skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would it? I thought the type defaulted to "text" if missing. I'd be surprised if css selectors didn't recognise that...
Just finished Little Brother, in the middle of The War of the Worlds right now, and I plan to tackle Cryptonomicon once the semester starts winding down. I also read You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier recently, which is a great read.
eh, at least they are taking the financial hit for doing so, right? I mean if you are going to treat me poorly, for me to keep buying tickets either you need a monopoly or I need a discount.
It seem like we're training people on how to use tool such as MSFT Frontpage but not actually know how to program. Just my two cents.
> The 80 chars limit has a justification: expressions that don't fit on 80 chars (or two lines using parens) are not readable anyway

I disagree. There are many cases, especially after 2-3 levels of indentation, where 80 characters is an unreasonably narrow space. I don't have a strong preference for reading code within 80 characters. And I'd much rather comments use 80 characters plus indentation rather than worry about whether I've got my screens vertically split.

> Furthermore having 80 chars is great to have vertically split editors with the code on one panel and the tests or the documentation on the other panel.

Having lines here or there that go beyond 80 characters doesn't completely prevent you from doing this, and having an entire statement on a single line of code makes line-based tools like grep or kill-line more effective.

Limiting to 80 characters is a good idea, but it's easy to see that there are a few significant tradeoffs, and that someone trying to get something done is not going to want to bother.
I just have a hard time believing incentives don't work. For example, if I lost all of my stock options today and was told I'd never get another raise or bonus, except CoL, I'd quit on the spot.

In fact I'd argue, if there were no financial incentives, most HNers wouldn't do startups. I know everyone likes to say they do it to change the world and the passion of something or other. But in reality I've yet to see many founders take a $50k salary only (but keeping voting power) despite the profits of the company.
I agree. The issue is not "I do or do not want $instance->method() in my code" but rather "Do I have state to encapsulate?"

I'm a full time perl programmer and often run into people from the perl community who think OO is just a calling convention or a style instead of a tool with a specific purpose. It's very frustrating. The fact that Perl's native OO support is incomplete and obtuse just makes it worse. This module follows that pattern of thought. Using it would just add arbitrary and unnecessary complexity to a project.
Why not crowd source it and add a down vote arrow for submissions? We could even disable the ability to submit for people with karma below X.

Edit: Not sure why this is getting down voted, I proposed the exact same thing a few days ago and got 4 up votes (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853851).
This libertarian is pretty much reduced to only voting in "Hitler vs. Dukakis" elections (which, er, don't happen much, despite what the raving partisans say) and for or against particularly important propositions.

As much as each side tries to brand itself with various ideological sympathies, their actual politicians don't differ that much on most of the issues - and their supporters will excuse them endlessly and hector you about how the other guys don't even give you the wonderful lip service they practice.
Installed it on CentOS 5.5 and it broke the websites served on it, so it's buggy.
I agree with this comment. Interestingly they're trying to implement it on Go Daddys systems for 8.5 million customers. This suggests they must be fairly confident that the optimisations are safe for the vast majority of sites.

I wonder which filters Go Daddy will enable and how many problems it will cause.
I've never had any problems putting a research-grade python setup on OSX - just use the .dmg installer files files available for python (2.6.X for compatibility), numpy, scipy, and matplotlib. But I agree that the Enthought Python Distro is also a good alternative (if a little bloated for my needs), and it's also free for academics.
Google Python Class Day 1 Part 1
thought of sharing since it will help other people like me learning.
Whilst this initially sounds like a hilarious anecdote Harold Wilson did suffer from Alzheimer's disease which causes a sustained and permanent mental deterioration once it sets in. Also there are severe question marks over the veracity of this particular quote, suggesting it was made up in order to promote the sales of a book called 'The Pencourt File.'
Getting Things Done

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produc...

So that I can read more and do other things :)
If you're that easily offended, you probably shouldn't be on the Internet at all.
Is there a way to flag users?

This is the umpteenth time that this user (known) has literally copy pasted the same responses every time any article with India as a focus comes up on HN .. caste this, less than $1 that, etc etc.

Wish there was a way to ban trolls ..
I assume Canada has patient privacy laws similar to HIPAA in the states. How have you dealt with privacy issues?
Easter egg- scroll down to the bottom and click the kraken.
Startup Strategy and Tactics
QED, by Richard Feynman

Also watching the Messenger Lecture series Nima Arkani-Hamed gave recently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1851016
Flash defaults to "non-web-friendly" (windowed) flags by default, HTML5 defaults to "web-friendly" flags. As a commenter said, you can also make the canvas tag opaque by using a special browser-specific style.

If you remove the windowless flag from Flash, you would have to add the opaque flag to HTML5 to make it a fair comparison.
This presentation comes out against some specific incentives, but doesn't state a judgment on formal incentive schemes in general. From what I've heard, these schemes are quite alive and well at Google. So perhaps they have found a way to make them work, or perhaps they just take them for granted at this point.

In either case, there must be something about the incentive structure that is serving Google well.
College kids rushing into relationships at the start of term and then breaking up at Christmas when they go home for holidays?
I've been reading Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" on and off over the course of these last 5 months or so, even though the other book I am reading is "Getting Things Done".
Very similar thread, three hours ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1864688

EDIT: Not necessarily trying to say that this shouldn't be here, just that the audience for these two threads is probably pretty close, so people here might find the info there interesting/useful.
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=6811

Video from 22:42:30
CSS sees DOM attributes (what you get from element.getAttribute('type')), and not DOM properties (element.type).

These are different things kept roughly in sync by setters/getters (called "reflected properties" in HTML spec).

The `type` attribute is also supposed to have default value implied by the DTD, but that could only work in "validating" SGML/XML parsers (which browsers aren't).
HTML5 allows you to position elements on top of the drawing canvas and use a transparent canvas so the background of the page would show through the drawing. Flash does not, unless you add wmode=transparent to the parameters.
Jeff Jarvis on Germany Vs. Google
Language - By Leonard Bloomfield.
My Company, Anybots is developing a video conferencing robot to help remote employees of mid-sized companies stay in touch with the main office more effectively.

Also "parents who are female"? if only there was a short english word to replace that wordy noun phrase.
The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
I bet he would like Ender's Game - the other book that every other nerd in the universe likes. :)
Yes, but this is on the front page.
I liked the description of You are not a Gadget, maybe I will pick it up after I complete one of my current books (its almost definitely going to be TECS, GEB will take year to even be read once and understood superficially and add another few years for my habit of googleing or wiki-ing ever word I don't understand.)
What's your take on the multitude of software that you buy together with all the README files, Word or PDF documents describing how to use the software, what does it do, and all that jazz? Do we (humans) get to view all that code and see what Microsoft Office Word 2007 can do for us?
Omnivore's Dilemma

I tried Godel Escher Bach but after a few pages of his pq system I couldn't take it any more and walked away. Is this something I need to endure or am I not "getting it"?
I just read all of Peter Watts' books (Blindsight and the Rifter triology), very hard scifi, you can find them all free online at his website: http://www.rifters.com/
plus Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck...

Always keep in mind that these guys (and yes, their equivalents on the Left) are not experts in political science and philosophy. They are entertainers first and foremost, and their job is to be provocative. The day they say "You know, today everything is copacetic" is the day people stop listening and they lose their jobs.
That's not a readme! At best that's a weak INSTALL.

Anyone care to illuminate to me how this works? "Real-time MapReduce" sounds almost like an oxymoron.

The project's site ( http://s4.io/ ) isn't very helpful either. Full source:

the S4 open source project. coming soon.
Okay. The session cookie is marked secure and is sent only in response to HTTPS requests. That should cover everything.
> Reread the complaint - driving less doesn't solve it.
By "live closer", I mean "within 4 miles", so that you can walk. That does solve it (unless I've completely misunderstood)

> I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey

Yes, but you've chosen those places due to the prevailing social norm in your society to drive all the time. Looking at a map, were I you, I'd live in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara/Cupertino, so that one of you could walk to work, and you wouldn't have to do too much urban driving to get to Monterey.

> Buses and trains don't necessarily go where I want when I want.

How precise do you need to be? Unless I'm going somewhere obscure and far away, or travelling on Sunday, a train can normally get me to within 2 miles of where I want to be, within about half an hour of when I want to be there. That's plenty accurate enough, and certainly as accurate as urban driving.

OTOH I don't trust buses, because there are too many cars jamming up the road.
To be honest this thread was inspired by that thread. But as the person was asking for suggestions, there is a fundamental difference I think.
Mythical Man Month.

Some of Jakob Nielson's usability stuff.
Hope Bourne
Website analytics and traffic stats for any site
Surcentro - is website analytic and traffic stats online tool for checking site publicity. This provides whois, backlinks, Alexa and Compete Ranks and etc.

Dont forget to bookmark this site - it will help you in any time.
I'm also reading Getting Things Done.
Interesting, as historically the problem has been quite the opposite. If you go back not that far most devs simply had a flat position in the org. There were no Distiguished Engineers or even Architect titles. You were a programmer.

Of course people started to get upset because the only way they could advance in the company was to go into management. A corporate VP can make $250k/year but a programmer never could. Maybe if you single handedly implemented Google you'd get a $50k bonus that year, but your base salary is still $80k/year. And maybe you get a 15% pay raise for your great contribution.

And when everyone is a "programmer" it is more apparent than even now that everyone is a replaceable cog.

It sounds like the Google promotion system is just bad. Since technical ladders don't have human resource bottlenecks (you can't make everyone the dev manager, but you can promote everyone to Level 4 SWE) you really should have very clear guidelines as to what constitutes a promotion.

When I've managed it looks like this:
"This is where you're at today. To get to the next level, this is what you need to do. With your help we've put together this plan for your next 3-6 months. You'll finish up A, make sure B gets deployed. C gets checked-in with QA sign off. Do this w/o ticking anyone off or being a general jerk and that looks like Level XYZ".

Every week we talk about his/her progress against the plan. There's no pleasant surprises, but there's also no big disappointment. If you're not getting a promotion we've known about it for a while, and we're usually both not happy because I've made it clear that something is not going well.

Notice, there's no competition against other employees or any other such race. With that said, there are cases where there is little or no money associated with the promotion, but surprisingly this is often not a concern.
Yes if you have the cash AND know how to hire and manage technical teams, a technical co-founder is not really needed IMO.
If I understand correctly, it's suggesting that having formal levels, regardless of whether managers do or not, is what's undesirable.

I infer the alternative to be flat, such that there's only difference in compensation, with no difference in formal title.

Perhaps I'm biased, since I very much believe you can call me whatever you want, as long as I'm suitably paid. This function-over-form attitude is why I prefer startups.
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman

Excellent science fiction.
It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
I just finished "How to Write Great Copy for the Web". It's a piece of crap. The design and presentation of the ebook is amazing, but the content doesn't make it. It's not 90 pages, it's only 40 or 35 (Extremely large fonts and lot of white space). It does particularly add nothing to what can be found in a blog post or two.
Yikes...property values are going down. PHP has moved in.
I didn't know that. I tested it myself and you're right. The "Elide Attributes" filter seems fairly pointless anyway. I can't imagine it making that much of a difference in performance even if it was safe.
The Pragmatic Programmer's November magazine is out
- *Built to Last* - Collins and Porras
- *The Ruby Programming Language* - Flanagan and Matz
- *_Whys Poignant Guide to Ruby* - _Why the Lucky Stiff
As a teenager who does web work, it always bothers me when people judge something by the age of its creator, rather than its quality.
Android Market has been broken for days. Still is?
Semantic improvements to the html 5 spec that would improve media coverage
Private Placement Memorandum
The PPM seems to be extremely expensive for a new company. If we're raising angel funds, do we really need it? Is it expected? Common practice? Thoughts & experiences are appreciated. Thanks!
Yes, it is. It's held up surprisingly well considering it's nearly 30 years old at this point.
In certain companies, bonuses are dependent on three factors: company success, team success, and individual success, based on targets agreed upon at a certain point in time.

To me, that seems a lot more fair than implicitly believing all members of a team are of equal levels of skill, productivity, etc.
ITC staff sides with Nokia in Apple complaint as trial begins
Who's worth more, Peter Norvig or Marissa Mayer?

Who's paid more? Who has the better title?

Who's worth more a very strong CTO of Google or an overachieving SWE I? Presumably with title comes responsibility befitting the title.
They've deprecated the "Web Search API", but replaced it with the "Google Custom Search API" (which requires an API key):
http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/docs/dev_guide.html
Somebody get this guy some karma.
Most of the advice is applicable only to startups in and around valley. The scene outside is pretty much different. But then it still is useful.
In your end rant, you could replace "Perl" with just about every other language out there.
Not Disruptive, and Proud Of It.
Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

If you work in a UI/UX/Product/Front-end role do read this book some time.
> You can see the full (PDF) list here...

wonder how some of them are already registered, like go.co.uk is owned by disney apparently
Incentives work great. Incentives aren't the problem. The basket of formal performance-driven compensation programs colloquially referred to as "incentive pay" are the problem. Incentive pay includes:

* Formal periodic performance reviews

* Scheduled bonuses based on "job performance"

* Ranking of employees (this is the old GE performance management paradigm; "up or out!")
The worst part about career ladders at Microsoft was that it put people who were great engineers but terrible, terrible managers in positions of authority, because there was only one advancement path. When I left,they were just starting to create a career ladder for individual achievers, because they had finally realized this. I don't know if it actually ever happened.
When I owned a Symbian phone I did use it to browse the web but I used Opera Mini. The symbian browser was pitifully slow and awkward. That might also account for the small percentage.
Buyology - Martin Lindstrom
The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit - Ralph Kimball
The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
Laptops Targeting Women | InfoMov.Com
The whole "left-right" single-spectrum metaphor, particularly the American reduction of it into a column A-or-column B mindset, is such a thought-killing meme.

"a conservative wants to preserve the status quo"

A fourth-grade textbook explanation, but one that has little connection to the ideology or to the political party most commonly deemed "conservative". What's status quo about wanting things like overturning Roe v Wade, constitutional amendments to stop gay marriage, stringent anti-immigration efforts, or invading the Middle East? Hell, what on Earth was status quo about 2001-2008?

"this is not a slight on libertarians, just making it clear there is a distinction between people who like what we have now and people who want to roll back even what we have now"

More making it clear that you don't know much about libertarians, or are only dimly aware of libertarians not wanting particular government programs you're fond of. What's "reactionary" about wanting to abandon the military imperialism of the last, oh, century or so? What's "reactionary" about open borders, or wanting to end the drug war, the war on terror, agriculture subsidies, and eminent domain abuse?

ETA: And how do anarcho-capitalists fit into this setup? :)
Most-retweeted messages about Christine O'Donnell (scroll down)
Brad Feld on Solving Venture Bias PtII [video]
"The Evolutionary Void" - Peter F. Hamilton. Epic SF on a grand scale.
Programming Clojure - Stuart Halloway
It's not totally a rubber stamp. There have been a few outright rejections in the previous decade. In addition, they often force bills that have been passed in the house of commons to be reviewed/changed before it evens comes to the Senate. Over the course of the review, the law almost always get changed into something the Senate agrees with and so it gets passed.

But you are correct in the broad sense typically, once a bill passes the house of commons, it will become a law.
Towers of Midnight, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.

Blood and bloody ashes.
Just finished Irvine Welsh's Crime (my trainspotting filters are level 6 now) and starting Kipling's Kim.
...or you screwed up your settings. Have you read the FAQ or documentation to see if there is any conflict?
Salman Khan (KhanAcademy): YouTube U. Beats YouSnooze U.
This is a dup - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865249
"In Defense of Food" - Just finished.

"Long Walk to Freedom" - Currently reading.

"Good to Great" - Up next.
When I was a team leader, I was asked to rate my team members on a curve. Management stressed that this was important, and that we all had to conform.

I told my boss I had no intention of destroying my team, and handed out ratings and reviews as they were deserved.

Never heard this particular line from Management again.
Based on their election widget and access to demographic information, Facebook probably could put together scarily accurate, realtime election results.
http://wiki.s4.io/
addthis is a particularly guilty culprit. pageSpeed is always giving me hassle about their CSS. grumpywebmaster. You listening addthis?
Gödel, Escher, Bach

Types and Programming Languages

6 dozen students' homework

Probably going to start Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said sometime soon (or some other novel... I can't currently remember what I have waiting on my shelf).
Peter Pan (in Mandarin)
What is a "Peer bonus structure"? I appears in #3 Recognition, "Peer bonus structure was very well done, but not widely used inside engineering."
I just read Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez. The second one is better, but they're both very entertaining. Also, Matthew Soble, the mastermind character in Daemon and Freedom reminded me a lot of Hari Selden.
100% confirms my fear that this is a group of incredibly smart, hyper intelligent people who don't understand that specializing in a field (like, say... Management) isn't something you can "dabble" in and do well. My experience is that most "managers" in Google (when I interviewed, I met a few Directors, Managers and Tech Leads) are 99% technically focused. Google swung the pendulum too far the other way. Engineering should be in charge of the company, but rely on Managers to do management things, not have Engineers dabble in it (with the best of intentions)
I would think if Google applied the same hiring practices to hire in hyper intelligent people with a management focus and could integrate them into the teams correctly, this would be a huge win.
(I haven't interviewed there since '07, so things may have changed since then)
Ask HN: Truckload of paper
I work for a small company that is doing an event in DC in two weeks. We have literally about a truckload of paperworks to print and take it to the event. So much so that, it turns it is cheaper to drive a truck to Washington DC than use standard shipping options. I and my co-worker are thinking about driving over there together.

These paperworks are handouts to the attendees at a conference we are organizing.

I am wondering if anyone here had some insights on avoiding this. I would ideally like to not print anything at all, but handout CDs with all the materials in it. But we worry if everyone will be there with a computer. And handing out CDs seem so 2005.

I did send an email to Steve Jobs asking if he would be interested in donating iPads. :-)
This also reminds me of a paper I had submitted in the past. Randomly promoting people is more effective than using merit:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455
Download Windows 8 Bliss Wallpaper | beingPC
Regarding the Incentive system actively promotes bad behavior on slide 7, Dan Pink gave a very interesting talk on Motivation at TED — with surprising results:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
The “Bury” Button Returns to Digg
Coders at Work by Peter Seibel.

Very interesting interviews with hackers and/or computer language inventors.
Ruby first "clicked" after I read _Why's Poignant guide to ruby. As zany as it is, some how it clears all the things you need to kick start in ruby
Corporate teaming building
Libertarians will also make rational arguments about how blood alcohol limit laws should be repealed. After all, there's no science to indicate that 10 different people will be impaired to the same extent by the same blood alcohol level.

No, that issue is solved. It's called a trial.