skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(honest question)

What IE-only sites are actually worth visiting?

I've been using Firefox forever, and Netscape before that, it's been more than 5 years (maybe even more) since I found a browser-specific site that had any value.

My wife and I both use Mac's (hers at home, mine for home/work), so I can be pretty sure that I haven't had to resort to IE for some odd site.
At least it is not a pointer. Can you imagine the kind of segfaults you would get? UGLLLYYYYY ones.
AMD cuts follow Intel restructuring
isn't huddle chat identical to campfire?
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080408-021637
Context is definitely important; the pause function is a nice touch. I don't deny that there are things you can read with RSVP. You probably can see that there are things that aren't suitable for RSVP too. It depends on the content and very importantly, the goal. But I will contest the usefulness of RSVP as a primary approach to reading in daily life; the case for peripheral vision above and below your current focus is strong enough. Your center of gaze is where meaning is most efficiently processed, but peripheral cues do enhance understanding. I would further reason that the spatial arrangement of text is also useful in aiding recall (different topic).

Also, the brain, or a little more accurately, your visual memory buffer, does indeed "cache" images, which does get deciphered in time, but as the text is flashed to your eyes at a constant rate, it doesn't make a difference. If I flash a stimulus at your eyes for 65ms, you may not consciously detect something, but it will register in your brain and you will process it, after the stimulus is gone. This is the visual buffer in action, but the processing is latent and does not occur at the same speed it takes to send the signal from the optical nerves to the visual cortex. If I flash many short pulses back-to-back, I won't bet on retaining most of the stuff.

The one-line RSVP has a fundamental speed limit before your forebrain cannot consciously register (hence willfully reflect upon) the material. While you can pause the reader, it requires intervention by your hands, which could be an unnecessary delay, because your eyes are far quicker and more fine-tuned for this task.

Anyhow, I'm sure zapreader has its uses. It does force you to read in a less lazy way, and is also useful (very definitely so) for training, but for those serious about reading very "fast," RSVP can only do so much.
The article basically says: "Typography is subjective. There are no rules -- especially regarding serif and sans-serif fonts. Look at your design on the screen and on paper. If it looks bad, change it." This advice seems self-evident and unhelpful to me.

Here are the three points in the article that I think are genuinely helpful:

- Times New Roman works better in narrow columns than wide columns.

- Some fonts look good on screen and bad on paper, and vice versa.

- Lighter fonts work better with small margins, blacker fonts work better with large margins.

The article seems quite long for relatively little content.
My point is that Google's had very few exit strategies other than an IPO once it took 25M in VC money.

Most YC startups have more flexibility regarding their exit strategy.
Robots seen doing work of 3.5 million people in Japan
Blocks are lambda's, they're just not objects (but they can be converted to objects.)
Refactor AS you continue ahead when you notice specifically bad code/design issues. Also if you find performance issues when profiling. Don't let refactoring be your primary task, keep it on a secondary track but running along side your primary task.
Ask YC: Is tech-life threatening your love life?
Our personal space has now become our personal cyberspace. There is little room for that close cuddle in bed anymore, as couples prefer sleeping with their phones and laptops!

Do you sleep with your wife/husband, girlfriend/boyfriend or your laptop? Is it your mobile phone that you grope for the first thing after you rub your eyes in the morning?

Do you plug in your MP3 player or tune into the radio on your phone as soon as you step out of your home/office/college?
I don't get what you're saying. aston did say pretend.

Once you have the function name (or an object method array) it can be stored in a variable with any name you want, passed around, etc. You can pretend it's a function all you want; you can check whether it seems like a real function with is_callable; and you can call it via call_user_func or call_user_func_array (this distinction made necessary because PHP lacks Python/Ruby *array unpacking syntax).

Somewhere I have a PHP class that lets you fake closure. You call Closure::Create($real_cb, $state_data) and it gives you a callback that, when called, calls $real_cb with $state_data plus all arguments that it was called with. And if $state_data is an array whose elements were assigned by reference, the 'closed-over' state is mutable.

So overall, it's a good pretense, even if foreach will always be faster than functional style.
This article is not pro-college. He's talking about correlation != causation. ie. going to college doesn't necessarily teach you anything you wouldn't get elsewhere -- rather, it is an indication of what kind of person you are (the kind of person who goes to college... who is more likely to be smart than the kind of person who doesn't.)

Hence the relation to Firefox: just like college, using Firefox doesn't actually make you smarter (though an ignorant view of the statistics might make you think so) -- but the fact that you are using it in the first place, says something about the kind of person you are.
I've been a fan of Google for some time, but in this instance I still think AWS works better for me. We're into Python in a big way, so in theory the Google offering should fit nicely but I like what AWS has done, I like how they've done it and they're supportive. My dealings with Google (Adsense support) hasn't been particulary positive as an experience and my concern is that they will provide the same type of support here. Also it feels like I'll be more locked in to this platform that with AWS
> Uses Design Patterns
> Writes Tests
> Leverages Existing Code

Mmm... moreover the article seems to be a bit biased toward Java that is not exactly the rockstar software engineer preferred language.
There are many Ruby libraries that haven't been documented anywhere, online or offline. Random example: bitset.
RubyForge now has Git support
Not so new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
This is a very good indicator of smart coders indeed, people that don't love to code and are not interested in the beautiful of the code itself will reply "but it already works well, why do you like to modify existing working code?".

Of course the reason is that you can make it 1/2 the lines of code (or even better, sometimes it happened to me to reduce a 30 lines existing code function to 4 lines of code), more modular, trivial to understand even after 6 months and more beautiful.
If you can't pass more than one block literal to a method, then a block literal is not a real lambda, from the Lisp point of view.
> Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US.

Most colleges offer H.S. Algebra II-level courses to incoming freshmen -- nevermind requiring high school students to take calculus to graduate.

> This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school.

My guess is that all we would be accomplishing is reducing the high school graduation rate. The only way it would be worthwhile to require calculus to graduate from high school is if we created a two-track high school system and started sending non-college-track kids to vocational school.

In any case, I would say that if we were going to revise the high school math curriculum, we should add a year of probability and statistics, not more calculus, especially (god forbid) differential equations. Possibly by shifting "Algebra I" into junior high school coursework, or by making Geometry an elective. I strongly suspect that the fundamentals of probability would be a lot more useful to most people than Euclidean geometry.

Having high school kids take DiffEqs would do more to make kids hate math than anything I can imagine.
If the methodology was that severely flawed they obviously wouldn't use the study in the book. This isn't Oprah's book club, it's a report co-authored by multiple Ph.D.s that was commissioned by the Brookings Institution.
This is basically the rational behind the E-Myth. Your business is not just another job you do. It's a self-sustaining entity that you create.
The syntax may be weird at first, but one gets used to it. More importantly, both inclusive ranges and exclusive ranges are useful. It's convenient to have both. It makes code more readable, compared to having to add a -1 offset.
I appreciate that the author is taking the time to tell us about a system that he's clearly put a lot of thought into. While it might not work for everyone, it's certainly good to get anybody thinking about how they might organize their everyday efforts more efficiently.
I'd prefer a Ninja software developer :)

I cringe at the title 'Software Engineer' coming from an engineering background
That is correct: AP Comp Sci is not an introductory class.

It is merely a standardized test, with an accompanying standardized curriculum. How schools decide to teach that curriculum is up to them.

For example, I had to take two semesters of Java before I could take the AP/IB CS class; however, my high school currently allows students to enter AP CS (material unique to International Baccalaureate pushed back to an independent study) straight from Honors Algebra II.
That's an extremely misleading headline. Settling a lawsuit is not the same as winning it.
I'm sure that you can use a google apps for your domain account to receive emails back. It only costs about $50 a year.
One of the biggest things that I'm interested in, is being able to use Google checkout. If they can provide an easy API integrated to their hosting, it's going to be killer.
refactoring usually has diminishing returns, providing you're doing it well. it comes down to what will benefit you more? refactoring again for the 3rd time, which will take you even longer and/or result in less benefit than the previous 2 times, or something else like testing or development?
I did edit my post to make it clear that I was referring to the social signaling value of colleges, not the pedagogical value, but you may have pulled up my comment before this.
28:06:42:12

/too obscure?

but seriously, who knows? who knows how long they might have already been working on it? who knows when they'll start, or how many resources they'll throw into it? we'll only know when someone tells us.
In my head I hear "Sanitation Engineer". There are too many parallels to list.
What do you guys use for documentation, btw? I used DocBook for Hecl, but man is it ever a PITA. It's very, very, very, verbose, and even if that verbosity does give you a lot of flexibility, I'm not sure it's worth it in terms of docs that don't get written because it takes so long.
Individual rates can be ridiculous, organizations like the Freelancers Union may fix that.

Beyond the difference in cost per individual, when health care is tied to an employer it can be a deterrent from changing employers. For instance, an employee undergoing cancer treatment would be forced to stay with the current employer and insurance policy even if they received a better job offer.

There are some federal requirements for covering pre-existing conditions, but they do allow for a period of time where no coverage for those conditions is provided. Some states require immediate coverage of pre-existing conditions.

The original intent of this post wasn't to seek out risk-reduction in startups but to spark a discussion on how health care in the U.S. could be improved.
Where to buy an iPhone (and how much it costs) in 12 countries from Argentina to Turkey
For some reason, I'm reminded of a story that a Windows 95 product manager went to the local Electronics Boutique software store and said "we'll take everything". To test backward compatibility of DOS/Windows 3.x applications. How do you do that? Install, run, debug. Repeat.

Windows' ball-and-chain is support of legacy applications and the giant-ball-of-rubberbands called the Win32 API. I'm sure some of the alpha geeks at MSFT would love to build a *nix OS - but they have the legacy of Windows.
with the users api your users cannot be transferred, they are google users who can use your application, it isnt openid, you cant chuck this on another computer and have remote authentication.

anything to do with your code that stores data, interfaces with external data / services, runs new threads etc pretty much everything that makes it useful, cannot be ported, by 'hardening' the language sandbox, they tie you into their api. their query language is even google specific.

any application written on this platform looks to need to be entirely rewritten from scratch to port to another architecture
My favorite was a technical writer calling himself a Grammatical Engineer (with tongue-in-cheek)
Cool URIs in a RESTful World
On The Last Lecture
so, how do safari users stack up?
That's it! You can now build your application as you normally would using Django.

I'm curious, does this mean that once you do their initial steps, you could run any existing Django application to Google App Engine?
You are right. There is an aesthetic beauty in code. Even in complex problems it should be clear and simple. I wish more people could appreciate this. Many times they don't see it, (because it doesn't give any problems) or they they see the finished product and think it was an easy problem. They do not know how hard was to find the simple and clear solution.
I did a lot of this when I built a form templating engine a few years back. When I came back to the code a year later, I had no idea what I was doing.

Python syntax is much cleaner, and with only one way to do things, it's almost always easier to read. I'm a Pythonista now.
"Dude, you guys wanted a rock star, so why'd you freak out after I smashed my computer after the project was delivered? Kurt Cobain's my hero, man"
Be sure to throw Opera users into the same basket. By this standard, you would expect that they are really a breed apart.
Ask YC:  Links (rather than words) as forming a new language for higher level communication?
Why not have conversations where the smallest unit is a link rather than a word? These links would be to existing content on the web (i.e., you are not allowed to create new content and link to it).

To experiment with this form of communication, I propose trying such a conversation here starting with this link:

http://weblog.fortnow.com/2008/04/web-10-guy-in-web-20-world.html

The idea is not just to have people contribute related links, but rather to have a conversation where replies contain link(s) that directly address what is being replied to in the parent. After all, almost anything that you would like to say has probably been said better by someone else on the web already... so why not just link to it?
in short, I agree. Ruby suck. Python good.
I love the hyperbole in the technology world. An interesting new product isn't cool, it's revolutionary! It changes EVERYTHING. The development of penicillin and Christopher Columbus ain't got SHIT on this neato cloud computing thingie from Google (that no one has actually used in a significant way yet). And if you disagree you just don't get it.

There's no time to wait for people to actually use it for products that customers pay for. There's no time! By then it'll already be obsolete.
PHP:

- Easy to deploy on a webserver
- Easy to integrate with HTML (good for small sites)

Python:

- Not ugly
- Real and consistent object system
- Better documentation than PHP (even though PHP's is good)
- More consistent libraries
- BDFL (PHP is an unregulated mess)
- Good C API
- Excellent web frameworks
- Excellent desktop app support
- Very cross platform compatible
- http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
- It makes me smile
Utilities (my gas company) and some banks with good interest rates.
"After all, almost anything that you would like to say has probably been said better by someone else on the web already."

Emergence != aggregation.
Water is actually the best re-hydration aid ever. Bottled water is really popular with construction workers for that reason. They like the convenience of being able to carry the bottles around with them, and the fact that they come pre-filled when you buy them (even though they re-fill them with tap water later). So you really can sell bottled water based on the fact that it's water and it's in a bottle.
ah, well, you didn't word the post to line up with the intent :)

my personal healthcare improvement idea is this: make basic, universally necessary healthcare/tests/procedures/etc standardized, efficient, cheap to execute, and consequently free to all americans. this would create a standard, cheap, accessible, low-grade universal healthcare. i'm modeling this idea off of the army - their doctors are like robots with the commonplace procedures. they're done quickly, efficiently, and researched and standardized so they're cheap as hell to perform.

i'd like to think that this would make insurance substantially cheaper, since you wouldn't be tapping it for the mundane doctors visits -- only for the relative emergencies. the average healthy american wouldn't use their insurance except for once in a few years, making the premiums drop.

other than that, have the system work the same way. it would require a government investment, but so would any change to the system.
You broke your rule by using words instead of just links.
Will proliferating seed companies start looking like micro sub-prime mortgage traders? They operate on the similar assumptions: pooling small, high-risk investments hoping that these individual bets are unrelated, thus driving down the variance when bundled together. This is probably only true for the seed company that gets to cherry pick first, which seems to be YC as of now.
Assuming an initial chance of success of 1/100 for the groups that are selected by YC, the chance that every single one from a group of 100 fails is about .36. That means that on an investment of about 1.5 million dollars (100 * 15,000) they have a 64 percent chance of a success, which I loosely define as a big acquisition or buyout. Also, YC companies seems to prop each other up and drive up success rates through intelligent nurturing and beneficial network effects. I'd guess that the payout probabilities are much higher over a three-four year period.

Now I am highly skeptical that the same math extends to other seed companies. Do they get applicants of the same caliber when there are so many second tier seed companies to choose from for a prospective applicant? People are willing to uproot their youthful lives and move for YC, but will they do the same for Techstars or LaunchBox? Probably not, at least not for 15,000 dollars and little else. If I throw in the assumption of a power-law distribution for startups, the quality goes downhill rather rapidly. And additionally, if YC happens to be decently good at identifying truly promising candidates and taking them all into their fold as they claim to, it the median success probability for the rest is going to be rather low. Assuming an order of magnitude drop-off, that gives an payout probability of .09
( 1-(1-1/1000)^100 if they are operating on same scales as used for YC). The number of seed companies sprouting is surely going to be limited by such math...
Philosophy Can be the Alternative to Computer Science
"Chapter 1 introduces some of the basic tenets of the book, namely that code is literature and should be read as such. All too often people only read code when they have a specific problem to solve or want to get an example of an API. Instead, if you read code frequently you'll always be learning things and improving your skills. Also, Spinellis discusses the lifecycle of code (including its genesis, maintenance, and reuse), which simply must be taken into account if code is to be good. Poorly skilled developers forget these things and just slap it together, never thinking ahead."

From a review of "Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective"

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/02/1951204

I was reading this book in the bookstore the other day (too expensive to buy).

See also: "Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think"
No.

"Since App Engine does not support Django models, leave all DATABASE_* settings set to an empty string. The authentication and admin middleware and apps should be disabled since they require Django models. The functionality these provide is covered by the App Engine Users API and Admin Console respectively. Sessions also depend on Django models and must be disabled as well. Finally, you need to set the path to your template directory dynamically."
Facebook Chat Launches
Hint:

http://tinyurl.com/tc5xq
Google App Engine sessions @ Google I/O developer conference May 28, 29
TechCrunch UK - Lacy does London
> The idea just doesn't seem appealing to me, and I would think that the vast majority of users also find it unappealing.

It may indeed not be that appealing, but there are real world use cases where people want to do things like read their email or edit their documents when an internet connection is not available. Web application providers are struggling with how to provide tools that allow users to do that.

One possible solution is to provide a web app for people who don't care about offline and a full-blown desktop app for people who need offline, but then you're building the same app twice, and the two interfaces are also likely to be confusingly different. Offline web apps have a lot of problems, but they're an attempt to find a compromise solution.
I have carbonneutralwater.com/net/org (and have for awhile) - free to a good home if anyone wants to seriously pursue this idea.
This is a little bit one-sided! Yes it's exciting that Google is getting into this space but Amazon was here first, has a loosely coupled architecture that allows for more flexibility, and already allows you to run apps in your language of choice.

I'm not saying AppEngine won't be better, but let's not declare Google the winner by default. If there is anyone that can go toe-to-toe with Google I think it's Amazon. This is a battle I've been waiting to see.
Consider that you aren't his audience; his is a blog constellation that includes mostly young and amateur designers, where the notion of whether there are hard-and-fast rules for setting in serif or sans is in dispute. Lots of good programming posts are similarly unintelligible to people who don't code.

Consider also that the notion of typesetting that he's discussing is different than yours: if you're a typical Hacker News reader, you want to know how to make a good looking web app template. A designer often gets many weeks for a single project, during which they may be working with the final content, and may very well print out several roughs and tack them to the wall to look at.

The post quotes Bringhurst, and if you haven't already, you should go buy that book immediately. It's one of those rare books that manages to marry craft and science with evocative writing; compare, favorably, to Graham's "coiled up" functional programs stretched painfully into imperative code from On Lisp.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html
Feynman Quotes/Anecdotes
Like I said earlier, our app parses with racc, does cryptography, and a fair bit of analysis. It is not heavily database dependent. Most of our I/O is memcached. I assert without evidence that Ruby's performance deficits have in fact bit us.
All aboard onto the Google mothership! Buyer beware, tickets are non-refundable and the price is your soul.