skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With enough effort you can put lipstick on a pig. But really, an IL that doesn't support integers? An IL where a member field access may involve looking up a string in a hash table instead of being a single machine instruction? Propose that as an IL to a compiler guy and they'll laugh at you. Javascript is an historical accident. Let's look at some alternatives if history was different:

- Scheme: this would have been a much better choice, because it supports integers and has a compact object representation instead of representing everything with hash tables. Bad point: all objects are boxed (like in JS). Good point: tail calls are handy when compiling all kinds of control structures.

- Java: As an IL to compile down to this would have been better than Javascript. Good points on top of Scheme: unboxed primitive types, static typing means fewer runtime checks. Bad point: lack of tail calls.

- ML: excellent choice: has both unboxed primitives and tail calls.

I challenge you to find a language that would have been a worse choice than Javascript. It may turn out that by working really hard on smart runtimes and compilers you can get OKish performance out of Javascript in some cases, but that doesn't mean that it's a good choice for an intermediate language. A ML compiler that just translates to LLVM IL as simply as possible without doing any optimizations itself will easily beat the highly optimized Javascript engines we have today.
As a nitpick, the Apple Remote has seven buttons: Four direction buttons, center button, Menu button, and play/pause.

This does not really detract from the central point of the argument, but then I believe the argument is flawed since the remotes are made for almost entirely different things. You cannot run searches using the Apple Remote, for example. Whether the solution picked by Sony and Logitech is the best solution remains to be seen (although I find it doubtful at best), but the article, IMO, makes a bad point.
Enlightened Self-interest. It might be a completely rational move for Google to keep their staff happy, well-motivated and well-treated in order to maximise their productivity.
@mahmud I don't have to invent backronyms for urmom.
Hahaha, just a few days ago this article hit http://www.fastcompany.com/1701119/adwords-is-dying-and-goog...

which is a LOT better look into what Google is doing and why. The sky is not falling Dvorak, never has been, never will be.
This article is awful. Terrible, terrible awful.
Does anyone know if the lithium metal polymer (LMP) battery technology is useful in other spaces, such as personal electronics? For a long time, we've been hearing that batteries are a key limiting factor for a variety of electronics.
The Unix Evolution
Old men? You could have just said people and been done with it. When Facebook moves a button there is outrage and mass demonstrations. You younguns and your confirmation bias. Amiright?
I often wonder why nobody ever asks Steve if he codes when he does an interview. Maybe I should e-mail him.
It's a pity just because of the 12" capacitive tablet format...there are no shipping competitors with that size yet.

Of interest, JooJoo users have been hacking away and have figured out how to install Android, Windows, and OS X on it. I think that's what JooJoo should have done all along -- sell it as a reference platform.

I wouldn't buy it because of the cloud that hangs over the company, but the hardware looks nice.
… I would replace the modal form sheet with alternative UI. Removing the form sheet (and therefore its bug) would eliminate the need for the private API.

I read that to say he went with his second choice for a user interface that is probably not quite as good and experience.
So thanks to the guidelines that was supposed to ensure quality in the app store, his users should either deal with a buggy app, or make due without the feature?
Why Making, Instead of Buying, Dinner Could Make You Thinner
Imposing a Metcalfe Tax
All you need to do is stand in front of a mirror after midnight, chant 'Oracle support contract renewal' three times and he'll appear behind you.
"If by some terrible twist of fate less than 100 people submit entries to a contest, we reserve the right to select no winner."

That's a big "if." Big enough to lose interest.
The main objective of this post is to advertise a new competition for business models held by BYU. Total prize money is $50,000 in cash and kind, split between winners 1 through 8. Having been through a traditional biz plan competition before, I'm 100% behind this initiative. That being said, I find the post slightly misleading.

The competition is open to all college students--I highly recommend you go check it out at http://www.businessmodelcompetition.com. I'm thinking about entering myself, so if you're interested in collaborating send me an email.
This week's new programming books
Raw Taste Brokerage Power
Welcome To The Wild West Of Venture Capital
Sebastian Marshall == lionhearted
Amateur space enthusiasts launch paper plane into space
>>problem with the scripting languages is that they don't have any need to exist. They usually copy features from existing languages that already did a better job.

All I've read (and own experience), says that scripting languages are much faster to develop with?

Do you have anything contradicting that?

Edit: Grammar
Look at the embed code at the very bottom. It links to another website using terms like "free website builder". They are hoping people will copy & paste that code around. This means people will link to their website with terms that they want.
I'm really disappointed in the next generation of remotes. What I really want to know is why, when we have touchscreen phones and devices like the iPad, our remotes are still hunks of plastic with dozens of tiny rubber buttons?

Forget remotes, I want the whole UI for my TV to be on a dedicated touchscreen device. I want to read about what's on next, preview what's on other channels and schedule recordings without disrupting what's on the display screen.

The rest of the time, show me two big volume buttons.
Open, Democratic and Decentralized Project Management with Bettermeans.
Why Tim Ferriss Sold His Muse
The first article/puzzle: http://thetreasureblog.com/2010/11/the-delicatessen/
I once emailed Steve and did not get a reply. A day later, the dude in charge of iTunesConnect called us, and then everyday till the issue was resolved, someone was emailing us daily updates.

I'm exchanged 3-4 emails with Phil Schiller back when there were some scammers on the store. Apple executive is VERY hands on.
Apparently, when connected to a generous enough power supply, the batteries can recharge in just six minutes.

I wonder how generous of a power supply that would be. The Tesla Roadster has a 110/120V "emergency" charger, a 220/240V "home" charger, and I believe there are plans for 440/480V "public" chargers in the works.

The emergency charger takes 48 hours to do a full charge (120V 15A), and the home charger about 4 (240V 90A). In theory the public charger should do it in 1 hour (assuming 480V 180A). This "generous" Audi charger sounds like it will have some serious juice flowing through it.
Small Tip:
--Have a friendlier URL for users. I.e., If I want to share my list with someone offline, I'd prefer to say, "Hey checkout 7bks.com/user/steamer25" rather than "7bks.com/user/1094004".
it seems like this question is a setup for the answer to be what seems like the hot tech book of the month: "Do More Faster" by the guys that run the YC like accelerator TechStars in Boulder... anyway:
http://www.amazon.com/Do-More-Faster-TechStars-Accelerate/dp...
Even if that is how it went down; the fact that its a positive for both parties makes it alright with me.
Yup, I have a strongswan IPSEC rig with two-factor authentication that I use for a private darknet, and a second account on the same box that lets me access the Internet.

I also use VyprVPN at home for when I want to watch something restricted to the US. I still have to configure my VPN client to kick in on specific IP ranges automatically so that I can get BBC iPlayer and Hulu in a more wife-friendly manner.
Rather astonishingly, he presents no data whatsoever on whether users (y'know, the ones who matter) actually like instant search and the new image search.

Without that, his argument that Google is in some sort of "decline" because of their introduction can't be taken seriously, and the article is nothing more than a rant about how he dislikes them. This is a fact about John C. Dvorak, not Google.
Yeah but if a user copy/pastes it from his email client into his blog posting system, the double spaces are stripped, too (I checked it with Firefox, maybe other browsers work differently). It would only work I think if the single/doubles space pattern was preserved across copy/paste operations.
Semantics are almost always without authority, from what I can tell. E.g., by your definition if I write "When you go to the store can you pick up milk, butter, and toilet paper" I am being semantically incorrect, as I am using this "," thing to indicate items in a list instead of ul's and li's.
I need a female version of this graphic!

But I totally relate to it otherwise.
I like some of Google's recent changes, but I must agree that the new Google image search is a mess. I much prefer the old one.
There are standard name tag software packages already scale the font size for you automatically, e.g. the application that Avery makes for use with their badges. I'm pretty sure we did the Swagapalooza name tags with that software, and they came out looking reasonably good:

http://www.quitecurious.com/swagapalooza/
Yeah, I think the tech industry has consistently overestimated how much people want to interact with their television. TV is a fundamentally passive experience. Basic DVRs are probably pushing the limit of how much thought most people want to put into the viewing experience.
The Changing Nature of Open Source Companies
The part I find worst is the comment saying that it's still alright because, statistically, "more sex offenders are male".

If that's a valid judgement call, surely the fact that most child sex offenders are relatives/acquaintances of the victim rather than strangers means it's safer to sit the child away from their family and friends? I get slightly annoyed by these misuses of statistics.
> all I know is it's not in the 2.3.36 Linux kernel, but btrfs is, so btrfs wins.

I've been out of the Linux kernel loop for ages now, but isn't 2.3.36 over 10 years old? Did they change the naming convention such that development kernels are 2.3 again? If so, why? Or, am I completely missing something?
I like the new one for the most part. Sometimes I would prefer the sizes to be listed under the image, but having the page full of images with minimal whitespace is nice; less clicking to see the results.
Twitter Blog: Twitter + Ping = Discovering More Music
Edit: Thanks, that requirement has been removed.
Well, don't forget selection bias. We hear about the lucky few who hear back from Steve Jobs, but not about the hundreds that write to sjobs@apple.com and never hear back. So it could be as simple as "Steve Jobs spends 15 minutes every day on answering public emails chosen at random".
I'm really not sure I agree. Remotes do their jobs best when one fully learns their layout and can operate every function while keeping their eyes on the content they're wanting to see, not looking down at a small screen to figure out where your tap target is at any given moment.
This is the man who invented trolling and link-baiting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOHzHVF-4Mg

At best it's satire, not to be taken seriously--if you get up in arms about what he says, he wins and joke's on you.
Top Ten Content Management Systems
Content management systems can bring a world of difference to the Internet. Reading content, which the web is filled with, can be nearly impossible without a CMS. CMS or content management systems power many of the websites that you use on a daily basis.
Must be a typo for 2.6.36.
British Students Stage Attack on Headquarters over Tripled Tuition
It would be equally valid to observe that bloggers are all basically self-absorbed wankers who have no idea how normal engineers do stuff.
Could anybody with a more mathematical background explain what this means?
Why would you! If it seems to be an easy win lot's of people will join your contest.
Four Worthless Samsung Galaxy Tab Reviews and One Useful
Erlang is not a logic programming language. They started with a logic programming language and eventually removed every feature that made it a logic programming language.
Facebook Plans $450 Million Data Center in North Carolina
Does anyone else think the recent release (and positive reviews) of Kinect might indicate that the Sony and Logitech solutions will quite soon be anachronisms? People seem to say the Kinect's voice recognition is still a bit dodgy, but for the solutions the monstrous remotes are meant to solve, I don't see why voice input wouldn't generally work? If I want to find the next showing of It's Always Sunny in Philadelpha, it's a heck of a lot easier to just say it than type it out, and since it's search-based, the voice recognition doesn't have to be perfect anyway.
I don't really understand people's complaints on this issue. How could you not prefer to have hundreds of images on one page instead of clicking for the next page over and over? It's the difference between a mousewheel scroll and click/scroll, click/scroll.
Consider that most people don't expect a UI element to appear on the left hand side of the page, completely removed from all other UI and text. Most users are used to scanning the part of the page that already has text. Also consider that the text is vertical, so it's a little difficult to read.

I think people are tempted to use these feedback buttons because they break normal expectations. By not being a normal UI element, they draw attention to themselves - in theory. The other side of this is that by breaking expectations, some people may not realize it is a UI element.

Of course, an alternative explanation is that your users did not have anything to say.
Dvorak could legitimately be described as a professional troll.

"you get over 20 pages of large thumbnails all on the same huge page....And because thousands of useless large thumbnails are loaded, a huge waste of user bandwidth takes place each time."

Beware commenting on things you don't understand, because often it just makes you look like a fool.

In this case, Dvorak apparently didn't notice that while all of the images "were on" the same page, they were simply placeholders until you scroll.

If an image exists outside of the viewport, does it exist? Not necessarily.

As to them being large images....welcome to the high speed world, John. We've graduated beyond dial-up.

"So instead of being able to scan the entire page with a simple glance to find an image from say, usgs.gov, you have to put the cursor on each and every image and wait for a pop out with the information."

Who searches for images by domain like that? Few users of Google image search, I suspect, with the average user casually looking for some images to "borrow" for their book report or blog. The source domain just doesn't really matter to most users, again speculating (though presumably Google has actually verified this).

But say you really want to see images from usgs.gov? site:usgs.gov, e.g. http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=site%3Ausgs.gov+...;

And of course you can search by size (larger than, or a specific absolute size), and so on.

There will always (always) be people who complain about change. John, in this case, is just plying his trollish trade, however.
Open Source Requirements of the Knight News Challenge
I still like physical buttons I can feel and click when I'm a couch potato.
does the job. ui doesn't look too great though.

why so small? countdown time should take up entire screen.
Test Driven SharePoint Development
From some investigation, I think the simple answer is "yes", as long as you leave out devel, java, and a few specific tools. And totally yes for all the Xserver stuff.

I've got a kickstarted system with "@additional-server-devel
@base, @compat-libraries, @core, @development, @network-tools, @performance, @server-platform-devel, @system-admin-tools" package groups and a few specific package tweaks. Fits in under 2GB. Looks like there's no X server stuff, but there's libX11, a few other libX* packages, and gtk2 installed... It's being pulled in by some of the java stuff, seekwatcher, latencytop, python-matplotlib and a couple other devel things I probably don't care about. There's only 29 packages it wants to remove if I tell yum to remove libX11-common.

Looks to me like with a few more tweaks to my kickstart I'll be able to get all the X11 deps out.
Ooh, this looks right up my street and I love GEB. It's one of the books that changed my life!
It's not just that it can be overcome, but it must be overcome. We each must look at these expressions as they are made, and infer what is intended by them -- it may be more awkward for a blind person, but understanding "greater than" is not fundamentally different from seeing > and inferring the meaning (though you'll lack the visual queue of an arrow-like symbol).

The article doesn't actually point to any better user experience, it just imagines one might be possible as a screen reader might be able to use his notion of "semantically correct markup" better than Google's -- even though Google is one of the only serious implementations paying attention to specifically breadcrumb-related markup.
Personally I love the new google images. However I would quickly point out that some of the reasons people have left google is their frustration with the magnitude google relies on "the numbers" I highly doubt that the changes are hurting them, becuase if they were... they wouldn't keep it.
Mine too, hence the prize ;-)

And I figured it would appeal to the HN crowd.
We are using PayPal Subscription API itself. It easy and supports some of the stuff you listed, but some has deeper integration with our system/easier to implement on our side.

Cons:
Its PayPal.
Pros:
You sorta asked for PayPal
99% of the time when I suspect there is a bug in an underlying library, it turns out the problem is me not really understanding how that library works.
I'm not going to actually go check, but I'm pretty sure the images still load one page at a time, when you scroll to the bottom of the last page (or farther). How can you have a job at PCMag and not acknowledge or even be aware of this?
Game mechanics 1.0
Ask HN: Attribution
Lately, I've become concerned with terms of service which proxy ownership of digital media posted through a service. Does anyone know if an attribution license, like cc-by, applied to content would require a service and its affiliates to credit the real content owner in any use of the content?

Here is an example borrowed from http://picplz.com/terms/

If you post Content to the Service, unless we indicate otherwise, you grant MixedMediaLabs and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content in connection with: (i) providing and promoting the Service; and/or (ii) exercising the rights granted in these Terms.
Tribal Leadership
It's amazing how much of this is alleviated by something like 1Password or LastPass which I currently use. It'll generate a strong random password for me and remember it so I don't have to write it down. Changing passwords is just as easy.
My First Open Source Project: A Two Week Chrome Extension
Britain to Record Trader's Cell Phones to Fight Fraud
The œ ligature is not used in the German language, and the letter ö is transliterated as oe in Latin alphabets that don't use it.
The newspapers are Dutch (as is the company). The copy-writing is just not very well done...
Pre-moderation would be an excellent addition to FB.
I should try it, thanks. I don't think I agree with that you should optimize your readability for non-programmers, I think you should optimize (mostly) for programmers.

However, I know a guy who is a consultant, and in one project he built a small DSL to describe the domain of the client. Next, he sat down with them and walked them through it, and it was very easy for them to spot mistakes or logical flaws in the code. At first they thought he was crazy, but ultimately they loved it. So I do see your point, I'm just not sure if it's good in every situation.
KeePass works well too. It is cross-platform (I've used it on Win7, linux, android, and the iPhone and it does more platforms as well).

http://keepass.info/
It's possible to be a good tech journalist without having coded something yourself (though that's not to say that Dvorak is a good journalist). Sure, it would probably be an asset, and a lack of technical context can make people write some stupid stuff, but not having built something does not automatically invalidate anyone's opinions.

Most journalists have never worked in their fields, but nobody's complaining about that. The asinine idea that nobody's allowed to have an opinion about any tech company without being a programmer is getting old fast.
I disagree with the author, and think that he hasn't used google image search very extensively.

"Instead of the single page of thumbnails, you get over 20 pages of large thumbnails all on the same huge page."

The (near) endless scrolling model works better for rapidly sorting large sets of images, not worse.

"There is no information, just endless thumbnails. No sizes, no locations to scan, nothing! ... Now you have to place the pointer on top of each image for ... size and location information."

If you are optimizing for a an interface for sorting the most images possible, removing text makes sense to me. Also, sorting options for the image size is now on the left, which I find more useful than reading text below each image.

The pop-ups also contain controls which the author ignores that are very handy: similar images, and different sizes of the same image.
Putting 'Dvorak' in the title would have saved me some time.
Agreed. When you make an exception for developers to rely on a private method, you "promote" an implementation detail to its public interface. Now you can never remove the method, change its signature, or change its behavior. Nevermind that when the bug in the public method is fixed, you now have two methods to accomplish the same task. You've introduced cruft, or legacy code you need to maintain. Ick.
Same here. It was the only one I found that worked well on Windows and Mac (Android/iPhone is just a bonus)
> without using resorting to an iPhone or iPod Touch

Why not? You have iPod/iPhone in your pocket, or iPad on your coffee table. They can be used to look something up, and with AirPlay you can send content to TV once you find it.
It may be that Steve Jobs email account is monitored by one or more personal assistants, who act as a human filter for importance. The private API question seems important, and they could raise that issue to Jobs' priority inbox. Of course, the account is also accessible by Jobs himself which explains the responses to emails that seem unimportant.
Or it's an interesting insight into how the mind works of the person who reads that mail. Clearly, Ram is only trying to get around the rules because there's a bug in the iPad version of iOS.

Apple probably knows that it's their bug, and can probably reproduce it easily. But they also know that they have to keep their rules about unapproved apis consistently administrated.

So, it's a massive exception (in the throwing an exception sense) rather than an exception (in the sense of getting an allowance to the rules), so it gets handled at the top.

It's interesting to see how a company handles issues like this. I've had similar end much worse.
The trouble with wizards
Apple's implementation solves this by allowing you to perform directional swipe gestures within a large area of the screen, with a tap proxying for the select button. It's quite nice.