skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMHO .co domains are not in any way better than .com domain names. Also I feel that they are worse than .net or .org extensions in that .co will get easily confused for a .com domain name.
On the contrary, it is quite an intellectual feat to lead a large group of people against a powerful oppressive regime. It gets quite difficult as the organization grows and everyone has their own agenda.
Even if the news moves on having the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Peace prize rotting in prison sends a strong message to the world, and to any Chinese citizens reading about their own country.
Scribes Gets An Ubuntu PPA
I still don't understand? Doesn't the Ehtopian government automatically have exclusivity on Ethopian beans?
To be fair, "Uncle Bob" is a known snake-oil salesman, always pushing fad methodologies. Let them snipe at each other and pay them no heed says I.
Save it. Boring, but money in the bank is freedom.
If that were the case, they probably would have just announced the change in a press release (and alerted the appropriate design blogs) and waited for the backlash. I don't think they would have gone ahead and deployed the change to gap.com.
Don't know about you but I find Rob's screencast style really annoying. His jokes are not funny.
Python is very popular and growing within Biology - although molecular biology has a sizeable Ruby and Perl following as well.
Any geographical information software (GIS) offer tools to create spatial data, from scratch or by copying / digitalizing sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geographic_information_...

Then you can style them, and design a map, using vector drawing software like Inkscape.
A 'police state' is not a binary proposition.

There are elements to it and one of those elements includes the arbitrary tracking of citizens without warrants.
I've used selenium pretty extensively since 2007. There are a lot of good examples out there, the docs are good, and its written in a very extensible way, so I've always been able to find a way to accomplish what I'm trying to do. (anything you can do in javascript!)

Ways I've used it:
1. create basic smoke tests that test the happy path of an app, to be run after a new deployment

2. use the Selenium IDE firefox plugin to record a 'how to recreate a bug' scenario, and attach it to a bug report, greatly reducing the amount of time to document and explain the steps it takes to get a bug to happen.

3. when integrated into the app, with some customizations, allow a QA user to dynamically choose elements to feed the selenium test (2 adult, 1 child, ord-sfo, round trip, with refund)

4. to fill in forms I don't want to fill in again (chili's and home depot receipt surveys)

5. Setting up accounts, re-initializing my stupid vonage motorola router that loses its settings if the power goes out

Selenium is great, and has gotten people thinking about how to test the app and drive it the way that the user experiences it.

There are certainly some draw-backs, and other tools that should be explored, but I think Selenium is part of a 'balanced testing diet'.
Heh! yeah I was not defending Uncle Bob at all (and it would be hard to defend him as some kind of heavyweight uber programmer).

Just pointing out that this guy is obviously trolling for attention and that it is not his first time.

Ironically enough the last few times he tried this, he got "taken to school" here on HN by people who really knew what they were talking about.
Someone correct me if I'm missing something, but this has nothing to do with the Kindle.

It's a website that lets you play the games[1]. A minimalist website, slightly more minimal than any I've seen which does this, but a website nonetheless. Any device which has a web browser has access to this website, the Kindle is just an example of one.

They could've labelled it for the Nook, or Sony's e-readers, or anything. The iPhone has access to it as well. It's news only because someone decided such websites are worthy of news, and made one into a high-profile example.

The only thing which has any relevance to the Kindle is that there's a referral link to buy one on the site.

[1]: http://www.portablequest.com/
They require you to use a first name and a last name. It can be whatever you'd like and you're free to change it anytime.
The World’s Most Amazing Subway
You’ve maybe traveled a lot, maybe not but one thing is sure if you haven’t traveled through this subway you missed out on seeing the most beautiful subway in the world!
Take blame, give praise
"It was not clear if Liu himself had been told about the Nobel."

This has to be one of the first, if not the first case of someone winning a Nobel Peace Prize and not being immediately allowed to know they'd won. The article mentions that he is the first to win it while still imprisoned, as opposed to simply under house arrest. Imagine winning one of humanity's highest honors, but the very censorious state you fought against keeps you from knowing even that simple fact!
This is utter bullshit. It's the same reasoning that leads people to say that video games or guns cause violence. Web apps are just tools, you can't out-code human nature, just like you can't legislate morality. It doesn't work.

For example: Twitter is a powerful platform for sharing information. This could be leveraged for dissent or education, and it is in some ways. However, most people just follow Justin Bieber and Lada Gaga. "Bieber Fever" allegedly consumes about 3% of Twitter's entire infrastructure. (Source: http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/) Take that stat with salt, but it's certainly not improbable.

The argument put forth in this post is older than dirt and completely false. I'll wager a bet that this argument is just slightly older than it's cliché response, "You can lead a horse to water, bu you can't make it drink."

There are plenty of web apps that are truly kick-ass implementations of "doing good" (http://mycharitywater.org comes to mind), but they aren't going to ever be as popular as something like Farmville, because of human nature. Making your "do good" web app kick more ass won't make people want to do more good.
I run a similar service called BitBuffet that delivers those one-use download links after payment, its linked to PayPal and is very easy to setup.

If any HN'ers want to give it a spin on your next project that involves digital downloads, let me know and I'll give you a free account. Just promise to let me know what you like and don't like! ;-)
no, quoting from grandparent: "a specific offset for each attribute with a certain name" -- e.g., for all <image> element, 'width' is always at attributes[0] and 'height' is at attributes[1], presumably regardless of whether that particular image has a width and height attribute.
LABjs is great for making javascript not block the rendering of your page. It's not just a simple switch though. Depending on how your code is structured, and the various assumptions you've made there may need to be some code changes. The biggest thing, is that if you load everything in LABjs - including jQuery - then the document.ready event fires BEFORE ALL THE JAVASCRIPT IS LOADED/EXECUTED. This is incredibly important because many many people code with $(document).ready being the signal to run all sorts of stuff. However, with LABjs the meaning of document.ready changes so you can't assume that things like plugins have been declared when document.ready fires.
Champagne, anyone?
This hardly seems like a surprise.
Ninjas, Zombies, & Tips for QA in Agile Web Development
Would you buy underwear by subscription?
could it be china's great firewall? these sites all load snappy for me and i am on a 45mbps local ethernet loop in san francisco. sounds like a network edge problem.
I wonder how much age is relevant in software development merely due to the commonality of awful working environments (which younger workers are more likely to put up with).
That wikipedia page states that Liu's lawyers informed him today that he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
I think this is where the current attitude towards programmers and how we hire them is wrong, or at least a little off-base. A lot of people here seem to look down on someone who just works his ass off and gets the job done unless that person has a web presence and a github repository. Why would a guy like this even have a blog? Why would he care about our opinions of him? The contrast is striking between the blogging, coding-a-personal-project nature of our generation of programmers and the get-things-done-efficiently-and-go-have-fun nature of an entirely different generation. Many miss that "completes entire projects by himself" and "razor-like focus" often preclude many of the activities we now expect to see in a good programmer. Many think that if a programmer is not giving something away for free -- likely something that few will use or read -- then he is just a hamster-wheel cubicle drone.

Your comment reminded me that the reality of the programming world is that there are countless unsung amazing programmers who have stuck to the same platform for years, if not decades. They know their IDEs, libraries, and code bases inside and out. They get an assignment, go into crazy-productive genius-coder mode, and get a high quality product out the door. And then they go home and enjoy themselves, and none of us are the wiser. But we sure do appreciate the reliability of our cell phone networks, our vehicle computer systems, and countless other amazing pieces of software that we take for granted. Thanks for reminding us that you can be a great programmer without having a huge following, programming open source, or even working for a startup. Building something people want and getting things done are all that matters.
Bit.ly just got through raising $9M Series B funding, they're growing like crazy, and we've all heard about the amazing data (sic) that bit.ly is collecting. Is there more value to them selling this data to companies like NYT so they can all launch their own social news products vs opening up this firehose to the public? This is akin to Twitter only allowing a very select few have access to their firehose. It's not a far stretch to suggest that had Twitter done so their growth would have been stymied.
Just wanted to thank you for that link, one of those palettes was exactly what I needed for my work today. I've used Kuler before but never seen colourlovers. tyty
>You'd expect the secret service to be more discriminating when it comes to spending their time...

Haha! It's not their time(money) so they don't give a shit. It's our money.
I got http://spu.co/ for the flash games development I've been doing lately. I think some traffic will be lost by people typing in spu.com or even spuco.com, but how much is anyone's guess. I think the more general-purpose your website (and therefore audience) the larger a percentage you're going to lose due to typos/unfamiliarity with the TLD.

Since my website is more of a collection of stuff I've made and I'm not going to be marketing it heavily, I think it'll be okay. The traffic it gets will likely be through links where the person doesn't have to type the domain in. An easy question to ask yourself: will you ever be putting the domain in print materials/advertising? If you can see yourself wanting to market your website in print, the .co will be more of an issue than if the only marketing you do is online, where the site will be linked and the visitor only has to click the link, not type anything in.

There are some people who absolutely refuse to use anything but .com/.net/.org, or even those who ONLY use .com, and there's valid evidence out there making their case -- del.icio.us changing to delicious.com, or the fact that microsoft has bought nearly every typographical misspelling of their brand that you can think of, for example.

And then there's the additional issue that .co is technically the ccTLD (country-code) of the Republic of Colombia, even though it's available worldwide for registration. With the .ly issue or non-issue, depending on which side you're on, that's arisen recently it could be argued that any ccTLD is potentially at risk.

Personal opinion? I think it works fine for what I'm using it and don't regret my decision. But then I love short domains (I also own http://pzxc.com and http://6d7.com, and used to own http://ui.cx/ but gave it up partly for these reasons we're discussing here but mainly because I had to use the Christmas Island registrar for that one instead of my normal registrar, which was annoying).

However if I was using it for a massive site trying to make oodles of money off of it, my opinion might change. I think if I was bit.ly right now I'd be at least a little worried, though of course I'd downplay it just as they are doing.
2010 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates Maturity of 1,800 Technologies
It's hard to imagine that there are exceptional developers out there with domain experience that don't have a backlog of ideas that they would prioritize. I think if it's industry changing then you should put your own money into it. Saving 25% sweat equity on 1 billion is a lot of money!
Ask HN: Bit.ly Now, what happened to you?
http://twitter.com/#!/clickabit

Bit.ly just got through raising $9M Series B funding, they're growing like crazy, and we've all heard about the amazing data (sic) that bit.ly is collecting. Is there more value to them selling this data to companies like NYT so they can all launch their own social news products vs opening up this firehose to the public? This is akin to Twitter only allowing a very select few have access to their firehose. It's not a far stretch to suggest that had Twitter done so their growth would have been stymied.
In most cases for social media buttons supplied by these web services, you can't. You will typically have to reference a JS library at the position of the document you want to render the button at. You put them after </body> and they'll render in that position in the document. The above tip is smart and works around that by asynchronously updating the DOM when the scripts are ready (i.e., downloaded).

If you meant "put the OP's scripts after the body element" -- yeah, you could do that (at least for sure with GA async code, you can), and that would be a good idea so that you serve and render CSS first, making your pages feel more responsive. But that's not what your comment reads as.
It's interesting you say that, as there are many studies that show total productivity in coding tops out at around 40 hours a week, and working 12 or 18 hour days is just a waste. (See, for example, the references in Code Complete.)
The chinese given name is not always comprised exactly of 2 syllables; there are single syllable chinese given names.
I've experienced similar issues from here in the UK. While the Internet is typically pretty fast for me, it seems that some CDNs sites use have verrrrry flaky POPs in Europe. Tumblr is an example - frequently I can't load any images on Tumblr sites even though the rest of the sites are speedy and fine.
but when the Russian revolution happened democracies everywhere were afraid it would happen to them so they responded to Russia

Democracies fought to preserve the Russian Tsar because they thought his overthrow was a threat to democracy? No. They fought communism because they thought communism was a threat to their regimes in specific, just as other monarchies fought the French Revolutionary Wars because they thought the French Revolution was a threat to their regimes in specific. The commonality is that there are regimes of elites fighting to preserve their own power. Anarchy doesn't have that by definition.

I just entertain the idea that we don't have the best possible system and to get the best system may mean starting over at some point.

You don't get to start over unless people get hungry and desperate. And I think we have a system that can sustainably keep people out of hunger and desperation. If I'm wrong, maybe the anarchists will get another shot.
AdBlock does a good job on these. I have meebo.com and wibiya.com completely blocked, as well as facebook.com, fbcdn.net, tynt.com, etc. I use a different browser installation altogether for things like Facebook when I actually want to download their stuff.

Basically, any time a website takes ages to come up, I turn on Firebug's Net panel and monitor the laggy requests; and then, if warranted, kill them off with AdBlock. Similarly for offensive widgets.
Purchased ‘APB’ Digitally? EA Has Your Back (& Refund)
key bit here:

> The domain has also been excluded from future registrations so that no other entity (local or abroad) can re-register it.

So much for PGs theory that someone there wanted the domain and they took it at a pretext: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1764475 It should be easy enough to check up on it periodically to see if they're true to their word.

I wonder if the "local Libyan internet community" is an open body or if they are semi government.

On the whole this is a pretty levelheaded and clear response, and it never hurts to see the other side of the story.

That said, I still think that you're much better off to invest your time, money and effort in to .com, .net and .org domains and to steer clear of cutesy domains from countries that can disable your domain based on the content of your services.

As for their regulations being only available in Arabic: http://nic.ly/regulations.php
They could sell it with Dharma initiative labels.
If you're a big shot exec, you might go to silicon valley and see these highly talented and ambitious Indians and say "I gotta get me some of those".

But the sort of Indian you find in Silicon Valley (or more generally, the sort of person from country X you find working in another country) is generally not representative of the average worker where they come from. As far as Indians go, there are the cream of the crop who can work anywhere, and you never see them on the open job market. There are the regular Joes like you and me who generally work for Indian companies in India, you only see them in the West when they're on holiday. Then there are "the rest" and those are the ones who do outsourcing gigs.
We believe age matters because a lot of people allow their age to matter. They let themselves go, physically and mentally, and want to slide through life. They stop growing. They stop learning.

Just because some people do that doesn't mean we all do. I'm, ahem, 47 this year, and you probably wouldn't know it judging by my mental and physical vitality. I have not stopped being who I am. You don't have to, either.
Thank you!

We are using both techniques (filtering + TF-IDF weighting), actually :)
I don't see the problem there. The author writes first clearly: "This one isn't purely a textbook error. Still, it involves misconceptions on the part of authors." He wants to point that it's not a misconception to explain that the sky is blue because of "wavelengths of light, Tyndall effect, and Rayleigh scattering" the misconception (in the approach to the presentation, not in the facts) is to explain only that single effect on that level and not mention that all the materials with which we are surrounded also have own colors because of the similar behaviors of atomic particles. That is a valid and important insight. And the misconception (again in the presentation, note again that he writes about school books) is not to mention that the air actually always has colors only that we don't register them because a lot of it is needed. I think it's good to point to all this.
Russia 50 years behind the times in science, Nobel laureate says﻿
Nice opinion there. My opinion is that the constitution was written to outline what we want from government, not what we don't want.

Just because it's not in there, doesn't make it against the law. That would suggest the Internet is against the law, since it isn't mentioned in the constitution. Also you seem to forget that States and Cities have their own laws as well.
Interesting. Trademarking regional products is a big thing in Europe with its many centuries-old food traditions. Switzerland and the EU both have official recognition of protected designations of origin, for instance for Gruyere cheese. Proponents say it protects local tradition and ensures high-quality products, opponents say it's a veiled subsidy for over-expensive farming.

However, at least in Switzerland producers must do more than just be located in the right region, they also must adhere to quality criteria. That could be a way for Ethiopea to leverage their new trademark: officially ensure that this coffee is actually special, and check that.
Tool for detecting "social widgets" problems on your site
People asked for a simple tester for the problem that I've described in the topic "Your social widgets are losing you visitors right now": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1771607 (in brief: are there any scripts on your pages that can significantly slow down your site and therefore cost you some real visitors that won't wait 2 minutes for page to load).

If you see any "non-async scripts" on your site - you're potentially significantly slowing down your site.
http://octobot.taco.cat/
Justin.tv VP Of Product Starts Stealth Mobile Sharing Startup, Yobongo
Delays of 30-90 seconds are rarely at the network level. Asynchronous is generally better than synchronous, but it seems more detective work should be done before declaring war on synchronous scripts.

Are other users in Russia affected? Are users on other ISPs affected? How widespread is this problem? Are your ping times the same to "www.digg.com" as to "widgets.digg.com"?

If there is any truth to this post, the problem should be fixable.
I'm curious what an index consisting of stock whose IPO was mentioned on the front page of HN would look like?
Actually no competent manager thinks in terms of "cheap" but in terms of ROI.
I personally think its a horrible quote and seems to rely on fundamentally not understanding enterprises in any meaningful way.

And its simply a cop-out to say that if what he suggests then hire better programmers (because practically, you probably already tried to hire the best programmers you could).

I love the "empowering dev" perspective, but with no data to back it up, and a very naive sounding post that didn't even, in passing, mention a couple of reasons why such mandates happen (and effictively exist at companies like Google and Facebook) it comes off as completely not credible.
If you're using Firefox, the Firebug extension's Net panel (when active) shows the Gantt chart of downloads.
I knew that one and I still find the Beaty's texts much clearer than the relevant Wikipedia articles. Some time ago I've read in Wikipedia about what lifts the airplane. Then I've read his text. His one is significantly clearer.
Warmgun Design Live Stream
Google and Amazon have published research to the effect that even small increases in page load time have a massive effect on traffic.

Social sharing is intended to boost traffic virally, but I wonder if these stupid widgets are actually reducing traffic by slowing the page load so much.

Many of these submit tools could be replaced (with less functionality) with an image button or text link.
Absolutely referring to internal transparency.

The area I work in rarely has companies that offer employees that emotional connection.

It's horrid when a company can have the upper-ups say the start-up is low on funds but afford a very affluent lifestyle.
Yahoo Building Next 'Computing Coop' in Switzerland
I have written a very simple tester for these problems that you can use to diagnose your own site: http://whiteposts.com/not-async

Now also shows the code to be replaced to make calls async.

If you like the tool - please upvote it at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772169
As of now, it uses method_missing to catch the first call to find_by_name_and_address, then defines the method inline, so future calls are handled by an actual method.