skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose the idea behind gradients is that they mimic the sky and hence have a soothing effect, or something like that?

How accepted are gradients among designers?

Asking because I am starting to hate some aspects of modern web design. Today I had this thought that maybe I just don't like it if a web site design lies to me. That is, a web site is a flat thing, it shouldn't pretend to be 3d with fake shadows and stuff like that.

I see the need for making buttons clickable ("afford pushing " was the term one design book used, I think).
I was mostly agreeing until he compared fire services to lawn mowing companies.

Fires are something you insure against, everyone pays a small fee up front, some percentage have a fire and the large cost is borne by the many small payments from all the people who didn't have a fire. It's not cost effective to pay $75 after you know your house is on fire, that's simply not enough to cover the service provided, and that's why you take out insurance.

In any other insurance business, if you don't pay, they don't provide the cover. Is it really worse to have a house burn down than to have a child with untreated cancer?

In certain cases people feel this is inhumane, so they legislate that everyone pays e.g. Fire, Police and Health Services in most of the globe.

I found it strange that they felt the need to counter one misrepresentation of the facts with another.
Why do children need lots of stuff?

My grandfather was one of seven children, and they had one drawer each for toys and another drawer for clothes. They seemed to turn out OK.

Of course this kind of thing requires the co-operation of both parents, but that's true of a lot of things.
Steve Jobs is both a salesman and CEO. He needs to think so much about what the company does that the answers come easy, he also is very curious and had read a lot.

I thought I was a bad writer(in other language, not English) until one day I won a contest,over 400people without effort, I just loved the topic so much words flew as a torrent, faster that I could write it down.

He(Steve) loves to be on the spotlight, and show them how fantastic is what they have done.
The problem is simple, this is a design mistake in .NET's API. They designed the Marshal class to suit Windows and Windows only and they only had two choices UCS2/UTF16 encoding which they call "Unicode" and current code page which they call "ANSI".

Adding a new API say PtrFromUtf8 would mean that the code would not run on Windows because all of a sudden we are referencing a method that does not exist on .NET.

So we took the approach of turning "current code page" in Unix to what made sense on Unix: it is UTF8.

In fact, the particular issue of UTF-8 encoding is the oldest bug opened against Mono, not something that we can fix without breaking binary compatibility.

At this point, we value more staying binary compatible with the core libraries than breaking compatibility with the .NET toolchain.

We try to extend Mono in /new/ libraries like Mono.Simd or Mono.Unix where we have complete reign over the API and can still let them run on Windows with the native .NET toolchain.
What I did (http://www.thintz.com/essays/less-stuff) is to take stuff that I didn't think I needed and move it to the basement. If it stayed down there for awhile and I didn't miss it, then I knew there was a good chance that I didn't need it anymore.
Founder’s Stock is Simple, but Watch the Details
TOPGUN lessons for VCs & founders: the importance of situational awareness
I cannot agree more with you and I might add: I was born american overseas and have lived in the US only half my life time. I think this gives me a different perspective. Poverty and economic inequality in general is one of the most misunderstood phenomenon in american life I believe. You are quickly called socialist (which is like an insult, in this country only) if you dare say something different about it. So, kudos to John Brooke for a fantastic article which questions our usual perceptions of poverty.
"This isn't as bad as it looks. Only your friends can add you into groups"

Yes, it is as bad as it looks. If one person can add you to a group without your approval, that's bad.
Those examples also contains a great warning message:

Making your software suck makes the user hate you (unless you have a reality disorder field).
Better way to find a job!
I think a bunch of message-passing Erlang processes seems like a more apt description. Any one of them can crash, and others will take over, if things are set up properly. Indeed, after a half an hour, things were mostly sorted out.
Compare and contrast with http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EW...
Marketing Analytics: Understanding Segmentation and Prediction
Collecting bottles after midnight seems like a recepy for getting sick, if you are over 60.

But you are of course right, he did mention jobs in his article. (donating blood really isn't a job, but collecting bottles might be OK).
For me, it's timely knowledge of friends doing things I might want to join in on, keeping up with a few groups and organizations that post things there, and cheaply signalling my affiliation with just about anything by joining a group named after it.

I also found a great band called "The 21st Century Monads" because I was looking through famous people's profiles, and it's the only music group on David Chalmers' page.
Are you familiar with how middle-aged women actually use the Internet?

Step #1: Make sure you dominate rankings on "the Googles" for every conceivable way someone with half an ear on the television could mangle your name or category. She isn't going to product.com, she is googling for [product], [product.com], [products], [praduct], [pro ducks], [what was that thing on Oprah this morning?], etc.

Step #2: Expect less traffic than you think, because while Oprah's audience is ginormous they are in TV watching mode rather than browsing the Internet mode, and large portions are going to fall out of the funnel in a) trying to go to your website and b) doing so successfully. Oprah's peak audience is somewhere around 9 million people. If you're expecting 500k visitors to your website, I think you're being overly optimistic (absent Oprah literally doing a call to action on your behalf). So it isn't all that much worse than a Slashdotting, and you can expect the people to come in over a wider interval than "right the second the URL appears on the screen". Any reasonable website can chew through 500,000 visits spread over a 48 hour interval if it survives the initial bump.

Step #3: Scale the obvious bottlenecks and get ready to do some firefighting, though you probably won't need to. If the home page makes 10 SQL queries right now, a) fix and b) replace with static HTML for the day (or get a process in place where you can do that quickly if the server starts to chug). I'd put a big Welcome Oprah Viewers banner at the top of it with a sales pitch leveraging that social proof for all you are worth and giving them "special" advice for using the site, by the way.

Step #4: Have a backup plan. If it seems highly unlikely that you're going to survive, switch all or most users to a static site which explains that "due to overwhelming popularity" the service isn't available at the moment but you'll email them the second it comes back up if they just drop their email address into this MailChimp signup form. Do so. Give them an option from hearing from you in a less transient fashion, too. (I would strongly consider "Check if they're cookied for your site, if so let them in, if not give them the static pseudo-site" but that doesn't scale to the moon like "hello new client, here is index.html, bye" does.)
http://github.com/jashkenas/docco

http://github.com/rtomayko/rocco

http://github.com/rtomayko/shocco
Apple Is Gearing Up To Sell 45 Million iPads Next Year ~$30 Billion Of Revenue
That robot is not bi-pedal.
Not sure if Builder does this, but in theory you could even do:

builder.person do |b|
b.name = "Jim"
b.phone = "555-1234"
end
HTML5 offline webapps: a practical example
Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On Ubuntu 10.04
It's closer to that here (NC). Most people I know who make > $100k have either narrow specializations and/or > 10 years experience. It's not impossible to do otherwise, but geography will play a factor in that as well. Earning $150k in NYC won't feel like all that much compared to $150k in Topeka, KS.
This is excellent advice. I found the exact same thing. I was getting underbid by less qualified workers for projects of X nature. I learned a little bit about Y, and now I have to raise my rates again to slow the work down.
It does apply to Mono as well. I haven't done a detailed comparison, just some ad hoc tests. The reason why memory consumption is so much lower is not an implementation detail. It's because .NET knows structured value types (struct in C#) and hence uses way way fewer pointers than all JVM based languages.
Docco is CoffeeScript/JavaScript, Rocco is Ruby, Shocco is Shell, and there's one more (that I know of) ... Pycco for Python:

http://github.com/fitzgen/pycco

And a first cousin, once removed: Dox (JavaScript):

http://visionmedia.github.com/dox/
> You also can't violate a license, if you haven't agreed to one in the first place.

Perhaps I chose a misleading word by saying "violating" as it implies only the problems for license holders. The nature of patents however is that if someone has a patent affecting your software you are potentially in violation if you either don't have a license or you do have a license and are in violation of it (which tends to devolve into a contractual dispute).
Symantec Gets a New Logo
It makes me gloomy because of the incentive advertising they included to drive traffic to affiliate offers. From what I remember, Mafia Wars had teeth whitening, diet pills and dating sites.
Other replies got it mostly right. There's a particular tax in the US to pay for Social Security and Medicare. If you're employed, your employer pays a half share of that in payroll tax. If you're self-employed, you have to pay the whole thing— about 15% off the top (up to ~$100,000) before paying standard income tax. That's called the Self-Employment tax.

Self-Employment tax applies even if you wind up not owing any income tax. You get the benefit of being able to deduct business expenses, which employees can't do, but that usually doesn't make up the difference.
Turn your spreadsheet into a map
E.W.Dijkstra Archive: Are "Systems people" really necessary? (EWD 1095)
A wrenching story of bad memes and their long term outcomes? Not sure what to make of it. Poor bastard seems to end up making a profoundly nihilistic statement -- life is pointless and the only thing to do is get off the bus.
The real pitch, of course, is this unfunny video. Still, it managed to amass some points on HN!
What You Need and Want With Windows Azure Part I
The first thing needed is a Windows Azure Account, which is simply a Live ID. The easiest way to setup one of these is to navigate to http://www.live.com and click on the Sign Up button. If you have an existing account that you use to login it should display on this page also.
thanks for the follow up
I thought this was the case, too. Until I started reading about Sean Bonner. Look him up!
Very pragmatic and realistic. With this advice you might even make first release.
Paper Books Aren’t Being Killed By Tablets, They’re Creating Tablets: Negroponte
A former associate, in what struck me as an absurd notion, recently questioned whether so called "systems people" are necessary today. I thought the contradiction of what the term meant back from EWD's time to today and from Europe to America will make for an interesting discussion.
This is just a style comment, but given JavaScript's open class prototypes and expando objects, I generally prefer to write these methods as new members on their natural classes. For example, the RegEx escape method would be on the RegEx class itself, rather than being a stand alone function.

Other than that, this is an incredibly useful set of functions that any JavaScript developer should have in their toolkit.
Unless you are POTUS, don't put your middle name in your email signatures. It's pretentious.
With this idea as "stock market as multithreaded program", I find it ironic then that many derivatives now have to specify their function in python...
Facebook Location Patent Issues
Or you could just click the links.
Samsung Galaxy Tab
Same author; the venerable Jeremy Ashkenas[1].

And yes; quality is fractal.

----

[1]: http://github.com/jashkenas
Sony Dash The Coolest Gadget
it's quite unhelpful not to provide ANY resources or links to where I can read Libyan Law in English

Even if they could give you their entire body of law (including court decisions!), there'd be sure to be translation errors, or laws which you can't understand without cultural context. Then they'd have people complaining about getting misled. The answer is to consult a Libyan lawyer.
Mobile money transfers in Africa to exceed US$200 Billion
From the comments here, it's fairly obvious that people have multiple conflicting ideas of what 'minimalist' actually means, which makes this blog post moot because no one will ever agree.
I don't think you're fighting effectively by screaming and calling the person you're talking to uneducated.

Fighting for privacy is great, but you're not always going to be right just because you're on the right side.

I think there's a valid point made here, that bookmarks aren't that much of a worry relative to other information.

Also, xmarks has been quite open about their practice of using these bookmarks to make money to operate. They have never hidden the fact that they were working on a curated search engine with this data.

-h
In the US, things that you buy and use for your job are tax-deductible (no doubt the IRS has a very detailed definition of “use for your job”). If your employer buys them for you, then the employer gets to deduct them as a business expense.

Mortgage interest (up to a certain ceiling) is always deductible in the US, whether or not you are working from home. If a certain part of your home is set aside for business use, you can also deduct a proportional slice of your real estate taxes, depreciation, and various other things, but not, it appears, the principal.
Matt Cutts from google also recommends subfolder:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
I would call your title exaggerated yet accurate. It's the nature of a small group of people forming a Corporation; you get titles that sound big when they're really not, at least not yet. There's a huge difference between being a CTO of company with hundreds or thousands of employees vs being a CTO of a company with six employees.

Now I've never been a CTO at all, so I'm not trying to disparage you. I hope your company grows and you get the chance to grow into the title. Good luck!
This is simply arbitrage. The book sellers don't take the time to do the research to price their books accordingly or offer them for sale online which creates a profit margin from the price difference between the two markets. He's not marking them up to some unreasonable level and controlling the book supply - he's correcting the sale price to reflect market value.

The book sellers are obviously missing potential revenue here. Eventually they might wise up and start doing this themselves, or maybe a startup will come along to help them with this, cutting guys like this out.
My favorite quote about Zynga, relevant to this discussion, is that "their motto is the exact opposite of Google's 'Do No Evil'". That's what makes me gloomy. They're like the spoiled love child of EA and Microsoft.

They have no scruples or creativity and no apologies to make for it.
My answer was to partner with a high quality designer who was interested in becoming a front-end web developer, and also had a good pension for freelancing.
Not sure myself but it can also be written like this:

builder.person do |b|
b.name "Jim"
b.phone "555-1234"
end
In graphic design, gradients are generally frowned upon, primarily because they tend to be excessive and distract from the meaning of the images. In web design, there are legitimate uses for subtle gradients to add a subtle 3D effect. As with anything else, trends come and go; right now, subtle gradients and 1px highlights are in; take a look at the iPhone UI for inspiration.
A minimalist lifestyle does not make you a better person

But a minimalist coding style does make you a better programmer.

I really don't mind a few extra Philips screwdrivers, kitchen knives, or pairs of shoes in my house, but I every superfluous bit of code in my repository drives me nuts.

Others say I go overboard and they're probably right, but I can't help myself.

If a 6 character variable name can be shortened to 5 characters without losing meaning, then I do it. Same thing with labels and function names. If I find the same line of code twice, I write a function (but only after whipping myself). Complex If Statements are replaced by Case. Complex Case Statements are replaced by arrays and pointers. Two programs look alike? Replace them with one parameter-driven program. Two forms look alike? Replace them with a flexible form app. Reports? Same thing.

Old data? Archived! Old programs? Archived! Old notes? Archived! And not one trip to Goodwill, just to my e: drive. I'm so proud of myself when I can fit the software needed to run a $100 million company on a 256K thumb drive.

There must be a 12 step program for people like me. But then, by the time I was done with it, it would be a 7 step program.
Videos of Robots Controlled By Rat Brains
I thought crack was the catalyst for the "War on Drugs", not a symptom of it.

Heroin was banned in the US in 1924.

Also, isn't heroin derived from opium?

So, are you saying people prefered coca leaves, but they were abolished, so crack became the substance of choice?
I can email you without your approval, what's your point?

That's an identical amount of control that you're surrendering. I don't get the frenzy-Facebook-rage...
> it's a lot easier in aggregate to do multiple transcodes on the server side

ah, that brings back good old memories. We used to prepare at least three formats for WMP, Realplayer and Quicktime. AFAIK HTML5 isn't doing anything better.
My friend uses a less wasteful, but slower technique. Here's what she does every spring and fall:
1. In the fall, she boxes up or separates everything she hasn't used in the past week. For clothing, she just turns the hangers in the closet around (so the open part of the hook is facing you.)
2. She lives her life for six months. Every time she uses something, she puts it back in the normal cupboard rather than back in the box.
3. In the spring, she simply gives away all the boxes and all the clothing that is hanging backwards. She allows herself a couple of "passes" for special clothing (e.g. she might know that she has a few weddings coming up so she'll keep an extra dress.)
I just submitted one earlier this morning[1].

-----

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767758
Zynga depresses them because they don't make games to be fun, amuse, educate, or tell a story. It's all about the addiction and funneling factor to get users to pay. The 'normal' rules for app developers also do not apply, the founder even admitted to abusing every FB feature possible to grow.
Not to suggest I disagree with JC, but in addition to advocating opt-in, he should have less shitty "friends".
Don't build an empire overnight - lessons from FreshDirect and Webvan
It is hard to agree with his conclusion that the market is unstable. The flash crash was a huge exogenous shock of unknown (at the time) origin and the market self corrected in a few minutes. The market did such a good job that the author did not even notice the crash until a specialist pointed it out.

If only all multithreaded programs behaved that well.

[edit: added parenthetical "(at the time)", thanks chr15.]
Deciphering the Meaning of Gap’s New Logo
Next to jQuery, Underscore is my most-used JS library. Makes scripting client-side behavior so much more pleasant.
but keep in mind all converts are lossy.
Going a bit off topic but I really hate when you have a bit of code you can either have 2 functions with some repetition or one function that gets ugly because of the number of if statements required based on parameters. Both options feel suboptimal.
GoDaddy just increased their prices. I tried to buy a domain a few days ago and it was now $14. My coupons from referral websites no longer work.

I suspect they are increasing revenue as they prepare to sell the company.
I think the author means to say that a minimalist lifestyle does not make him a better person.

He really has no idea who any of us are, or what our goals are, or more importantly what our vices are. Some of us probably would benefit from a more minimalist lifestyle.
This is common to so many things. When you treat strategy as a to do list, you are performing the acts without knowing their meanings and without understanding why they have to be performed. It is performing rituals without understanding the dogma. It is building a landing strip out of rocks and stones and then waiting for the gods to bring cargo.

When you finally get it, it feels like a light that was suddenly switched on. You cannot even imagine how it was to work with the lights off.
Failed Supercar Company Up For Grabs on eBay
I don't think you can derive the conclusion from that that if only the other ones had searched longer, they would also have found jobs. (Haven't read the report, just your comment).

They might have had good reasons for assuming they would not get a job, for example. Or maybe the searched 40 weeks in vain in the previous year and didn't have it in them anymore.
Here are my notes from a Bruce Sterling keynote [1]. I liked the "life simplification" part (32 min mark). But found the rest of his talk dull and poorly delivered.

[1] "Dealing with stuff" -- Bruce Sterling http://video.reboot.dk/video/486788/bruce-sterling-reboot-11

- Pay most attention to your "common everyday objects". That is, anything that takes up your immediate space: on your body; in the room with you. Also those things that take a lot of your time

- Buy the best possible common everyday objects you can. Most importantly:

-- your bed: you spend a third of your life in it. Consider the per-hour cost

-- your chair: stop whining about your wrists and back hurting and buy a really good chair. Again consider the per-hour cost

- Ditch anything you haven't used in the last 12 months. eg: wedding china, tuxedo, everything in your storage locker

- Only buy real things you really use

---------

How to get rid of stuff.

First, note that getting rid of stuff is HARD (but doable). Do NOT start on impulse. Think hard about it and make sure you're morally prepared.

Then... for each item in your life ask the following questions:

1) Is it beautiful?

Test: You have it on display. You share its beauty with the people in your life.

If yes then keep it, otherwise...

2) Is it emotionally important?

Test: It has a narrative. You share its story with other people.

If yes then keep it, otherwise...

3a) Is it a useful tool, piece of equipment, or appliance?

Test: It efficiently performs some useful function. It actually works. It is the best possible tool. (Do not put up with broken or shoddy stuff)

Bruce's side comment: There's nothing more materialistic than doing the same job 5 times because your tools are inferior.

3b) Are you experimenting on it?

Test: You methodically work on it and you publish your results.

Bruce's side comment: Beware brand-new time-sucking beta-rollout crap.

If yes to either then keep it, otherwise...

4) It is unworthy of taking your space or time. Virtualize it (take its picture; record the barcode; record any anecdotes about it) then get RID of it. If you ever need it again, get another one from eBay.

---------