refueling. While normally the "range" of a jet plane is a circle about some point, the range of this jet exceeds the size of the Earth itself. Similarly, if the Universe were smaller than the OU, some of the distant galaxies we see would actually be repetitions of closer galaxies from an earlier time and a different angle, since the light had been "looping around" the Universe once or more before reaching us. Or, as Modest Mouse put it in one of their better songs: "The Universe is shaped exactly like the Earth / If you go straight long enough, you end up were you were." Recent evidence from the Cosmic Microwave Background has made this idea very unlikely, but it's a useful example to clear up misconceptions about the OU.

So, however big the Universe actually is, it's bigger than the OU, which means that the stuff cosmologists are debating about is space that cannot, even in principle, ever be observed. It's an important question, though, since whether the Universe loops back on itself on the large scale or just keeps going forever has implications for whether gravity will win out over Hubble Expansion in the long run, determining the eventual fate of the Universe.
I have it and use it, I just don't understand why people choose those tiny fonts to begin with.
Origin USA, destination Netherlands.
Do you think that sterilizing your skin will improve health?

Everyone has loads of bacteria all over them, the vast majority of which are completely benign. AIUI, there's a little ecology there, with all of them competing to survive.

So if you kill them all by sterilizing your whole surface, you create an opportunity for the bad bacteria to gain the initiative and take over the ecosystem when the benign stuff can't fight back as well. The end result, then, could be that where you'd had just a few of the bad guys, you're now covered with them.
I think they're going to get a huge influx of pathological users who mostly pay amounts which would amount to 80% off the face price of the cheapest game in the bundle.
Average contribution of $8.64 for 5 games or $1.72 per game.

It's a nice PR move but that's just disgusting I'm sorry.
I didn't know that about Foxit Reader; thanks for sharing. Still, there's no reason, given the author's own requirements, why a PDF reader has to come from Microsoft rather than a competent third party. Granted, Microsoft has gotten better at security in recent years, but they're hardly exemplary at it.
Not if you happen to have a big, pointy stick and know how to use it.
When I went with no heat in the dead of winter - for 5 days
Most of the articles of any size on that site have been cut-and-pasted from elsewhere. Maybe it's a splog-in-training.
I know how to fix it. I'm trying to understand why it happens in the first place.
Raleigh, NC; so not really
It means Calcanis is thinking in terms of seniority and "years of service" being the keys to career advancement and compensation. The decade's-old management mindset that gives us things like SLOC and butt-in-seat quotas.
If it were inertial expansion, in the sense of movement in the usual sense through space, yes it would. That's obviously a big problem, and confused a lot of people in the early parts of the 20th century. Metric expansion fixes this absurdity, since when spacetime itself is expanding it is everything that moves away from everything else. No matter where you stand, you appear to be the center that everything is running away from.
Interesting Definitions of IT job People’s Designations
Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder's amusing failure at Six Flags.
Everything period is a luxury, then. I mean, at which point do you draw the line between luxury and necessity? Okay, hot water is a luxury. What about running water? Clean water? Enough water to clean yourself? Enough water to avoid poor health?
Not to sound pedantic but you do realize that those two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive in people right?
If we condone such cruelty to other living beings in the name of scientific curiosity, there is no limit to it. It's not ok to go around torturing others because one is 'scientifically curious'.
The web browser is the web application platform. Did you follow the link to Quake 2? It runs in browser you can download right now. And while the apps I mentioned do need some more support from the browser platform, that support is actually mostly there in some browsers. The only thing missing is native code speeds.

Are you keeping up with what web browsers are doing lately? They've turned a corner and are burning rubber now that we're increasingly less tied to Microsoft every day, and Microsoft's efforts to hold things back are no longer working. I'm hardly even hypothesizing, you can get demos of many of those things right now.