skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do you say that? Java's still not up to the features of Perl 5 (released in 1994).

Besides, if you want evolution in Perl, look to the CPAN or Perl 6.
This seems like an important point.

Design and aesthetics are such big, exciting fields that it seems like one enter them and never leave, meaning you start thinking about visual qualities of a page and forget that it exists to convey information.

Consider: A single, amazing image can takes months to create. That's two dimensions for painting. A single, amazing moving picture can take man-years to create. That three dimensions for film. How long should it take to create a single, amazing, roughly four dimensional moving image? (The dimension for an application being height, width, time and user interaction) It should take a long time indeed - meaning that anyone designing an interactive application must ignore/discard 99% of the possible ways to do things superbly and settle for things that work in one dimension or another.

Black and white is terribly ugly in standard image aesthetics. That doesn't mean it won't work very, very well when a number of the other dimensions are considered.

Obviously, a long topic...
I feel that this is an issue for the courts rather than the representatives, and the courts are less influenced by Joe Gun-nut than the elected officials he directly elects.

So while surely there will be some new law censoring the Internets, the courts will probably strike it down.

(I mean, are we really going to send people to prison for not upgrading their ssh servers? I doubt it.)
Once it’s all about glass, it’s all about software.

This is a good thing!

This can dramatically lower the barriers to entry for great interface design by exposing more of the end user experience to programmers. Just like the move from desktop to browser, the cream will rise even faster. What a great time to be a software hacker!
It's kind of like saying "US Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192677) and then blaming the subsequent erosion of your credibility on US intelligence. It doesn't matter if it was ever true or if you have any actual evidence, so long as you have good story that appeals to your audience. Insinuation and paranoiac fantasy (wherein absence of evidence can be cited as evidence) take over from there.
Re: Making Debian Responsible For Its Actions
Because I find it easier to read. I have no evidence other than my own experience. If anyone has done experiments supporting either way, I'd love to see them.
Oh yes, Iron Sunrise was cool. Love Ian M Banks too, The Culture is incredible as a vision of a far future utopia. I've not read any Vernor Vinge but will check it out, recommend any starting points?
I hesitantly admit to knowing that Opie and Anthony have even called him out: http://gawker.com/5035006/even-shock-jocks-hate-tucker-max

Tucker hit a sweet spot when blogs were blooming, with his stories of debauchery and was small enough and early enough in the curve to keep from getting called out until he was already nationwide.

His content made for an guilty pleasure, with the more far-fetched tales actually being more amusing. The problem he has (as you've pointed out) is that he's been called out publicly on the truth of his stories. But possibly more importantly, he's getting older, and I doubt anyone wants to hear about someone pushing 40 getting drunk and chasing 20-somethings, true or not.
It kind of does an what e.ggtimer.com does but only for minutes (just type in the minutes and hit enter). I could add some visual indicator of the percentage time left. You can also link to a time like this http://www.ianjorgensen.com/timer#10 or http://www.ianjorgensen.com/timer#0 to count up.

I like http://www.sardinesoftware.com/, he sels the most simple apps 5 bucks a piece! Its not a bad idea.
If you don't consider yourself responsible for the introduction of the exploit, I'd say do what academics do: publicly publish the exploit.

If you are responsible in any way, though, I'd recommend informing of them of the problem. You don't have to fix it, just tell them it's there.
Crunch n Munch
This is starting to smell like bullshit. I agreed at the time that failing to redact these names seemed to be a poor decision that could put people in danger. However, now we're a month or two on, and nobody has cited an instance where anyone has actually been targeted as a result, even though the government would have considerable incentive to be able to point at such an instance.

If a thousand people, or a hundred people had died because of that leak, I would be receptive to the idea that Wikileaks was actually doing harm. If a dozen had died, I would be sharply critical of Wikileaks for not taking more care and redacting their names. But as best we can tell, none have died. It seems pretty clear to me that Wikileaks erred on the right side of "get the documents out as soon as possible" vs. "keep working on them."
Appreciate the question, but any answer you may find highly debatable. I am not an expert in such things, nor much of anything for that matter.

However, my attempt at a response would be: "We should try to help others, if we have faith that this is our purpose." I have faith that helping others is my purpose.

I am also a hypocrite, because what I say and do don't always match. Take my opinions with a grain of salt if you must, but my faith is important to me.
First off, it's gambling it's not expected to have a ROI.

Second, 2/wk or 1040 over 10 years is not that many 2-3 a day avg 1040/yr is more like it.

Third, I won $67 whooo hooo!
7 Reasons Why an Amazon App Store Would Be Good and 4 Reasons it Could Suck
This is like saying movie theaters are a tax on people who don't know bittorrent.

You play the lottery for entertainment not for it's investment value.
"Additionally, I think Jason assumes that industrial design and software design are mutually exclusive. He ignores that part of the beauty of Apple's products is the interaction and combination of software AND hardware and the quality of interaction between them."

I'm not ignoring any of these things. I'm simply suggesting that one of Apple's key first impression advantages - their unique hardware design - is a bit less powerful as all the hardware designs in the industry trend towards a slab of glass.
The Simpler CSS Grid
Hmm, thanks. Just tried it with a wider window, I see what you mean.
Read "A Fire Upon the Deep" then "Deepness in the Sky", those are his best works that I've read. His other stuff is solid ("Rainbow's End", "Tatja Grimm's World", etc.) but not nearly as excellent.
Hm, my approach is a little different. I agree if you mean decent drawing skills.

I can draw mockups, even with colors by hand, that look in some ways like the design i want. Then i go on(and cheat a little) and let a friend who is skillfull in photoshop cast it into pixels.

Thats some kind of a pair designing process. He does some layers with different components from several mockups and we constantly play with the colors and styles we want, until we get the components in various polished forms.

That way, we develop in a few hours, first digital drafts of our core concepts. Yes, drafts. Three is a good amount, i think. From that we select, probably with customers the best fitting one. Or the best fitting components from all three. Then we can go on and put a prerelease draft together. It's really a lot of trial and error, but in the end it pays off, i think.

The thing you absolutely need for a good design process is enough inspiration and a open mind, in my opinion.

That way drawing the mockups and pair designing the drafts, is a continous flow of good and better ideas until you reach what you need.
From @chromatic_x: "@shadowcat_mst I use the word "apologetics" in its medieval sense of "a rigorous defense" not "an excuse"."

So, ok, then it was apologetics for lack of a feature. Also, my english is apparently insufficient, and I've only discovered this after the edit has timed out.

As the child of two english literature graduates, I am now going to crawl into a corner and turn bright red for a few minutes. Sorry.
For anyone interested in Machine Learning let me again link to the entire lecture series from Stanford.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewiTunes...
Gaming the Reddit Voting System?
Actually, perl is "say 'Hello, world.'". Shorter and more readable.
I think the women included in the study were more ambitious than the men and are thus likely to earn more.
What? PHP is not in the default install of, say, Debian. But Perl is.
Social Network Content Creation Has Plateaued [STUDY]
And if this is the argument, Perl is in Debian's default install anyway. Hell, the APT system is partially written in Perl...
I recently used Dropbox to collaborate on an appengine python project with a friend and loved it. Since python is interpreted we didnt have too many issues with working on the same file at the same time (no compilation errors).
I came across this page (and Zompist's website) about five years ago. It has quite literally changed my life - it introduced me to a hobby where intellectual games are pursued for their own sake, and a community of people who discussed ideas rather than what was on tv last night. Another great resource is the zompist bulletin board, at http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/ - it's where the community is.

Although I've since moved on to programming and engineering, I owe a big debt to zompist. So long, and thanks for all the ideas!
To clarify: I am leading to whether or not AOL would represent the interests of Michael Arrington's Crunchpad v. joojoo d/b/a Fusion Garage Pte Ltd in their current legal battle.
Web applications aren't books.

By your logic, links also shouldn't be highlighted either.
There was an interesting Ask HN poll and disucssion on this a couple weeks ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584863
Since when did I have to register to view articles on nytimes.com?
anybody know where to get a copy of the test?
The black actually is more readable. The problem is that the author over-compensated to make his point and selected a dark neutral (#5-6) instead of a neutral dark (#3-4).

The simple answer is #0 black doesn't anti-alias very well and distracts the reader. Almost anything #2 and darker will look the same (for text), especially on cheap PC monitors. #3 range works best for print-like black and #4 will hint of off-print black. #5 is the beginning of "over-designed" fuzziness.
The headline gives it away "At Last, Women on Top". Wasn't this supposed to be about equality?
I'm talking about rate of change in the core language. Nobody sane would look at Perl 5 and say "ayup, this is an excellent stopping point, this language is a perfect distillation of the core Perl ideals and idioms". And yet despite fewer hindrances than Java, Perl has stagnated just as much. (If you want to talk modules and unreleased languages you might as well bring in Clojure, Scala, Jython, etc.) If you really want to be embarrassed by Perl's stagnation, compare it to Python, Ruby, or even C#.
"The beauty in Android is that it doesn't have to be the best ... it just has to be good enough + shipped on cheaper phones ... just like Windows did."

The "cheaper phones" bit has never been Android's advantage, though it always gets brought up as if Android is the poor man's iPhones.

It isn't.

The Droid isn't less expensive than the iPhone was. Neither was even the miserable G1. The Galaxy S isn't a cheap phone. The Evo 4G isn't a cheap phone.

My Nexus One cost me $550. How much did your iPhone cost you?

Kids with part-time McJobs have iPhones that they paid for with their own income.

Android's advantage is that there are a lot of vendors aligning and running in the same direction, and the innovation is reaching an extraordinary pace: Android has gone from a bit of a joke that some of us held onto purely for philosophical reasons a mere 12 months ago, to now undoubtedly being the #1 hardware platform, and is becoming a strong contender for the #1 software platform.

No, it really is. The improvements to the quality of software across the board is incredible.

Which, I suppose, is exactly how Windows succeeded: Microsoft set up a system where a lot of very capable, very energetic companies were motivated to help Microsoft succeed, and it worked dramatically, from storage system vendors to graphics card companies.

Compare that to Apple whose only real partners are media outlets who think it'll save old media (though that provides tremendous free advertising), along with lots of 1-man software shops who, at least for a time, were singing the Apple song on sites like HN.
Everybody has an agenda or opinion. Even yourself. Nothing is completely neutral. And if you want to convince people yours is the right way you make sure to speak in a persuasive way. Isn't this just a fact of life nowadays?
That's not TCO, that's just an optimization for individual recursion. You might be able to use it for multiple forms under the same recur (like w/ "labels"), but it's very different when it applies to everything.

With TCO, you can use a set of mutually-recursive functions - you can set up a FSM via tail calls, use CPS for backtracking (and many other things), a re-entrant virtual machine where each opcode is a tail call (rather than a giant switch/case or lots of gotos), etc. Being able to use function calls like "gotos with arguments" (but with local scopes, etc.) can make some constructs much easier to read, reason about, etc.

I'm not that familiar with the implementation of the JVM, but AFAICT it's due to difficulties setting up tail calls efficiently in JVM bytecode.
10 Essential WordPress Plugins Every Blog Needs
At least, you were able to put the argument token from painting away, by applying your skills as a painter.

Thank you.
My experience has been the opposite:

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2542/job-prospects-in-m...

I guess it depends what you're comparing against. Against general purpose programming jobs, yes, the market is small. But, of all CS PhDs, people who do ML are the most sought-after.
I think the point is you should focus on design principles intended to for conveying information - if that's your purpose.

Web applications can have zillions of purposes and zillions of aesthetic considerations to go with them - fluffy pink hearts might work very well for Victoria's Secret, etc.
It's all a very successfully executed PR stunt. Local generation only matters in places where electricity distribution is unreliable or nonexistent (such as shopping malls in India having diesel generators on site).
you can compare direct real traffic numbers.

Engadget numbers: http://twitpic.com/2suiav
Gizmodo numbers: http://www.quantcast.com/gizmodo.com#traffic

So looking at sept, Engadget ~18 million uniques vs ~12 million for Gizmodo. (I used cookies, not "people" for Gizmodo's numbers as I suspect Engadget's numbers are also the higher "cookies" number without knowing the exact source)

FYI, MacRumors is about 9.4 million uniques for Sept using the same metric.
Temporary overcorrection seems more equitable than a longer time before reaching true equality. I.e. this[1] is OK. Or, even better, in this image[2] we prefer the light blue line to the green line, because it is more equitable overall.

[1] http://www.newport.com/images/web600w-EN/images/1231942.gif

[2] http://i.cmpnet.com/embedded/gifs/2000/0010/0010feat3fig17.g...
Signing JS to Defend against XSS using ModSecurity
Appendix B from the Pew site has all the questions:

http://www.pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Belief_and_Prac...
> Oh please! How many months, or years perhaps, working at it every day, would it take a normal, not-particularly technical end-user to get their C++ to a level they could add meaningful features to a full blown office suite?

OOo plug-ins don't need to be developed in C++

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Extensions_developm...

And it also depends on what you call meaningful. And then, you are completely ignoring every other person who shares the same problem and that can cooperate in solving it - or hiring someone for that.
Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics

That doesn't surprise me, since, based on my experience, atheists and agnostics tend to study several religions before deciding not to follow one.

Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation

This also does not surprise me, because this is more of a history question than religion. To draw a non-religious analogy, a computer programmer doesn't need to know who wrote a language to be able to code in it.
I guess this is why I like competition, because apparently I and the rest of the world differ when it comes to concepts of looks in electronics. By my view, the ThinkPad T410 I just bought looks very beautiful. Straight lines, matte finish, right angles; all of these are very pretty to me. By comparison, the glossy sheen and curves of most Apple products look like a child's toys.

Frankly, I think Apple started their brand by being unique and out of the ordinary ("novel"), have improved it a bit with usability, but what happens if or when the sheen starts to wear?
I think they took an even more granular approach. Thats what the 'young, single, childless' stuff was about. They were comparing people who fit all those categories.
I suspect they make very little money selling Kindles.
They probably sell for about break-even, as seen by the price drops.

Amazon want you to buy books, preferably online, and only from them.
Sad that this article spends tens of grafs talking about personal drama, and buries what should be the lede: that a key Wikileaks insider has reason to believe the Af/Pak dump was inadequately redacted --- in other words, that Wikileaks managed to help put people at risk.

But by all means let's pore over their IRC logs and Assange's "and your children's children's children for two weeks" pronouncements. They're a lot more fun to read.
That is why I use Slackware. Installing new software by hand from tarballs is a bit tedious compared to package managers, but it is transparent, and when I am done I can be pretty sure it is going to work. I have tried other distros, even Debian once (for some reason the Debian wouldn't let me sign in as root, I never did figure out why), but I keep coming back to Slackware - for its transparency.
Enabling, Responsibility, Hunger and Insecurity
i regret nothing ;-)
Hm, but problems exist from a programmers view, because you get blind by starring at shiny white editor windows constantly.

Also, in my opinion, to much white can make a good design look too offensive on a monitor. Decent gray, for example, does much better as a background color, i think?
Because your ability to make mega millions hings on the scalability of wealth making a stable society provides. It is not an individual's own ability to make huge amount of money. Without a law abiding and stable society, you won't make your millions.

If all the workers are uneducated and dumb, if all the contracts are out of the window, if all the banks collapse, if the money are worthless, if no court or police to protect your property, if no firefighter to rescue your burning home, how much millions you can make? How much are you willing to pay for those?

If taxes are considered as a cost of doing business in a functional society, it won't be contested so much.
The correct word for that is "stragedy".

Despite the negative connotations of the word, it'll be fun to watch.
I don't like that either, but when I think about how complicated control systems are, it eases my mind a bit. A system that oscillates towards the goal seems to be reasonable and even expected when you're dealing with something as complex as success in life.

Of course, it SUCKS that anyone is ever on the wrong end of that oscillation.
One possibility is that while the rich now hold a larger percentage of income, they hold a similar percentage of "income over subsistence level."

In real dollars, the subsistence level is much lower now than in 1919. Assuming that subsistence in any era gives roughly the same utility, dollars over subsistence can be a useful metric.

I quickly dashed out 2 distributions, for then and now. I just plugged in numbers that looked sane and got the percentages to come out right. Then i plugged in 2 subsistence levels, assuming that NOW is 50% of THEN, in real dollars. The $ over subsistence % comes out roughly equal then and now.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AsZT04jfENsidEpHLTM...
Startup Profile - CollegeJobConnect
I would start right now!
I'm confused. Does the average young, single, childless woman earn more than the average man, or more than the average young, single, childless man?
It would be more interesting to hear why you disagree. It seems fairly straightforward to me, though I probably appropriated the argument from Joel Spolsky as loumf points out.
This article takes an observation from fine art and uses it to clarify a key technique in information design (creating hierarchies of information). Look at the metadata line on this comment for an example of that technique being used in one of the least ostentatious designs you interact with regularly.

This comment, on the other hand, appears to begin from the premise that because books use black and white to good effect, fine art has nothing to teach information design.

It's distilled, oblivious snark.
I know what you mean. I've been trying as well to become better at design, if only so I can proudly say I designed my website myself. I've bookmarked several articles about design, but one that really helped me get started was http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/

It's full of useful tips and tricks that I would never have thought of on my own. And for completeness, here are the rest of my bookmarks. Hopefully they'll be helpful for someone.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory-for-...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/02/color-theory-for-...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/08/color-theory-for-...

http://sixrevisions.com/css/font-face-guide/

http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/the-960-grid-system-made-...
I think any serious infrastructure is going to need a cross-language, cross package manager entity that just lines everything up. I've run into the problem with pip on ubuntu where it puts something in the requirements file, but that thing isn't actually in pypi but was installed by apt or worse, if I generated the requirements file on my mac, macports.

I think more examples of how proper config management tools make that sort of clusterfuck manageable would go a long way towards convincing people that if you're expecting your product to have any longevity, you have to pay attention to this stuff and do it right.
Basic <subject> Test Stumps Many Americans

For what value of "subject" is this not a surprise?
Not just the impressionists. Most of the "classic" western painters and most people trained in those schools don't use black. One reason is that that black does not exist in nature. Or rather, almost never exists in nature, and these schools of art sought to "reality" or whatever.

The rules regarding black in paintings still applies, if you're attempting to create a somewhat 'realistic' scene. Other wise, use of black should be done carefully. One of the things that pure black does in a coloured piece of art (ignoring grey scale and almost greyscale) is automatically flatten the image. You'll notice that most Chinese brush paintings actually use diluted black ink. The fact that many of them are basically greyscale or monochromatic just means they can get away with more black.

Also, mixing in pure black into paint to darken a colour will almost always result in crappy looking shadows. Especially in pigment, but even in digital art. For example, if you tried to drop skin tone into a shadow by putting 20% opacity black it, it would look like crap.

tl;dr, in art, black is to be used carefully to achieve a desired affect. same deal in design.
Previews are cool, but it would be great if you could read all the kindle books you purchased in the browser.