skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm impressed that it doesn't even cross the author's mind that his ideology might be completely wrong. Perhaps health insurance, labor friendly laws, strong environmental, health and safety regulations actually attract the best people.
I remember there was a HTML4.01 upgrade pack for IE back in Win95 or something. Why don't they do the same for IE6? A HTML5 upgrade pack for all IE.
Chris Saad: "Facebook's Claims About Data Portability Are False"
I'm certainly not arguing against free speech (I think if you read my earlier posts you will see that I did not suggest that), which is why I suggested that an economic disincentive was probably the only effective way to stop this kind of behavior.

Since you bring up the question of free speech, however, let's consider that angle. Does the right to free speech give you the right to shout "fire!" in a crowded movie theatre? Or to perjure yourself? No, and presumably the reason is because such speech reflects a malicious intent to cause harm to others. I don't suppose for an instant that Oprah has such a malicious intent, but I think most HN readers would agree that by giving celebrities and quacks a platform from which to spread their stupidity, she does cause harm to others.

In The Ethics of Belief, W. K. Clifford said "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." If you accept Clifford's reasoning (as I do), then I think we must agree that Oprah is wrong to believe as she does, and further compounds that error by spreading her beliefs widely. While it is not illegal to be wrong, I don't think it would be a huge stretch to suggest that persons spreading beliefs that they have no right to believe (per Clifford) are culpable at some level for the resulting harm. As far as I know, the fact that the speaker honestly believes what they are saying is no defense in cases of libel, slander or hate speech.

My view is that Oprah has a duty to question her beliefs, and seek out evidence that refutes them. If she chooses not to do so, she is still entitled to hold those beliefs privately, but not to encourage them in others.
It isn't like it is there to incite racism so it is much more likely that the racebox is in place because that is what a census is for, tracking information.
1) What company would you pick? Is justin.tv very atypical of current Silicon Valley startups in some obvious way I've missed?

2) I've been at justin.tv since long before we were big enough to have a finance arm. I may have little idea of how those policies can hurt really big companies, but the interesting thing about Silicon Valley isn't the big companies - it's the startups.
Lesson I took from this: tape your parking sticker inside the car, and take a picture of it.
Getting closure in JavaScript
Gruber sounds like a whining teenager. It's the publishers' prerogative to (i) get attributed for their work, and (ii) get some SEO juice back to their site.

I suspect that he's just bored, suffering from writer's block, and needs and outlet to get it out. There, you've cried on the shoulder of a bunch of hacker news dudes. Feel better now?
Antifreeze tastes sweet. It's the long-term effects that are the problem.
But why does that information need to be tracked? Is there any real utility to having it? (I'm asking seriously - I really have no idea what it might be used for).
Browsing mail is still adequately fast for me; I have 33k threads and I don't have any problem loading up labels or switching back and forth from inbox to any other thing. I'm using 2GB of space.

I did find the search slow and inadequate though, so I downloaded and indexed all of my messages with Thunderbird and just use that when I want to search for something. I need to do an export to a conventional mbox or something soon, too.
If a person clicks on a confirmation link, then the email got through OK.
It is a very impressive analogy to convey the message and neatly done as well. However, the biggest bummer for me was when I finally clicked on the "Download IE8" link. The page contained a "Install SilverLight" link on the premier portion of the page (and I was thrown off thinking why I need SilverLight for IE8) and the link to download IE8 was way below after a scroll.
It hardly seems strange if Slava's main computer happens to be a mac.

Do you have some reason to expect that the results would be substantially different on some other platform? As noted in the article these are mostly srather narrow pure computation benchmarks, so the OS shouldn't matter a lot. Sure, the OS X kernel is crap when it comes to supporting exotic features, so SBCL has to do a little bit of extra work around bugs in things like signal handling. And I could believe using mprotect() for a hardware write barrier have a worse relative performance compared to a software barrier on OS X than on Linux. But at least in the context of pure computation these kinds of effects shouldn't distort things all that much.
Most of the relevant factors for startups are due to people and culture of the valley, not the California government, but there are some which are actually due to the state government:

California has a few big advantages due to the state:
* Non-competes invalid
* Well-understood legal system for startups

And big startup-relevant disadvantages:
* High taxes on income and especially capital gains (taxed at the 10.3% rate!!!) which force out some angel investors, and potentially reduce capital formation for new angels.
* High cost of living (which makes engineers expensive, and hurts during bootstrapping) -- some of this IS due to California government decisions.

Employment law, minimum wage, etc. don't really affect startups directly.

"Uncertainty due to the state being bankrupt" is a major new negative factor, however. Even though the current situation still leaves SFBA as the top startup location in the world, I could see a dying California enacting new policies which change this.
Much more about this issue in the context of college admission, including tracking the number of students officially reported as "race/ethnicity unknown" via mandated college reporting to the federal government:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/92721...
"Their browser is too tied to the OS."

During the debates surrounding the anti-trust trial MS argued that that, browser tied to the OS, is a feature. They were close to saying that the browser is the OS.
original purpose of the race box was to count slaves

Probably not, actually, as there have always been black freemen in the United States.
The Hysteria Over Google's Wi-Fi Scanning
The original purpose of the race box was to count slaves as 3/5 of a person (for congressional representation).

I don't think this is correct. While the vast majority of slaves were black, some were not, and some blacks were free. Can you cite a source justifying your claim about "the original purpose" of the census?
If that was true you would have most startups concentrated in heavily regulated places like california and the UK/Eu rather than all computer startups being in Africa
Why do Americans use the word race when they mean ethnicity?
You could also try out favetop.com for icon shortcuts through the browser if you'd like.
"no end in _site_".
From the Census FAQ ( http://2010.census.gov/partners/pdf/ConstituentFAQ.pdf ):

"Information on race is required for many federal programs and is critical in making policy decisions, particularly for civil rights. States use these data to meet legislative redistricting principles. Race data also are used to promote equal employment opportunities and to assess racial disparities in health and environmental risks."
Public health among other things. Various related issues break down best according to racial/ethnic lines and you wouldn't know that w/o the data.
What privileges one definition of "race" (or of "ethnicity") over another?

"The concept of race as used by the Census Bureau reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. These categories are sociopolitical constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_68176.htm
It is much better to boil the potatoes whole without cutting or pealing the skin off. If you do that, you lose a lot of the nutritions in the process.
Tiny Fluid Grid
Thanks! I'm glad you like them!
It's because the server has to create a tarball on demand, which can take a while.

So, instead of having your web request unresponsive for a minute while it's processing, they queue up a background task on the server and give you a "hardcore archiving in process.." response immediately.

Then I imagine they do some ajax polling to check when the background task has finished and the archive is ready.

It's a really good technique if you want your web app to be responsive. We do it at work for basically anything that will take more than a second.
It isn't binary, either good or bad. Maybe it attracts the best people (and I note you had to say "perhaps" since you are just speculating), but it definitely raises the costs of doing business quite substantially, which means less ability to hire, expand, or exist at all. That's not speculation, that's the entire purpose of regulation like this; the government directs you to spend money in this manner or go out of business, no third option.

You must also consider that the California system as a whole, which includes its regulatation system, has become unaffordable and California faces the task of either tearing some of it down or raising taxes to make up for it, and one way or another you must account that negative to that system, too. It's easy to "politic" away the problem of unaffordability for quite a while, just as we have done, until suddenly it produces a result far worse than if we had done the putatively-inferior-but-actually-affordable thing in the first place. Unaffordability is not a political matter, it's an objective one that can't be argued away. And I emphasize the "has become" because that is now past tense, it has happened.

The author is sticking to the facts of the cost of doing business, rather than speculating about IMHO rather nebulous possibilities of "retaining the best people". I think a rather good case could be made that whatever positive effects such regulation has, it passed the point of diminishing returns a long time ago. I don't live in California, and I do not feel a pressing need to move there so my boss stops beating me. (Yes, that is rhetorical, but the basic point stands. At some point regulations just add cost and not much benefit.)
> Imagine…now, as a publisher, I have 200 ‘followers’ whose sole interest is in seeing the links/stories that I publish. ...So far, there is no other tool that ‘aggregates’ all your content and pushes it directly to an audience like digg v4 is suggested to do

I think Tumblr already does this well.
Premier Edition? That includes 24/7 phone support, SLA:s, and a lot more. Why are you paying for something if you haven't even bothered checking what you pay for? Doesn't sound very clever to me...
Only if you buy a laptop. There is no need to pay for Windows in a desktop.
Hi think Alexis is biased by the fact that in some way Reddit was lucky in not having the social dynamics leading to a monopolization of the whole site.

This is instead what happened to Digg, and to many other social news sites, and the only fix is probably to switch to a hierarchical model. This also happened to OKNOtizie, that is the "Italian Digg", that I happen to run currently.

So I'm looking forward to the Digg changes, and in general to the idea of binding users to real identities of other social network sites, like twitter or facebook. We implemented a great deal of filters, but this does not work when a great percentage of your users are not playing the game correctly.
No way! The last thing we need to support IE6+HTML5 as well as IE6. IE6 needs to die.
They are så fæntæstic! Heia Norge.
Archives are generated when they are requested and cached for fifteen minutes. This cache length results in an average of 3.5GB of cached archives on disk at any given time. We have to serve a large number of archives for arbitrary revisions, so making you wait a few seconds for a tarball is currently the best tradeoff. It's possible that in the future we will increase the cache TTL (and the size of the cache) so that you are more likely to hit an already generated archive.
I work with the exact same setup. You're looking at 100-250k for the "Vicon" (motion capture) setup and 4k+ for the quad rotor (an Ascending Technologies Hummingbird).

That sounds like a lot, but the motion capture system can accurately track things with sub-millimeter precision at, at least, 100fps. The Hummingbird is very sophisticated, with a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis magnometer, 3-axis gyro and high performance brushless motors, and of course, the R&D cost for developing all of it.

DIYDrones has a lot of good info on hacking these together, but you won't get the performance you're seeing in that movie.

I've talked to people who are trying to build a poor man's version of these and they're aiming for 600-800, but it's not going to be as high performance.
I do understand that but please, analyze it more carefully.

You're marketing a version of your product which is compared against a carton of milk. I tend to think that when you're marketing a browser you should regard them as valuable cars, as you wan't to build up some goodwill among your customer base.

If your customers regard your browser as a carton of milk which basically is just a carton of milk - a product that's fastly consumed - then what makes them to connect to your product (in this case, an internet browser)? Will it build goodwill?

What if mercedes benz announced that their old products are just tin cans - and that you probably wouldn't want to keep old tin cans laying around - what kind of a message would the company be conveying to the customer in view of their product?

If microsoft itself views the explorer product family as cartons of milk and also conveys a clear message of it through its own marketing - then, in my opinion, as brutal as it sounds, it's time to rebrand the product. Even when you're publishing a new version of the product, essentially, you'll just be publishing a prettier carton of milk.
Your office and your employees' homes are more expensive to rent because regulations make it expensive to build in California. The food you eat is more expensive in California because there is a high floor on the compensation required for the people who produce it. Your coworkers require higher salaries because it's more expensive to live in California.

According to Salary.com's cost of living calculator[1], for every four $100,000 engineers in San Francisco, you can get five $80,000 engineers in Austin at the same salary percentile. Those five engineers would have a higher standard of living since it supposedly costs ~$60,000 in Austin to live like someone making $100,000 in SF. (I think that's probably a little low.)

If no one is complaining about the impact of California's regulations on your business, then no one is thinking hard enough (or they've just resigned to the fact that things are unlikely to change). The benefits of being in Silicon Valley may outweigh the costs, but the costs of being in Silicon Valley could be far lower.

[1] http://swz.salary.com/costoflivingwizard/layoutscripts/coll_...
Most of those things could as well help business. Without data, it is rather difficult to say, especially since a lot of the points you raised are easy to see as cost, and their advantages less obvious to observe.
New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears
There is something call KernelEx apparently: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kernelex/ which can fix that.

Or you could use Opera, that even supports Windows 95!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Hist...
Ironically, it's the civilian sector that's limiting this research to the DoD. The FAA has very strict regulations on flying autonomous drones outdoors (basically, you're not allowed to do it), so this has seriously hobbled a lot of research into UAVs, etc. Israel, Canada, Western Europe and other places are far ahead now in terms of commercial autonomous drones.
I remember Beacon. I doubt normal people do. This case could be similar.
Kudos from me as well. Not enough people take the time to test their assumptions. I guess it says something about the relative quality of comments, when you are surprised when someone takes the time to actually do some minimal research.
I think for me it was that when I first tried it it was adware and didn't support javascript. Also, the linux version I tried hadn't received much UI polish.
The Climate change essay
Along with gay rights and abortion, climate change seems to be the hottest topic that is being spoken or written about today. However, there are very few speeches and essays that really enlighten or galvanize people into some sort of action or the other. You need to ensure that there is some purpose or useful outcome from your writing.
Honestly, it did not even cross my mind that you would need to do any sophisticated programming. I assumed that most of the challenge would be in mapping and mastering the problem domain: figuring out what problems you need to solve, researching existing solutions to each problem, finding code and adapting it for your needs, experimenting to see if the existing solutions work well for your particular problems, adapting them if necessary, and then wiring it all together in a simple way using a glue language. Lots of work and sophisticated AI stuff there (probably a few PhDs if you took it far enough) but no fancy programming. That seems to be the sad truth about real world problems: the programming is rarely as hard and interesting as all the other problems you will solve.

On the other hand, Lisp is a lot of fun, and you shouldn't pass up any excuse to learn it ;-)
I got chills while reading your article, because as a single founder of a bootstrapped startup, the problem of dated mailing lists and discussion forums is the exact problem I’ve been trying to solve and this is one of the first times someone articulated the problem so well.

Check out my startup: http://BraintrustHQ.com.

If anyone is interested, I’d love to work with you and whomever else is interested to see how we can make this free and make it work for the Open Source Community.
Article 1, section 2 of the US constitution.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years,
the other thing is, if you surveyed myspace users back in the day, you'd never have predicted the exodus to facebook once it appeared. Nobody leaves until there's a viable alternative, which is what we are all here for!
I've looked and the only other feature I've seen that may perhaps rival Github is Joel's code review flow.

Would you mind mentioning specific features (other than ones that are part of another dvcs) that you are referring to?
1) I would pick no company because the SV is not a homogeneous habitat. You have capital-intensive startups founded by PhD's trying to capitalize on 20 years of research... and you have startups bootstrapped out of lunchmoney by a couple of college dropouts who believe their new app will be a killer. Seriously, technology is more than the web.

2) generally speaking, imposing constraints can only decrease the maximum of the objective function one is trying to optimize; I did not say that such policies do hurt, I suggested it's not hard to see how they can hurt.
Only because Microsoft made that stupid design choice, there is no reason it needed to be part of the OS. The numerous alternative browsers that work perfectly well illustrates that.
How many hundreds (thousands?) of other articles like this are sitting out in the Wiki-ether right now, wreaking havoc and just waiting to be debunked?

Don't think this is new. For all of history there have been pervaders of disinformation. The only difference now is the media with which it is distributed.
Does More Money Motivate Higher Performance?
Allan Odgaard's Latest Comments on TextMate 2
Using the Wright Brothers as an example might not be the best. They had a lot of dealing with US Army.
"Just %#~*^{}! Finish It" is really just a vaguer "You Ain't Gonna Need It" or "The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work."
I interviewed with Google four years ago and have been working there since. None of my interview questions were of the puzzle variety. Many were coding and some interviews were completely open ended of the type "You seem to have done a lot of X" followed by a series of hard questions on X from someone who is clearly interested in learning more about X. I found the interviews quite enjoyable. YMMV.
Alas, I do not see the word "race" in that excerpt at all. This cite does not appear to be relevant to your original claim.
Or save some civilian lives in a war zone. The robot drone soldier might actually be able to take the time to assess the target instead of split second shooting. If a normal soldier hesitates, the the soldier could die. If a person commanding a remote drone hesitates, well then maybe you have to order a new drone or some spare parts.
There is a lot of history / context / baggage packed into a single question on the census, but I think our concern with race is fairly obvious when you consider our history . The US has always been concerned with figuring out its racial composition, since slavery and all its multitude of consequences (Jim Crow, lots of poor blacks leaving the south for Northern cities) have made it so important. Think of all the money and power that used to go with whether you were white or black, or whether you could treat an employee (or slave) as white or black, or whether your state had a lot of black people or not who only got you 3/5 of a representative!

It is starting to seem anachronistic to worry over race (thank god!), but that history is really very recent; think about bussing riots in the 1970s, etc. Also, a huge number of government programs have a mission to try to fix racial disparities (successfully or not), and they need information on basic racial population composition.

That said, I can't wait until nobody cares about race anymore. The litmus test on this will be whether ("inter") marriage matters; in coastal cities among college educated people, it isn't really news if one's parents are asian and white, or latino and white, but it still elicits comment and introspection if they are black and white...

I think the big dividing lines today depend on education and family cultural background, but I am not sure how a decennial census might track that.
One, http://www.designdenhaag.eu/en/sites/designdenhaag.eu/files/..., includes a swastika - which would make it (IIRC) illegal to display in Germany?
Work starts in £15m plan to get Concorde flying again
Just let them change their mind already!

Signed, every web developer in the world
You may be interested in this: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/358276/microsoft-man-my-job-is-t...
What if the Facebook (Un)Privacy Revolution Is a Good Thing?
Of the 1400, http://www.designdenhaag.eu/symbols, I think a lot more look like good flags though.
The various grammatical errors picked my interest as well.