skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bad karma has a longer half-life than a bump in conversions for one month. Doesn't mean that they may not prosper for a while, but if they persist in bad mouthing all of their competitors as "dying platforms" there will be consequences that are likely to overwhelm any benefit.
I'm quite surprised that with some of Google's recent pickups more people aren't concerned about how it may negatively impact competition. We might get a better travel search out of this but I personally would have enjoyed seeing a company other than Google be successful at search for once. Same with AdMob -- Google is already a giant powerful advertising company. Not sure they really needed to gobble up AdMob to be successful there.
The pleasure of writing, and/or bragging rights -- the same way that Wikipedia came to be what it is.
Maybe that's the definition of "art" - how well can it be used for porn

This was the basis of my observation of medium/message confusion. The "it" which is being used is the medium and "porn" is the message. So it would seem that you are trying to define a medium as "art", which is wrong. A message transmitted via a given medium is art, not the medium in isolation. Maybe you are looking for a term like "art-capable medium."

An alternative is that kids are/ancient folk were more abstraction-tolerant.

I've been spoiled by years of pornographic magazines, then by high resolution images from the Internet.
As I understand it the developer got annoyed with other developers polluting his 32 bit ASM codebase with impure C and decided to focus on a 64 bit version with a more restrictive license. Shame.
Or make up some pseudo-code-y language. I.e. this is how it could look like in Java, if it included this awesome feature with some syntax I just made up for it.

(I like Python more in general, but I am not sure, if you can demonstrate some of the static goodness of Haskell-analogies in it. Polymorphism on return types is awesome, but not real imaginable in Python, but barely imaginable in Java.)
>Set a specific “go or no-go” deadline on the event for yourself. If you’re openly recruiting an international audience, this deadline must be at the very least one full week ahead of time.

If I've already bought (probably non-refundable) plane tickets to fly to a conference, and I get an email a week before the conference saying it's canceled, I'm going to be very mad, even if I get my conference admission money back.
we should add ruby to that.
I wonder if it would be possible to build a site like Reddit where karma points can be exchanged for real money.

Maybe if users have to pay a subscription fee to gain access... The company takes a cut, answerers get a cut.

I bet it could work.
How about "the death of the US IPO?" (for whatever reasons).

There's just that much less money to be made than in the late-50s to early '00s and this results in a lot of the things you note. E.g. there are too many firms with too much money for the new No Exit market.
This looks much more what I had in mind when I read the topic. It's a bit sad that it hasn't really get that much attention.
I thought you were incorrect, but Boy Genius Report just posted this update:

--
UPDATE: The last line in the email exchange was actually not said by Mr. Jobs; rather it was by “Tom.” We corrected it as soon as we were made aware.

Strange... it doesn't seem to really make sense in context. Why is he telling Jobs to relax and that it's "not worth it"? He's irate that his phone doesn't work right but then when Jobs says they're working on it, he tells Jobs that it's not a big deal?
I owned and tested various readers (including the previous Kindle) but until now a traditional book is unbeatable (at least in my eyes). Here is my major reasons behind this:

- The setup cost is too high for an electronic reader. Starting or jumping in a book is faster than starting a reader especially when you have 5 minutes to kill in a traffic jam or while being in a train/metro.

- Comfort of reading is still much better with a traditional book. Having an electronic device emitting light while reading a book in your bed is not really comfortable if you want to sleep afterward.

- Annotation. I'm writing, adding post-it or even adding pages in my books... Sorry but beating a pencil in a book is difficult for a software reader. I think annotation is really important for technical books when you start to use and master a specific technology.

- Social impact. I like to share books with other and even with strangers in the train. With electronic reader socialization is much more difficult than with traditional books where everyone can read the cover.

I'm still not really convinced or found a real practical use of such readers for my day-to-day technical reading. The only advantage for electronic books is the fast look-up but with some nice placed annotation you can even beat the ebook look-up/search...
If you like this sort of thing, definitely check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-without-Words-Exercises-Classro...
My approach was to find some designs I really admired and then recreate them in Photoshop from the ground up. That's a great way to learn PS itself, but more importantly in the process of (re-)creation many subtle design choices in the original are revealed.
I would be mad one way or the other too, but if I got some sort of notice in time to cancel I would be happier than getting no notice until I show up the day of.

The problem is hoping some miracle will happen in the last week and it turning into a disaster like this.
They also power most of the meta search sites, which Google is easily positioned to become (and link to actual OTAs for booking). Huge conflict of interest.

However, ITA is not the only option out there, and given the concerns I bet everyone has with their contracts there's now room for another data provider to jump in and snatch up contracts during renegotiations.

A general rule of thumb I find valid is if there's some consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of computation, Google will get into it. They certainly have the infrastructure for it.

(I'm a former TripAdvisor Flights engineer, which is owned by Expedia)
Exactly. Async is very important when you're blocking on an external event (such as fetching a page doing doing hanging-GET), but local db or filesystem blocking can most easily be handled by just running more Tornado instances (because they better not be blocking for too long anyway, or else your site is dead).
You just described 2 of the ways that the competition is being limited by law and politics:
1. Controlling the number of doctors graduating per year.
2. Making medical training very long and expensive(even when it's not needed - for example when nurses can replace doctors) so that doctors would inevitably charge higher rates in the future.

Since medicine historically was distributed and built by community doctors , the classic competition limiting strategy of using big monopolies didn't fit here.

So the medical profession uses many different strategies for limiting "distributed" competition.
37, here. One of my <=20s naiveties:

- That the old saying "you can do anything" is hogwash. It gets parroted by your teachers and parents without a thought, but it's totally true. It comes down to how bad you want it and what you're willing to sacrifice.
I agree with the ultimate point in this article, but the way he got there seemed to be rather jumpy. I also had a hard time following his train of thought. I will say that the way the article ended was excellent.
I like that it's animated; nearly every static "visual proof" of the Pythagorean theorem is nearly incomprehensible to me without a lot of explanation---I'm a huge fan of visual proofs but for most of them you really need a time dimension to make sense of them.
Journalism's duty is to be truthful and impartial--truthful on matters of fact, impartial on matters of opinion. From there it gets complicated, of course.
Garbage. Just before the SCO Group (new SCO) started their legal jihad they tried to get Novell to acknowledge that SCO owned it. Novell said "no way" (rather obviously). At least to PJ of Groklaw and myself, this demonstrates that the SCO Group knew exactly what a house of cards they were basing their Hail Mary Microsoft funded lawsuit against IBM and, well, the world, on.
Sounds like a real battery-burner.
First of all, that's not relevant at all. This was supposed to be a normal conference and they changed it to an unconference when they moved it and screwed their attendees.

Second of all, I know people who have gone to unconferences and had a blast and learned a lot. An unconference (eg. a barcamp) is a conference where you don't have speakers lined up ahead of time--participants sign up to give talks.

That doesn't mean the talks suck though. Sure, you probably don't have some awesome famous keynoter, and the quality of talks will be a lot more variable, but you can still catch a lot of good talks about a lot of varied subjects.
And you don't even need the cheapest option. Anything within 10$ of the cheapest option is probably OK. (Allowing approximations make the problem easier, at least in theory.)
This post is more about naming and shaming than providing any useful and constructive lessons for would-be event organizers.

I understand the temptation of writing a post like this, but it doesn't really have a place on HN.
Here's an accureate graph from Quantcast, both services are quantified, and yes, your postergous blog does count towards this graph.

http://www.quantcast.com/profile/embed?img=http://www.quantc...
I don't have very high hopes for Firefox. They promised V8-like speed with 3.5, 3.6, and now they're promising it with 4.0, but they're still more than twice as slow, and have been every single time I have tried them.

The only reason I use Firefox anymore is Firebug. All of my normal browsing occurs in Chrome. Even if they eventually get Firefox's VMs as fast as V8 or SquirrelFish Extreme, the interface is clunky and old and much, much slower than Chrome, and really that's what makes it feel so much faster; Chrome starts immediately, I can move tabs quickly, there's no needless address bar/search bar segregation, and so on. I think I am a permanent Chrome user.

Firefox has had years to catch up to Chrome by this point and their results have been pretty bad, imo. Unless they can get it together, I think that Fx is destined to decline permanently soon.
To understand the problem I think everyone needs to have a really good concept of 1.7 million devices sold. It could effect 5% of the owners and that's almost 100,000 people. If 10% of those people are very upset about the problem and e-mail tech sites, post to forums, etc can we really get a good idea of the scope of the problem? 10,000 people being vocal online could represent 100,000 real problems or it could represent 1.7 million real problems. There's really no way of knowing. The lack of some massive army of people returning their iPhone 4s makes me think it's probably closer to the 5% mark than the 100% mark.
Oh, I agree that a week before is better than when I've already flown there. I'm just saying that you really should aim to be sure you can do it months in advance, save for smaller events that really are just drawing people from a specific metropolitan area.
Something else I am not the first to notice: the "magic spot" problem doesn't affect Edge.

It really makes me wonder if there is an underlying software or firmware issue that is exacerbating the problem. The fact that upload isn't significantly impacted, nor Edge, suggests some sort of phone freakout that's not strictly dictated by the hardware to me.
The connections are when one person replies to another.
I created it mostly to find beautiful code, not because I have a whole library of it. Because of that I couldn't really seed it properly. If you have anything to contribute, please do.
Where did Posterous claim that Tumblr is dying, btw? Their original blog post says "A lot of you have asked for help moving your old blog, photos or videos to Posterous. You grouched about dying platforms that haven't added new features in ages, sites that have made it too complex to perform the most basic tasks and places that smother your content in ads."

You have to read things way too literally to interpret that as "all sites we're going to mention over the next few weeks suffer from all these flaws".
The word limit would or one page rule, would not work out as an absolute in practise. But it would be nice as a guide.

The version control is a very good idea that might actually work in practise. At least from a technical point of view. I don't know whether some people actually prefer the old system of amending.
now let's do this for the rest of the education field!
I'm referring to fractional reserve banking, and those loans, which are the primary source of money creation in the modern world. Not person to person loans as you are talking about.
Is a system in which a large number of citizens must be intimately aware of the intricacies of a huge and complex set of legal code a well-factored system? Isn't that a bit like the passengers of an airplane instructing the pilot on how to fly?

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from James Madison, from Federalist Paper #62:

"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"

In my opinion, Madison was as correct now as he was then.
It's so good to hear this. I'm always afraid that Python is going to squeeze out Lisp. It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive.
I'd rather assume it wouldn't. (Mainly for my on selfish ... err .. 'free'-loving self)
In the analogy, you yourself can tell whether you've arrived in Paris, France or Paris, Texas. In politics, you do need someone else to continue to identify whether the bills up for consideration are positive or negative from your perspective, and if you don't have a trustworthy figure doing so, you do end up in a a pickle.

But the key point is: I don't suggest or assume it should be the politicians themselves who tell you where you've ended up and who has brought you there. It's the activists and politicos of the world I look to.
I've been thinking about getting a kindle for a little while now, and the PDF reader is a huge factor for me. I already have a fair amount of PDFs that I read on my laptop and (somewhat painfully) on my phone. I'd love to be able to sync my location on a PDF between multiple devices.
If you Google "google travel" no quotes, the number 3 result is:

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/ (Watch the video. It's priceless)

Number 1 and 2 are Google Directory entries.

So I guess they finally realized they need to take a $2 Trillion/year industry a little more seriously than they have been.
And the Germans decriminalized adultery, homosexuality and lots of other stuff around the sixties. Prostitution was legalized a few years ago.
Well, exactly. Therein is the crux. Is that worth the extra conversions (which may mean more active users, an important metric to consider)?

As I said I don't know.

But you know. In my experience bad Karma has a funny way of fizzling out. Remember Climategate? Mostly fizzled out. I bet plenty of people have forgotten all but the broadest details as they read the latest climate blog - give it a few months and people won't bring it up any more. The Parliamentary expenses scandal in the UK? All fizzled out after a couple of months despite being pretty much wide scale "fraud". It's no longer as interesting as the budget. Last years financial melt down - pretty much the biggest example of "bad karma" we could pick. Where are all the vocal "we must punish the bankers" people now? (I realise there are vocal people still - and good on them - but the general public isn't all that interested now, they are still choosing to use Barclays etc.) How much is the Oil spill on national news right now?

Point is: heat lasts for a short while. The play you have to make (and I make this as a general point, I have no idea of Posterous' aims) is whether once that heat dies everyone sorta forgets it. If in a month the only people still bringing it up are the Tumblr fans then they will have succeeded. Sure someone in a few months might think "actually I will use Wordpress, I remember Posterous were jerks" - the play is how many are left thinking that.

And, finally, "there is no such thing as bad press" (certainly not bad press like this)

Disclaimer: I don't approve of what they are saying.
I'd sign up purely for the entertainment value.
I think that those hoops are unreasonable. When you give tests like this, you need to be respectful of the applicant's time; they all have others things to do and other opportunities to consider, it is incredibly arrogant to demand anything that takes more than a couple of hours imo unless you are both very serious about placement.

The refactoring of the code is probably OK; I haven't looked at the code so I don't know for sure, but writing a Ruby script with the GitHub API and the second task is a bit over the top. They should choose one or the other; if an applicant can refactor code well, he should be able to know how to use libraries, and if an applicant can write clean code to do the GitHub task, then he should know how to refactor. No need for both.
Can you just use an async db adapter? (I haven't used Tornado)
Their passion for their craft/hobby/skill?

I'd gladly sit down and pass on everything I know about programming (not a lot!), unix, amateur radio, aviation etc because as long as it's an interest of mine, I love talking about it. Having someone willing and/or eager to listen is even more motivational.
Well, sometimes I stumble upon code which I really think is very nice. Sometimes I'm also a bit proud of my own code when I read it a few months/years later but I'm not sure if that is maybe too biased (and also I'm not sure if I could point out any specific examples right now -- but I will keep your site in mind).

I also remember some talk on the Chaos Communication Congress about interesting code examples. That was both about very crazy hacks (mostly like 'don't do it at home' but still insightful) and also some very nice examples. I'll see if I can find that talk. (Or maybe someone remembers it?)

Edit: I think it was this one: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/files/363-litera...

Edit: Not sure if that was it. At least I don't see the nice examples there. :) And I miss some crazy examples I kept in mind.

Edit: Similar talk, one year later: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/704-...
Microsoft kills the Kin - What's Up?
Go read that Times magazine article about the most expensive town in America for health care.

Average health in the town, nothing special about it except the fact that they bill twice as much. They're sending each other referrals like crazy. It's in Texas, so I'm guessing their medical malpractice costs are not above average.
Grigory Perelman Declines $1M Prize
Use an Android phone and an USRP (GNURadio) to create a GSM "Cell" (BTS)
I think the problem is systemic. If you look at any one part of the system, you wind up saying "that's out of whack but it's only a small percentage." The problem seems to be that those small percentages are compounded.
While I agree with your second paragraph, I have to say that yes, I'd be happy to rewrite inline documentation to reflect a 3-line code change. Ten pages of inline documentation is a lot and probably inappropriately located, but if it really takes ten pages to describe what three lines of code are doing, there is just no way those three lines of code can be self-documenting. (So much for extreme examples...)

As you mentioned, there are different places for documentation: inline, commit comments, change tracking system, project/release planning documents, and overall system architecture documents. These all serve different purposes, describe different aspects, and typically have different audiences. They all have different levels of detail too. The code itself is the most detailed documentation, because it describes what the software actually does when it runs, and should be as readable as possible. The inline comments supplement that, because the code describes "what" but not "why". You mention that check ins should describe "why", but they give the why for the overall change, not for each block of code. Inline comments give the why for each block of code.
Glucose, which is pretty similar to cellulose in composition, does indeed contain two hydrogens and an oxygen for each carbon. But the carbon has a mass of 12 AMU, the oxygen of 16, and the two hydrogens total 2 together. So 6⅔% of the cellulose is hydrogen by weight, and the other 93⅓% is carbon monoxide.

(I have no idea whether the oxygen atoms from the water end up in the glucose or in the excreted O₂.)
Do you want to imply that parliament is not sovereign?
System to predict market size of a product. Unfortunately, it was a market flop.
More to the point than the Geneva Conventions: the UN Convention Against Torture, which is exactly what it sounds like.

As for whether waterboarding is torture under US law: the US executed a few Kempaitai (Japanese secret police) agents for torturing US prisoners in WWII; they had waterboarded them. Waterboarding is also covered under UNCAT.

(Note to anyone assuming a partisan motivation: I am a serious Catholic, thus not by any stretch of the imagination a US liberal.)
I like Tornado, too, but here are a couple problems:

- Hard to test, at least relative to Django. There's no built-in support, and being async makes it a little complicated. I have it working now, but it took some bashing and plenty of the mock library.

- Lack of libraries for things we might want to do asynchronously. I can buy the argument that that's fine for databases, but for AMQP it's mandatory. The lack of a (working) Tornado AMQP library drove me to use Cyclone, which is a production-ready port of Tornado to the Twisted framework. Libraries ahoy.
You can make a secure enough password that is much lower than 27 characters pretty easily. Let me give an example.

My brother is named Aaron. First I think of a memorable sentence about him. "Aaron got me to take money from a wishing well when I was 8." OK, that's memorable to me and not many people know that story. Now I'll just take first letters and make a few obvious substitutions. "Agm2t$fWW@8"

That's 11 characters. It includes capitals, small letters, numbers and punctuation. It would be easy for me to remember. And would be a pretty hard password to break. If they had passwords like that, I doubt that the FBI would have ever broken into the program. (Though there must have been some other reason to be suspicious.)

(For the record I just made that up. It has no relation to any password I have ever used.)
Huh? How is this content? QPX is "searching" on airline provided content.

OK, you could say that a QPX suggested route is content, but it's algorithmically built from on the fly constantly updated airline content. Very much like classical Google web search.
Also it would keep legislators busy with the old laws, instead of making up new ones all the time.

Just make sure that re-affirming old laws takes some effort.

However I wonder how businesses would react to the uncertainties of certain laws expiring, just because the nation is not in a mood to re-affirm them?