skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Add some spacing between items please. It's almost unreadable right now. Also the new/home text backgrounds interfere with the content.

It would also be nice if I could login somehow and vote/comment on your page (real time comments maybe?). Great stuff tho!

edit: just noticed that your version of the home page is completely different than the one here. Or am I missing something?

edit2: scratch that, you display items in reverse order. Why is that?
Silicon Valley wants the best and brightest. This filter is opinionated based on the company.

If you're looking for work at VMWare, your Rails and MongoDB experience won't be needed. They want C/C++ guy who can hack Linux kernel or write device driver.

If you're looking for work at Facebook, they want someone who knows PHP and C/C++ and probably have provided patches to MySQL or memcached. Or they grab "idea" people like Lars (from Google).

You should also "own" that domain (compiler, AI, optimization, OS/Kernel, Networking, DB/Data-Mining, business-app, ERP/CRM/Enterprise).

This is scary because it forces you to:
1) Put your eggs in one basket: domain

2) And put more eggs in another basket: technology

3) Stay up with the latest in (1) and (2)

This left you no room to breathe. To break this cycle you probably have to get out there and do something on your own (meaning: your own business/company)
In my experience, people that feel chronically under-appreciated are also bad at self-promotion, and would be more appreciated if all of their contributions were actually known. Especially when you go above and beyond (the sort of thing you most want recognition for), it's often a proactive effort that may not have an obvious cause-effect benefit that's visible to anyone outside the situation.
A snake which bites its tail: PyPy JITting itself
Regardless of the CSS, any time I try to enlarge text in any browser and it doesn't do it, I get frustrated with the browser, not the website. Their is no reason I can fathom why a browser would not do this. So yeah, I'd take it as a bug in Chrome. If it's giving you the option to enlarge text, and Chrome isn't enlarging, or zooming, then it's a bug.
In Russian it's also called "mayak" (literally 'beacon').
Yep, these are the standard definitions that would be found in a Turkish-English dictionary, but I don't think they cover the nuances of these words. For example, "destiny" is very well represented by "kader", whereas "kismet" seems to have a hint of luck, etc involved. It has a certain pagan feeling to it, I think.

That being said, Turkish is a good example of a language that suffers from a relative synonym deficiency. When I was working on linguistic steganography, where a message can be embedded into text by replacing words with their synonyms, I discussed applying same concepts to Turkish with a Turkish professor (Bulent Sankur). They complained that this approach is general does not work because there aren't a multitude of synonyms for may words, as in English.

The reason for this is partly the brutal pruning of many Arabic-Farsi synonyms during the Language Revolution and its aftermath that were common at the time (1930s) to create a "pure" Turkish.
To hell with hotels -- give me a nation-wide (US) real estate listing site with a Hipmunk-like lean and clean interface. All the current ones suck, unless there are some new startups that I haven't come across.

realtor.com has gotten so bad over the last few years (especially with its latest site re-vamp), I've resorted to scraping queries myself to avoid the frustration of wading through the mess of an interface. The leading runners-up in this space all have equally bloated/useless interfaces.

Hipmunk is just plain awesome. I don't fly myself, but I spread the Hipmunk love to any all friends and family that'll listen. A huge congrats and heart-felt thanks to the developers!
Sending emails in Node
How many companies of your type out there?
Basically yes, although it is not part of the language definition and should not be relied on. It's just an implementation artifact of CPython, and not only that but the threshold of which integers are cached changes for different Python versions.
True, but for many people, like me, we're refreshing HN every few minutes anyway. Why not have the 2 most common pages (for me anyway) on 1 screen powered by ajax to load all of the data. I also cache all of the data on my server in a database, so it actually lessens the load on HN's servers. It turns hundreds of requests into a handful. I also have everything tuned for automatic performance scaling, so if HN responds too slowly, I'll request pages less frequently, or if my server starts getting loaded, I'll increase the interval of the ajax requests.
Stack Overflow is hiring
Paypal API updates: digital goods, mobile updates and more.
Graphics cards are about to hit a wall, just like CPUs did a few years ago.

Power consumption is so high they're almost at a dead end. They won't be able to increase performance any more.
If you want to leave them equity, why not leave it to them in stocks, mutual funds, etc. instead of a house?
The Times paywall: iTunes and the Imperial City
How often does this happen? Do you have sources (a long-shot, considering the fact that they're not always announced)?
It tries to use Flash for fonts and falls back to standard html if you are missing the Flash plugin. If you use something that blocks Flash then you just see boxes everywhere there is supposed to be a text heading.
I have recently offloaded a whole bunch of stuff, streamlining my possessions before going travelling - and it is weird at first.
My feelings are definitely a mix of uprooted and liberated, in equal measures.
Having lost money on 3 of the 4 houses we've owned, I can confidently state that if you can't see staying in the same house when switching jobs you're better off renting. Houses might be "investments you can live in", but they are a long-term investment. The US favors home ownership, but that is not the case, say, in Canada. Do the math, and see which investment provides the better return for your time window. But invest it somewhere...
Seems relevant:

The Korean concept of Han, as explained by The West Wing: "There is no literal English translation. It's a state of mind. Of soul, really. A sadness. A sadness so deep no tears will come. And yet still there's hope."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_%28cultural%29
Absolutely! This was a great post...it was good to see I was doing a lot of things right so far, but I still had a long way to go. Very comprehensive.
Who does search previews better?
If you agree it's wrong to allow a friend to export my e-mail address, why should Google allow it either? It seems like Facebook wants to have its cake and eat it too.
There are also drag cues: drag to the top to maximize, to the left or right to maximize 100% vertically and 50% horizontally on the current screen, or when resizing a window drag to an edge to maximize in that dimension.
I don't know. One doesn't exclude the other, I suppose. I have heard about developers being in short supply as well. Notice that they are not saying "nobody replies to my job posting", so it's quite possible they get lots of replies, they just end up picking none of them, for whatever reason. Maybe it's hard to filter through all the replies effectively, maybe they are too picky, maybe the job is unattractive to competent developers, maybe it's something else. It's hard to say.

All I do know is that I have heard the other story as well, i.e. people who are hiring are inundated in replies.
That's a false dilemma - the choice isn't between full-service rentals and forging my own steel from ore I dig out of the ground.

Increasing one's autonomy has value, whether or not you ever reach full autonomy.
I wasn't aware, I fixed it :)

As for the text, I'll lower the opacity to like 5% and see if that helps. Also adding spacing now.

Thanks :D

edit: spacing added; looks much better :) thanks again!
Quick Thoughts on ‘Computing Environments’ & Fiddling
Now don't get me wrong, if you can leave your kids a payed off house, that's awesome. Even better if you can leave them with something a little more liquid (some stocks, mutual funds, etc).

But for me, the most important thing I want to leave my kids with is experiences. I hope they'll have lots of great memories of time we spent together, trips we took together, things we learned together, etc.
This is not a conventional use of the principal-agent problem. The landlord is not your agent in the sense that an employee is an agent for an employer. You are arguing that landlords have market power because switching costs are high. That may be true, but it is a completely different argument than what is implied by the principal-agent problem.
Interesting. However, I get three duplicate entries. I'm using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/3.6.4.

[1]: https://st.atic.co/screenshot/realtime_hn_duplicates.png
Facebook Uses Non-Stored Procedures To Update Social Graphs
Just going from personal experience.

Submarine and Vandenberg launches are visible a few times a year to those living Southern California.

They're visible from I-10 near the AZ border as well.
It would be real time if it didn't take an eternity to load. Neat concept though.
Of course, they can, er, manage the price point of the suite in the future. It's a per-month charge, after all.

To me it's clear that it's about the total lifetime customer revenue rather than adding up monthly prices. Especially since they are trying to get people to use Highrise and Campfire, which are much stickier apps.

But there's also the factor that if users do bump into any of the limitations at lower levels, they upgrade the whole suite.

Plus, their winning price points would seem to be $20-$50 a month (where managers and showrunners will be okay paying out of their own pocket as a productivity tool) and $150-$250 a month (which can be expensed to a company account without big hoopla if you know your people actively use it). And they want to get accounts pushed from the former category to the latter (it especially helps to be offering a good deal at this time).

And finally, nobody likes to see multiple charges from 37s on their card. That's definitely a real issue.

Good move for both customers and 37signals, I think.
This is rational behavior, because nobody works only for the money (unless you are a bank robber). If you're doing something that has no repercussions, then you're losing a lot of the additional value of your work.
My guess is that when some chose "insufficient recognition", a possible reason was that someone else was taking that recognition. Having a site that allows people to recognize others for their achievements could just as easily compound the issue. For example:

Susan wants a new application, so Jim tells Bob to write it. When the application is complete, Jim shows it to Susan, and Susan praises Jim rather than Bob, because as far as she is concerned, Jim made it happen. Yet, Jim did little more than tell Bob to do it and show the result to Susan. If recognition requires little work, Susan will praise Jim more often (if she is not aware of Bob, or chooses not to recognize him). If Bob sees this praise of Jim by Susan for his work enough times, he may leave the company one day citing "insufficient recognition", when, in fact, more recognition was being given, albeit to the wrong person.
Are you overthinking it - if I'm looking at restaurants in San Francisco, chances of me wanting to look at them in London or Philippines at the same time? I'm also a fast typer, so don't see it as a major burden myself... I'll have another play later
Now someone just has to hack it during a live performance.
Both would be cool
A post later:
Rails to Seaside – Some things I missed from Rails
http://www.codingforhire.com/2010/11/rails-to-seaside-some-t...
I think the idea of Charityware is a great concept, I just wish there was more of a way to federate the idea. Love it when people are doing good things for the world.
I do a lot of Python and have even worked on my own web frameworks before. I've done web development with many different Python web frameworks. I also don't consider myself just a web developer.

I was recently interviewing for a Python/Django developer position and was instead offered a SDET position (with the possibility of becoming a developer) because I don't have experience with Django.

I turned them down because it felt like an insult.
I'm with Chuck Palahniuk: "The thing you own, end up owning you". :-)
XSSer: automatic tool for pentesting XSS attacks against different applications
A quibble about the "download your information" feature:

This is not data export. It's a nice offline look at some of the data I have on facebook, but not all the dt I've added, nor complete data of what it claims to have.

The archive of messages does not contain all the messages that are in my inbox, let alone the deleted ones that should be produced. Not enough information about profile changes, picture changes, etc. is included.

An export of data from facebook should include information on all interactions interact with anyone on facebook. That's the information I put in, that's what I expect out.

What you do have is a token effort to appease the people who don't really care, but are scared into demanding it by their friends who do care. It doesn't solve our problem, only yours.
That is an incredibly simple website. It is possible to get away with it when you have such a simplistic website where the secondary content is almost irrelevant as far as importance go.

Now try and apply this design restriction to something other than a blog where actual interaction is required and it will fall apart fast.
Honestly the checklist alone makes that article worthwhile. SEOmoz, really any of the big sites/blogs is good for continuing your SEO work.
I was on a sales team of ~12 enterprise engineers and account managers that was always a top performing region in our operation. I think this was due to the fact that our boss consistently recognized team members publicly (in group emails or voicemails) almost on a daily basis. It made me want to work harder for him every day. Still the best boss I've had.
I don't get it. Exactly why do I want the Hacker News front page to change out from under me while I read it?
I'm sure NSA can design a secure cryptosystem that does not require key material of the same length as plaintext.
I'm also in Charlotte, but more of just an interested guy than a hardcore hacker/entrepreneur. Email me if you get something going, it's in my profile.
Announcing openrespect.org
I wasn't expecting an anime character, but more something like in the movie S1m0ne (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/).

In that movie, the movie/pop star is computer generated but is a "real" person and there actually is a scene with a 3D hologram of her on stage.

As someone else mentioned, though I find that to be fascinating, I'm more interested in what they mean exactly by "3D hologram" and how it works.
How does a location correlate to increased productivity? I have a hard time believing that if 33.3% of a day is in bed, and 33.3% of a day (or more) is at work, it seems really difficult to believe that this tool is going to maximize the other 33.3% of one's day.
This is a nice idea

I agree with the added spacing, also it doesnt matter if backgrounds are very opaque they are still distracting while they are visible.

I would prefer to not have both screens viewable, just the same interface by clicking new / home on the top navigation.

Thanks for doing this, looks like a fun experiment
1) FB only recently added this export data ability - before then, all they did was consume and never gave back. They are lucky no one called them out before.

2) You do want to export friends' emails because they are my friends and I should be able to maintain their emails regardless. I want to leave facebook, export the data, and import it elsewhere. It's fine that they are refusing to give an API for it (although they can make the application request for permission for it first) but if I am exporting all my data into a zip file, I expect that information to be there. I am sure Google wouldn't be complaining if FB did just this. If a user is stupid enough to import all their contact info back into a random FB application manually and gets spammed, then let them be.

3) Stop spinning this like Google is making their users' lives worse. Google allows this and FB doesn't because FB wants to trap all their information inside of their ecosystem. They are not right. They are one of the worse companies that try to spin automatic opt-in (confuse users and hope they never opt-out) to make them release more information.

4) Explain to me why FB blocking Twitter, blocking iTunes, blocking Google is GOOD for any of their users.
Seems to me that a heck of a lot of these "periods" have been declared over the last 12 months.
Normally, hitting tab just insert another \t wherever your cursor happens to be. Hitting tab in haskell-mode or python-mode just cycles through the two or three (or sometimes one) possibility for indentation for the current line. That's automagically enough for me.
The Path of Legal Information
"I Want Your Sex" of Fashion Week in New York City |
Less Framework 3 Released (css media query framework)
I agree. I don't mind actual public recognition. In fact, I sorta desire it sometimes - but only when it's actually earned and the people being told of the achievement recognize why it was an achievement in the first place. There has to be real meaning behind this stuff, IMO. Things like "employee of the month" just feels like cheap pandering and no one really cares.
These days, he focuses on writing the present
This is hardly revelatory, these days; nonetheless:

Trying to "pay my dues" as expected and/or manipulated by an older generation particularly of middle-management. That may have been the way things worked for them, but more and more of the U.S. employment space doesn't work that way anymore and hasn't for well over a decade.

Employment in the U.S. is becoming de facto class based, and if you permit yourself a) to become over "classified", and b) to let such a role mis-direct your energy in inefficient directions, you can seriously screw yourself.

Neither am I a fan of the know nothing hotshots that e.g. were being parachuted in as excessively paid management consultants. But that resentment doesn't negate the above fact.

Look for the exceptional person who really is competent, and cooperative, and build your relationships that way rather than through whatever formal hierarchy. And keep yourself prepared to jump ship; don't paint yourself into a corner, especially financially.
Despite how efficient I made it, apache seems to have trouble keeping up. I'm tuning it trying to find a good balance.
Technically I imagine it was easier to add it as just an upgrade path. Besides, it's a hard sell to sell a bundle of unknowns in one go. So they solve 80% of a problem with 20% of the effort, as it were.
Yves Rossy's jetpack loops a hot air balloon, looks great doing it
Definitely. Fridays after work (6pmish) at The Field in Central Square?
Right angle slot adaptor.
What Alcohol Actually Does to Your Brain and Body
Reminds me of the last of the Voodoo cards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5#Models
As I said, I agree with that sentiment.
I first got into Lua when a number of years ago someone (thankfully) pointed me to it to save me writing my own scripting engine for an application.

As one of those people crazily obsessed with pursuing simplicity, I really grew to appreciate Lua's design[1]. I started embedding it into any place I wanted simple extensibility in applications. Gradually I found myself writing more and more and more application code in Lua.

This didn't turn out badly at all - Lua's performance is really very good compared to any alternatives, and development was also much faster. With its easy interfacing with C there wasn't really anywhere I couldn't fit it. Lua being so flexible is probably one reason I really can't put it down now.

A couple of years ago I decided to develop an XMPP server (that's another story...). The choice was essentially between C and Lua, myself not liking Java and things like Python/Ruby being too heavy. In order to get off the ground I decided to write entirely it in Lua, and then port each component to C later. I'm happy to say I've continued to be impressed by Lua, both in its runtime performance and the speed and ease at which we can develop code. I have no plans for the C rewriting anymore - we already compare quite favourably with an equivalent erlang server in benchmarks.

Interestingly the "Why on earth did you choose Lua?" comments I received at the start have significantly died off over time. I'd like to think that people really are dropping the "Lua is only for games." stance - in my opinion this language is drastically under-used.

Also (despite a few inaccuracies) there was a good short talk posted recently about Lua[2]. My main quibbles are for example that Kyle repeats that Lua doesn't have print() built-in. His talk is primarily from the embedding perspective, and when embedding, yes, you have to explicitly pull in the standard libaries - but print() is certainly there, along with various other things. Secondly he claims that Lua does not interface well with Java, yet there are several projects allowing exactly that[3]. There are even a few Lua implementations /in/ Java[4].

[1]: Slides from a talk at Stanford by one of the Lua author's on design decisions made in Lua: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100310-slides....
[2]: http://kylecordes.com/2010/lua-strange-loop
[3]: http://www.keplerproject.org/luajava/
[4]: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaImplementations
Unless things have changed significantly since I was in the Navy (doubtful), they still use things like this to store crypto keys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/CYZ-10
I've used game mechanics to help several business applications I've written.

The most successful example was a workflow application that a team of customer service reps use to answer tickets. The system categories tickets and rates them for severity. Severely rated tickets get a big threat score and go higher in the queue. The system graphs the threat level of open tickets, and shows a google-o-meter to say whether things are looking bad, ok, or great, and then we named those states "Godilla, Pony, and Unicorn". We graph the overall situation over time. So users can see their impact on successfully answering and closing tickets. Each time a user worked a ticket, they could see the little needle rise a little higher, closer to unicorn status.

Productivity skyrocketed as users worked their butts off to keep things in "Unicorn" status.

Users could also see what other teams members were working on in real time-- whether they had a ticket open, and how long it had been open. This helps establish a culture where you want to keep working, because you can see how hard other team members are working.

These mechanics really helped the team stay motivated and working. Without software like this, it can feel hard to stay motivated to work on an endless stream of workflow. It helps combat the feeling of pointlessness when answering so many similar tickets.

The system that I described is currently being used at a major virtual world company for answering customer service tickets. One of the people that used it loved it so much that he got the google-o-meter needle graph that I used tatooed onto his arm, with the word Unicorn written under it.
After this, the only servers will be Mac Mini servers. Maybe they'll open up licensing for other servers.