skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Naming schemes by people who haven't had to deal with at least three or four large environments are typically poorly done and result in confusion more than helping you. People think they understand naming, but inevitably they have no clue. Find the sysadmin/network engineer with 15+ years experience in real world environments and just let them come up with a naming scheme. Speaking as one of those people - server A-records = m1, m2, ... M9999, etc..

Routers=rt1.datacenter, rt2... (sw1 for switches, fw1 for firewalls, ...)
I agree that there is no unbiased news. Ideally you would be equally critical towards all sources. Be aware of every word you read on the page, and understand that anything could be fabricated.

As soon as you become "loyal", you're much more likely to believe them regardless of what they say.

In addition to sites others have listed, for politics mostly, I've found that these two sites are a good addition (though they're surely biased as well):
http://www.factcheck.org/, http://politifact.com
99 Designs for Music
That's an interesting angle. But if you're the guy with a few years headstart, do you think the stigma associated with porn might make some future employer hesitate in hiring you?
NPR and Fox News? More like Fox News and Comedy Central.
You seem to be getting close to saying that the product actually being sold hardly matters, which I find hyperbolic.

This is the kind of thing that used to be said about Microsoft, that they were good at selling in spite of having bad products. But the truth was that Microsoft knew very well what their customers needed and wanted, and for the most part did a better job building something that met those wants and needs than their competitors.
I agree that the article is not implying a preference for "rule by elites", especially in light of this statement:

And if you harbor the notion...that the solution is more education
and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall,
well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study...showed
that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new
information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually
right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly
impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.
It isn't clear that there is such a thing. I remember a friend used to listen to NPR on the way home. At one point, he realized that he was getting home angry. Once he figured this out, he quit NPR and started listening to easy listening jazz (which I reinterpret to mean non-threatening jazz, but that's another story).

See, what most news channels do (TV, newspaper, web) is to strive to alarm you. NPR stories about central american coups, financial press predictions of doom with taxation proposals, valley press warning of the upcoming total shortage of venture capitol, bloggers warning of the impending death of microsoft, prince predicting (hoping?) for the death of the internet itself.

When we talk about bias, we are more likely to think left-leaning vs right-leaning vs libertarian. Let me suggest another way of looking at this.

Are you looking for a source of news whose thrust is to alarm you? I claim that is the common bias shared by most news sources.

So I suggest this simple experiment. As you listen to a newscast/blogger podcast/tv broadcast or read a blogger post/newspaper/news.google.com/news.combinator.com ask yourself "is this story informing or alarming".

Then check out utne.com or the Christian Science Monitor.

Better yet is to read several, or none at all.

Who is it that said "if the information is important, it will find me"?
This is lovely, considering that Reddit has, for years, been nothing more than a sounding board for a group of nasty, dishonest, pseudo-Marxist potheads. Take a look at /r/politics and you will see nothing but Obama-worship, profit-hating and Republican-bashing. On /r/programming, the subreddit I would visited the most, you will find plenty of mediocre programmers who do nothing but attack the work of others, especially when that work is done in a "boring" language like Java or C++, rather than producing anything of value themselves.

It is hard to see what value Reddit can provide to anyone outside of its current, very narrow demographic, and I haven't missed it much since leaving it last year.
Thanks for the info, just don't forget that you can always use a disposable email address!!! (ah-hem whyspam.me)
Add MSNBC to your Fox habit and you should be fine. MSBNC is left-leaning. NPR does a lot of international reporting and stories regarding the arts, which I think is why they sometimes get unfairly labeled as left-leaning. If you take a look at a typical NPR story, they have time to go into enough depth to give reasonably equal time to different sides of an issue or debate. I was listening to Talk of the Nation recently and a conservative PA rep who is pro-Arizona immigration reform was given a lot of time to speak uninterrupted. Had that person been on MSNBC he would have been cut off quickly and questioned.

I agree there's no one source for unbiased news -- you have to read/listen to a lot of sources and examine critically.
Honestly, HN is primarily my source. With the exception of some hard science and astronomy that I get from more direct sources. I usually hit msnbc once or twice a day and find nothing worthy of the name news. I dislike the layout of nytimes.com, so that prevents me from reading much there. Overall, if something hits HN it's usually of interest.
I like the PBS NewsHour program. They seem to have a slight left bias that I find tolerable. I really like the way they pick two or three issues daily to go in-depth with and try to get opinions from multiple sides. I also like that the people they get opinions from seem to be the well thought, well spoken type rather than the "I can talk the loudest and make the other guy look dumb" type that the cable news networks seem to use.
Well, bias also comes from withholding facts. "Netherlands:0, Spain:1" doesn't mention the dramatic game between Germany & Spain.

Although it's pretty harmless here, it can make a difference when you talk about bigger things, like unemployment. Fox News might be apt to stress the fact that X Million Americans are unemployed this quarter, whereas NPR might note that unemployment rates are down Y%.

They're both true, and plain facts. Yet, highly biased. Even if you state both, you're ignoring other, larger factors. Did a government program start/expire? Did a set of large companies undergo layoffs? Etc.

So theoretically, if you read enough (true) information, you don't have to worry about bias. (Very hard to do practically)
A downvote because I bashed a YC-funded company? Look, I stopped reading Reddit for the reasons outlined above, and I am sure others left for similar reasons. If you don't smoke pot or don't think pot smoking is a good idea, didn't vote for Obama, and don't believe the government can solve all of our problems, you simply aren't welcomed there.
I love Swype. It's unclear to me that I'm actually faster at this point, but I downloaded a speed test app -- I clocked myself at 47 wpm in one run, 100% accuracy. Cherry-picking the best number, to be sure, but still.

More importantly, it felt like the switch from button-mashing to T9. Swype is the way typing on a touchscreen should work: gestures that know what you want. So many of the brilliant idioms popularized by the iPhone (pinch zoom, left/right swipe to get between screens) are, in my opinion, why touch screens work at all for a phone. Buttons are unsatisfying due to the lack of tactile feedback; gestures feel natural and expressive. Given all that, making gestures the way you enter text makes me that much happier using the phone for typing at all.

To answer your question: Swype is in no way a replacement for a traditional keyboard. It's a language entry tool, and it's as useless as the stock iPhone/Android keyboard for things like keyboard shortcuts and arbitrary strings. As far as I can tell, I'll never move to a touchscreen keyboard for regular work because it's such an efficient interaction tool (if you live in tools like emacs/vim/command line like me). Swype actually limits the overall universe of your input[1], but it makes the common mode of language very easy.

Short answer: no, Swype doesn't try or succeed in replacing hardware keyboards.

Now that you've got me thinking about it, though, a full-sized Swype keyboard set up with better modified key support and a dictionary that included keyboard shortcuts in the app you were working in would be pretty great. Take vim: all those 2-4 letter combinations you type all the time would be available to you, and you could apply heuristics based on your document to help fill in more free-form keys like find-replace strings. You could even find ways to structure the shortcuts around easy directions, essentially re-inventing keyboard shortcuts as well-placed single swipes of a finger. Somebody with more time than I have now could work that into a neat proof of concept.

[1]I mean, you can still use it like the stock keyboard, but that's not the kind of interaction I'm talking about.
For a similar project we used the IR sensors off a USB ball mouse along with homemade encoder wheels to provide motor feedback. This method costs next to nothing and is pretty damn accurate.

It was a ball mouse which featured two scroll wheels, meaning we could recieve feedback from 4 DC motors using a standard USB interface & mouse driver.

We used the mouse buttons as triggers to mark the rotation stop points for use in the initialization routine.

The motors we ended up using were high end electric RC car motors. They were the highest torque in the smallest package we could realistically get that still fitted our budget.
you're damn right it's long and between all the "how to be a programmer" guides that pop up on HN (all of which are usually 10 point lists that I can only equate to CS masturbation)THIS ONE, this one really long guide here, is worth printing out and reading in it's entirety.

the reason it keeps showing up on HN is for new users, like yourself, to read about it.

if HN had a "best of the best" based on re submissions and up-votes, this would be on that list (also, erlang).
tl;dr = Procrastination is an ego defense mechanism which works by hindering your performance. This is a way to avoid the possibly painful reality. In the article, the give the example that if, for example, you study for a test only the night before and get a bad grade, you can still tell yourself "I just did not have enough time" which is by far not as painful as admitting to yourself that you are not smart enough.
Thanks for the link but I really don't see anywhere where it says using something like html() would be a greater risk. The rule of thumb is to sanitize information from untrusted sources. And as long as you adhere to this rule, I really don't see how using html() would pose a security threat. That is unless I'm missing something?
My compliant about the voice features in Android isn't just accuracy but also speed. It's just too slow. I can type much faster than it can do speech-to-text. If it does mess something up going back to edit on Android is a bit clunky (nothing like the magnifying glass feature on iPhone) which slows me down even more. Apple has their Voice Control feature and bought Siri so I would imagine they're working on something. It's a feature that would be useful if it actually worked better in my opinion.
sad but true: the daily show

when all news is biased, at least they make their bias clear.
Almost a year ago, I quit reading local news. Stopped hitting the main news sites 10x/day, stopped picking up a physical paper when I happened across one. I'd already stopped watching televised news.

I'd found that too much of what I was seeing was simply irrelevant and it either frustrated me or pissed me off.

Since that point, research into the influence of PR/publicity companies on local news showed that our primary newspaper in South Australia was comprised of 30% content pushed by PR/publicity. The online versions of the main paper here have devolved into eye-ball seeking trash - bikini galleries, celebrity gossip, etc.

Through this experience I've learnt how little I really miss. 99% of what's going on just doesn't need to be known.

I check Al Jazeera English once or twice a week and CNN a little less often. Other than that, I feel like I've saved some time and cleared my head a little (especially of some of the negativity that comes from news).
I think the suggestion is that programmatically creating specific DOM nodes is safer than handing the library a string containing user input and hoping that the browser doesn't interpret it in a way that corrupts the DOM.
If you have a bad experience at Zappos, you can buy your next shoes somewhere else pretty easily. Zappos HAS to have amazing customer service to get people comfortable with the idea of buying shoes online.

To transfer all your banking away from Citi is a huge chore if you're already there, and most of the other big banks aren't measurably better. Citi has more power than Zappos in this situation - they're only being as good as they have to be (terrible).
Agreed, thinking isn't words. Thinking happens lightning-fast below words. We just routinely load it into and out of the "language buffer" because we are the communicating animal.

I often solve problems when thinking about something else - a song, a radio program. THen when I go back to the problem, the solution is clear. Where did that "Thinking" occur? Not in my language buffer, it was fully occupied. In fact in might have been getting the language buffer "out of the loop" that allowed the thinking to occur.

When debugging code, I absolutely DO NOT have an internal dialog going on. I'm paging through code, following definitions, looking at code blocks as a whole, putting the code into some mental space that is not words, then voila! the wrong piece shows up in my mind and I have it.

Language is over-rated.
Why so hostile? Assuming that all women and all men obey the same rules is also an immensely stupid mistake to make. Not all of us are micro-optimising assholes - some of us actually care about the people that we choose to start a family with.
Colbert Report and The Daily Show!
I am an Indian, thus I dont have any rights to vote in USA.
I find both programs amusing, granted they have slight liberal bias but they are quite balanced as well.

I especially like their interviews with conservative authors.
this is awesome. can't wait to read it!
If you don't like the stock Android keyboard (or even if you do) I'd highly recommend trying out Swype. It's pretty damn impressive. Not perfect, but it's definitely a strong alternative.
Great advice! I'm currently making plans to exit a mild-moderate profitable company and I can attest to the fact that a startup is like family! We share the struggles, triumphs and everything in between.
There isn't such a thing as an unbiased news source. One solution is to get de-constructed news from a source like No Agenda - http://www.noagendashow.com/, and then you'll start to recognize the slant behind new stories more readily.

All professional new outlets have sponsors, and so they are biased. NPR for example, has shows sponsored by Monsanto, GE, and Archer Daniels Midland - so good luck avoiding bias!
One reason people recommend BBC is that it's a place to get a view of the US from the outside, from perhaps a more "objective" point of view, as opposed to domestic coverage that is a part of what it reports. I like Newshour, and it seems that Owen Bennett-Jones can play devil's advocate as well as anyone.
The very idea makes the network engineer in me cringe. There are so many good reasons to establish layer 3 boundaries before crossing any relatively low speed or high latency connections.
Is the weather/frost covering important UI elements a default/manufacturer/carrier feature or something that's installed?
I'm surprised that ~45 and counting people would downvote this. I assume these are people who saw "See no evil, hear no evil" and are taking it out on me.
The Daily Show has a bias against stupidity, which both major parties have more than enough of....
The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain is available in its entirety on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=ElrBj9ZcW50C&printsec=f...

Also free on Amazon in e-book form for Kindle/iOS devices: http://www.amazon.com/A-Dogs-Tale-ebook/dp/B000JQU9WO/
Most networks allow their phones to be unlocked after two years for this very reason. Even AT&T will give you an unlock code for other Motorola, Nokia phones once the two year obligation is fulfilled.
I agree scrolling was an issue in the past.

However, using android 2.1 + JIT (sort of a pre-froyo) on an htc hero, I find scrolling almost on par with the iPhone. I imagine Nexus One's with Froyo are near-perfect.
I love The Economist. It's the only magazine I subscribe to.

I think British culture is close enough to US culture to do a great job capturing the subtleties of American politics; at the same time they remain less biased since, for the most part, they don't have a horse in the race.

BTW: I also find that while they do try to remain unbiased, NPR slants a little more to the left than the right,
Have to ask -- Sokka Gakkai?
On the internet, porn is about addiction. SO go ahead, and create a gambling site while you're at it.
Why not? At least it'd working for a company whose product I'm interested in. :-)

Frankly, as long as the porn company was only doing relatively straight forward vanilla porn (no animals, no minors, etc), I'd have fewer "moral qualms" about working for a porn company than I would about working in the finance or "defense" industries.
There aren't many liquidity events (snicker) in porn startups, so make sure you get paid a huge salary.
That is an interesting post. Your idea of an opportunity cloud is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. I even made a decision recently to stay at my current job instead of taking a somewhat better job, because I believe the opportunity potential is higher if I keep with what I am doing for a while longer.
I don't disagree but I don't think it is wise to hold that against the platform. I'd much rather have it built in and refined for when processors get faster than to have Google wait for that to happen (Plus I personally find it to be fine for short messages now)
Absolutely, I look at it as creating a new segment of the market, much like crowdsourcing did for stock photography.

99designs main customers are small businesses that wouldn't otherwise have been able to justify what they view as a risky spend on design.
There is no "unbiased news." Period.

If what you want to do is get information without an overt bias, then yes, NPR is fairly good. Others have recommended The Economist, I second that. I would recommend getting your news from a variety of sources (preferably not American-centric, if you wish to hear international news).

I tend to lean heavily on NPR, The Economist, and the NY Times (the last two are seriously contradictory, but I find that to be useful). I have heard good things about The Atlantic, although I cannot vouch for it myself.
The iPhone UI looks dated compared to this?

http://bit.ly/cdfQkM
Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event
Very interested in how HN will react to this.
I gave up on all news about 10 years ago.
If something is important, or unimportant but popular, I cannot escape hearing about it. Once in a while I buy the economist to read on the plane.

That said, I recently started reading the New York Post. There's something to be said about a really trashy, tabloid take on the news.
Yea, let's be honest. Most of these "how to X" books should really be condensed into something like this. We should be thankful the author was considerate with our time and wise with his words.
I certainly agree with this but I think it's misleading to say it increases your chances for xss security threats. I can see it increasing the chances of having a webpage not behave properly across all browsers though.
Although there are far fewer contests overall.

Our top designers tell us they tend to avoid the higher prize contests in favour of the mid-ranged ones where there is less competition and simpler requirements.
Learning Disability
bbc news is a very good ressource
To the people who claim that thinking happens in some language or other: how about what's going through your head when you play chess? Is that not thinking by your definition? Or do you really narrate it to yourself, as if you were writing a commentary of the game?
Good guess, but no; it was, believe it or not, one of those fundamentalist Korean "Christian" churches that are located in and around Okubo. (My girlfriend, who was raised as a Christian, told me that they refused to read anything but one section of the old testament that had to do with Tithing or something).

As far as Soka Gakkai goes; maybe you can educate me more about them, but they seem to be hated by the Uyoku (so they can't be all that bad). The real insane religious cult in Japan right now is "Happiness Science"; Kofuku Jitsugento feels much scarier than Komeito.
I have been coding a new app with 1.9.2-head and the latest Rails 3 beta. RVM makes switching from 1.8.6 to 1.9.x easy. Haven't had any crashes and it even feels faster.
Drink Orange Soda not Caffeine
no, how could I explain that on a future resume?
I also didn't think it addressed a longer term perspective. I think that if someone throws out a "fact" that challenges some tenet I hold, I might be inclined to dismiss it at least in the immediate term. However as evidence mounts most reasonable people will at some point see that they have been mistaken and change their minds.
Those claiming here that Fox news are lying bastards are probably going to be equaled by the number of people here claiming that NPR leans left. As objectively as I can observe, the real outliers (far to the left) are the entire NBC/MSNBC set of stations and Newsweek (which is about to go under anyway). Among ABC and CBS, I think the only valuable sources are 60 minutes (which can lean left) and CBS Sunday Morning (which isn't hard news, but is informative and entertaining).

Again, in my opinion, NPR <i>leans</i> left. Fox news <i>leans</i> right. And if you want to watch the NEWS programming on Fox, then it is usually accurate as opposed to the OPINION programming on Fox like Glen Beck and O'Reilly.

Surprisingly enough, the most worldly, unbiased, informed and thorough daily news sources are the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, both of them use some combination of pay-for-service access - which changes regularly as the newspaper industry figures it out. They're both very close to centered, although the editorial boards lean left and right respectively. The big difference, however, is that both also give voice to dissenting opinions (where appropriate - on the OPINION pages) and publish well-thought-out, if contrary, letters to the editor.

Some of the other commenters are right - you need to take a look at multiple sources and discern for yourself not only where they sit on the political spectrum, but also the percentage of news to bullshit each chooses to publish.
The thrill of the chase
I have never understood the appeal of speech-to-text on mobile phones.

I don't want to sit next to someone on the train while they enunciate a long email or a text message to their girlfriend. Nor do I want to shout my own internet musings at those around me. Besides, these days most of us are used to editing as we write. Good PC dictation software makes that easy. On a mobile phone, you'll end up editing it by thumb anyway.

- - -

The problem with not demanding perfection is that once a feature ships and it's "good enough", it's probably going to stay "good enough" forever.

Yep, Android's has lots of cool features that iPhone has not, but a lot of its core functionality isn't fucking done.