skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mean to sound negative, but if someone had the skills and inclination to "finish" your work for 50% of the net, why wouldn't they just go build it themselves for 100%?

I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, but I can't see why someone else would work on it to completion and "cut you in" for 50%?
Because the one she targeted was shot. I'm not saying it's fair, or whatever, but that's why.

In any case, it would be nice of everyone to not do that.
Obese Pipes
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=fluoride+health+effects

There have been studies coming out of china re: fluoride for a lot longer than the one that came out a couple weeks ago.
What is the point of posting this? Solipsist, at the time you posted this the article had already been updated saying the rumor was false. Moreover the rumor is ridiculous to begin with.
I'd just like to make a counter point - while it is more trackable and instant these days, celebrity endorsement/trend setting is nothing new.

Celebrities have launched hairstyles, clothing styles, holiday destinations, social trends and sports.

Swimming at the beach wasn't at all common until King George started doing it. The dress Kate Middleton wore for her engagement announcement with Prince William sold out within two days.

What is new is the instant change a celebrity can make, but this unfortunately means the trends tend to last a microscopically short time. 250 years after King George went for a dip at Weymouth, we're still all going to the beach.

[note: humor intended here, not really making a comparison between beach visits and blog visits]
Dear customers, thank you for your support of our company.
Here, there's good news to tell you: The company recently
launched a number of new fashion items! ! Fashionable
and welcome everyone to come buy. If necessary, please
plut: welcome to :
=== http://www.findsoso.com =====
=== http://www.findsoso.com =====
=== http://www.findsoso.com =====
=== http://www.findsoso.com =====
=== http://www.findsoso.com =====
=== http://www.findsoso.com =====
=== http://www.findsoso.com ====
OK:

s/identical representations/identical external representations/
"Companies simply can't afford to have A players in all positions"
Every comment there disagrees with the post. Were you hoping to come here and find people who will agree?

I also disagree with it. Good code is as self-documenting as possible. Any gotchas should be explained in comments, but correct naming is way more valuable than comments explaining what a function does.

Any code that fails to be self-documenting needs to be refactored immediately.
I would love an update on this in a month or three to see what the results are of this change.
* Do signups increase for the free trial.
* How well do the free trials convert to paid.
* How many people put in their CC details up front.
I'm not going to argue that you should not document your code, but two things come to mind:

1) With the backup example- you have indeed moved complexity elsewhere, but the idea of that kind of setup is you logically separate complexity into a hierarchy so that the proper segment can be rapidly located, and is easy to comprehend because it is isolated, and small chunks of complexity are not all that hard to understand.

2) Every example of well written self-documenting code I've ever seen is pretty much superior to the alternative in every way, with the possible exception of small performance hits. It's generally a good goal to shoot for, whether you document your code or not.
I guess I'll throw my hat in the ring. Perl is awesome, and since I've been using it practically my entire career and have contributed quite a substantial amount of time developing libraries for CPAN I suppose it my core-competency.

Bottom line, CPAN is awesome ... but lets not be a one trick pony. When you hear things over-and-over you should probably take notice (and maybe even onus). "Perl is not newbie friendly, past or present (modern)", "Perl community is not friendly (rtfm)", "Perl is not used for the new web", "Perl has no good IDE", etc.

I'd like to see Perl restored to its former glory because it is an incredibly versatile language. IMHO, I think Perl developers need to develop more purty public-facing tools, e.g. Websites, Web Apps, Desktop Apps, etc. .. see Lacuna Expanse for example.

CPAN Modules are not public-facing (or are to a point) and do nothing towards altering the perception of Perl.
66kb of JS (compressed) is a bit much, this should be broken down piece meal so you can do JUST rounded corners, drop shadow, etc. Would be much more useful that way (rounded corners I'd imagine account for vast majority of the use cases). Cool though.
Be Scientific (Skeptical) about Scientific Research
And it's hosted on an ASP blog.
Quite Ironic.
I don't know, but being a "Perl rockstar" would probably evoke a more "prog rock" feel, not exactly the best target if you aim for sex appeal.

(NB: I do like both Perl and prog rock, so I personally wouldn't have problems with that.)
Well, if he doesn't treat his phone well, it may very well be beat-up.

But yeah, "old"? I have a 3GS, and it's still running fine, and I'm still quite satisfied with it.
They're getting Google in on this too. I can't imagine that Google will give no push-back against the idea that FacebookConnect becomes a national Internet ID.
No, that's not negative. Perhaps that is the answer. The only thing I have to offer is about $25K of out of pocket expenses with a design/branding company coming up with specific designs, UX, branding and about a half dozen 30-second marketing videos. There is working code we have for an iPhone that does communicate with the website database, but there are quite a few things that don't yet work.

I think it only makes sense for a talented programmer who is between projects and has 1 maybe 2 weeks to invest in the potential for $10-20K of upside.
Good point. Maybe free market forces will help after all...

Edit: Google probably stands the gain more from this initiative than Facebook if it can cleverly integrate it with Google Me.
Perhaps Zawinski's law should be modified to say "tweets" instead of email.
Same age. It's probably just the people I know. I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley amongst 90% Asians and the non-tech savvy subset of those I know all use the same AIM screen names but through different interfaces. The tech-savvy subset use multi-clients like Pidgin, Digsby, etc. I personally use Gchat and no one I know uses FB as their main chat client, only for a quick message if two people are coincidentally on FB.
I'm sure a company as large as O'Reilly doesn't pay all their authors the same. 10% sounds like a base rate, but everything is negotiable.
Lots of complaints in the article about the hidden menu. I like the hidden menu, at least on devices with small screens (all phones). I know it isn't as discoverable as an always-visible toolbar, but discoverability is not the only valid concern in the design of a UI.
I don't think every function needs a comment, necessarily, but I have seen "self-documenting" used as an excuse for not documenting anything at all. It's easy to declare code understandable and readable when you're the one who wrote it.
This isn't true for IBM. In 2009 IBM's revenue from hardware was less than 17% from total revenue.

http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2009/2009_ibm_annual.pdf
The birthday problem basically just cuts the number of bits in half. For SHA1 this changes from a chosen collision at absurd odds to a random collision at merely ridiculous odds.
It's because in large companies you don't get promoted (and so more money, escape the next redundancy axe) by producing good stuff but by being ranked higher than everyone else on your grade.

So you do this by pointing out to your manager all the good things you have done and shooting down anything anyone else does - since everybody knows this and everybody does it you have a catastrophic situation.

Ultimately the only solution if to have them crash their cars into each on the way to work to decide who gets the corner office (gratuitous Richard Morgan link)
You're right. Slaughtering 20 junior school students and a crossing guard are not acceptable means to get your daughter from school to her dentist appointment on time.

It is however acceptable to kill 20 enemy combatants to rescue a dignitary from a besieged embassy.
for the same reason strcmp() returns not just a -1,0, or 1, but a "distance" between the two strings being compared. A function or syntax has multiple uses if additional information is available to the programmer.

Example:

@array = qw(1 2 3);
$length = @array;

print $length;

By allowing a non scalar to take an implicit scalar form, we have an extremely useful and quick way to get the length of an array. Nothing that difficult to replace with a len() call, but it's language features like these that make perl ($length = @_ may be the most useful of all) so handy for quick hacks.
Linkedin should really push this feature. Great way to keep them relevant.
Wrong perspective. If you ship too much information down to the client the user will use it to know things they shouldn't. Google "wallhack". The stream up to the server will bear no overt traces of cheating.
To those who would say "it'll be optional - you won't need one to search Google, check you email, etc." I point out that there are already huge efforts to track people across domains and build profiles of them. Private companies are ALREADY slobbering over this, and paying good money for even anonymized datasets. If this system goes into practice, it will simply be good business for websites to require your ID as part of the signup process. Also, open networks (like attwifi, etc.) may begin to require these as well. They could build nice juicy datasets of the Starbucks laptop crowd, and believe me they'd be hot selling items.

That's probably a best case scenario by the way. How long until it's mandated that your ISP has your internet ID, and public networks (attwifi, etc.) are required to get it to let you out into the internet?
I lived in a small city in the Urals in Russia for a summer and they had exactly that... They had a bulletin/message board and I'm sure some why to share files. I didn't really explore it more so I'd love to hear someone else's experience.
Right. Because eBay and Paypal have completely eradicated fraud and the gaming of the system. In addition, there are no false-positives in this scheme and people are not thrown under the bus just because they aren't 'internet famous' enough to get their situation resolved...

I'm not agreeing that we need a government system, but don't point to eBay as the solution to fraud.
Gah! Why is this relevant to hacker news? You can take this to reddit and have a willing audience.
Yeah everyone seems to rag on the menu button, but I like it, saves space on the screen, seems logical to me. When I'm looking for extra options, I hit that menu button. When using my girlfriends iPhone I miss it, instead of having the one menu button I have to look for the applications personalized menu icon on on the screen - it's not consistent.

Perhaps its just that most people are used to the IOS way of doing things?
What do you mean by that? Why is it so? What is a "right", in fact?

You've just offered another slogan. You're going to have to work harder than that if you want to argue against consequentialism --- the idea that what matters are the consequences of each action, not the principles it contravenes.
Very, very interesting!

I felt a little heartbroken when I was watching the little shrubs grow and then suddenly get chopped off sometime in September.
In your first post, you made a clear distinction between the interface and the server-side stuff. Your points 3-5 are all related to server-side stuff. With respect to those things, you can get the benefits of GMail using Gnus or any other mail client (by reading your mail over IMAP or even POP).

(True, Gnus requires an initial configuration step -- maybe that counts as "administration" -- that the GMail web interface does not. But that's basically set-and-forget; it doesn't require the kind of monitoring or tweaking that running a mail server does.)

As far as the interface itself goes, if GMail works for you, that's great. Personally, I want:

1) to be able to check my mail from a terminal

2) a lot of control over pre-processing of mail, especially in filters that sort messages into groups/folders/labels. I find that simple string-match filters are really limiting.

3) to be able to copy and paste code and other data into and out of my email (e.g., to create new TODO items in Org mode), without using the mouse

4) to have the option to automate tasks like (3) when they become too frequent or annoying to do by hand

Different strokes, I guess. :)
Switched from Perl to Ruby in 2006. Things I like off the top of my head:

One variable type. This makes references unnecessary. Also, everything that can be stored in a variable is an object.

I can remember the Ruby syntax for defining a class. In Perl I had to look it up every time. Also Perl has two competing class systems.

Methods by default take a fixed number of arguments and there are no implicit conversions between strings and numbers. This catches a lot of errors.

Good Perl practice involves boilerplate such as 'use strict'. I hear about lint tools and such and it makes me think the situation has gotten worse since 2006.

The Ruby Array class and the Enumerable module are good. I've become dependent on methods that aren't as readily available in Perl: include? each_with_index all? any? permutation. Also the intersection and union operators: & and |.

Ruby blocks.

Ruby 1.9 has the Fiber class (rough equivalent to Python generator).

Ruby IO operations throw exceptions when they fail. Hence you don't need the '|| or die "could not open!"' idiom.
'This was one of the most humbling moments of my life. I stood
out, exposed, bluntly asking for help and displaying my
convictions.'
'Time passed and Mark had yet to start his new company, and I
was flat broke. I went to him yet again and asked for help.

You see luck here, I see something far more inspiring and saying just luck may undermine those, IMHO.
Perhaps not, but I don't think inline documentation is often very useful either and breaking code density is a jarring thing. External documentation exists for a reason (even if it's just doxygen-izing your inline docs instead of pointing people at the direct source), and I much prefer reading (and writing) short READMEs, examples, or tutorials than digging through implementation code if I'm interested in using something. And if I'm integrating anything non-trivial I don't think little comments saying "/* * executes the passed query string, not using prepared statements, throws SQLException, returns nothing */ public static void executeSql(String query) throws SQLException {" are useful or worth my time. Write comments when something needs some explanation not clear from the context, save the academic comment-everything documentation for enterprise busywork or academia.
>Thus, you could have "XSLT macros" that work in the same way Lisp macros do.

Yes of course. How could I not see the power of XSLT macros?
So what happened to the actual study?
I grant that all code can't be self documenting. But you don't commit suicide just because you're going to die at some point anyway. Instead, you try to make your life as long and happy as possible.

Your highest priority should be to make your code self-documenting as possible, even though that isn't always possible.

That said, the author does have a valid point in that public APIs do need documentation. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that every method (private or not) needs documenting. Unnecessary comments and documentation should be treated like any other kind of useless code. They should be removed.
US Government subpoenas Twitter for info on all wikileaks followers
Wow Egg - Family-friendly and fun web directory
I would seriously rather switch OS's than switch to tea from coffee :)
Fair enough, but that's kind of orthogonal to the author's point isn't it? An idea isn't wrong just because it can be abused.
Considering that 95% of the world live outside the US, One could say it may be more impressive that 5% of the world accounts for 25% of iPhone use.

Between Japan, Korea, and Europe and the US that's ~1.4 billion people, putting the US at ~20% of the high tech world. That's not even including China.
I notice that with some reviewers; they often translate "not like iOS" to "not good UX", and I don't think that's fair or accurate.

I also think that phones and tablets are different kinds of devices, and that the tradeoffs appropriate for one aren't always right for the other. I might prefer a menu button on a phone and a toolbar on a tablet.
If you have a 4th & 2 from your own 10 in the first quarter, go for it!

No matter what the math says, no coach will do this (save for maybe Billichek, but even he's not that bold). Sports is one of those areas where the "gut" and conventions are more important than stats and probabilities. Moneyball is a great book for anybody whose interested in the intersection of sports conventions and math.

http://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Art-Winning-Unfair-Game/dp/0...
My VP is one of those double-digit-employee-ID people, and he recently said "People ask me what it was like to work at Google in the early days. This [the making of Google Instant] was what it was like to work at Google back then."

So in at least some parts, that spirit still exists at Google. The problem is that it's much harder to find well-defined problems that are ambitious and yet feasible.
"Even if each individual algorithm makes perfect sense, collectively they obey an emergent logic—artificial intelligence, but not artificial human intelligence. It is, simply, alien, operating at the natural scale of silicon, not neurons and synapses. We may be able to slow it down, but we can never contain, control, or comprehend it"

I can see algorithms being used to automate decision making in almost every other industry, not just Wall St. It's both scary and exciting to see what happens with the resulting "emergent intelligence".
> "This is very much a non-lethal weapon," says Bryan Hore of BAE Systems in Farnborough, UK, where the system was developed.

How's the old saying go? Stop a pirate with a non-lethal weapon, and you've stopped him for a day. Stop him with a lethal weapon, and you've stopped him for life.
While this helps get the point across, your example doesn't provide comparable events. The distinction is the weighing of the results of actions to the actions themselves. Is taking one life justified to save another? Is it measured by the greater good, such that the life that is saved will provide greater contributions than the one that is taken? Or is it measured in that all life is inherently to be treated as equal? And if all life is treated as inherently equal, is it a numbers game, taking 100 lives is justified so long as it saves 101 or more?

The phrase "The ends don't justify the means" is not hyperbole to discredit accomplishments, nor is it meant to remove the ends from the equation. It changes the equation to provide the necessity of weighing the ends against the methods rather than measuring the ends independent of the context used to accomplish them.

What is even more interesting is the opposite. The ends not justifying the means is typically used for weighing the actions necessary for a favorable outcome. If looked at from the opposite perspective, do the means justify the ends, it presents a more difficult scenario. If X people die, but only appropriate means were used (and others would have saved X people), should those that chose the appropriate actions be held responsible for the failure to provide a favorable outcome? Or should they be heralded for making the difficult decisions to only use morally acceptable practices?
Interesting, if you watch the bottom through the first 4-5 months the camera zooms in slowly. The result from start to end is a fairly large field of view difference. I wonder what caused this... a software issue or maybe motor drift in the camera over time. Very cool.

Edit: thanks to the commenter below, I missed the post processing zoom he added. Thanks!
I think it will eventually be necessary even for informal interactions. It will be the only way to reliably distinguish people from spam bots.
That's why Jesus invented amendments to the constitution.
You Can't Get There from Here
WebOS is turning out to be one of those things that are commercially unsuccessful/unpopular but massively influential. Both Android 3.0 and RIM's playbook (whose OS will eventually make it to their phones) seem to be more influenced by webOS than the iPad.

To put it another way, WebOS:Android = Pixies:Nirvana (things like this seem to happen a lot in music).
I agree with that. However, Microsoft's problem is that the volume of its new products is too low relative to the volume of its established products.

It is a bit like population pyramids; every country has one, but some are signs of (future) population decreases. Microsoft's, according to one viewpoint, looked like it was on track to expand forever and occupy the whole world (oops; mixing metaphors here), but now looks as if it will/already has reached a plateau, or even will/already has started shrinking/collapsing (there are many variations here; I think they still have chances to win big in another field (for example, XBox or .NET seen as 25-year investments may turn out to be huge cash cows) but I doubt whether that 'big' will be big relative to their current size.
Its funny when people use the term 'ORM' when there is no ORM in sight (I know I do it to :). BTW there is no 'Relational' and no 'Mapping' in the C# Redis client, For max speed POCO objects are just serialized as JSON or have their primitive values stored in Redis's Sets/SortedSets.
The major problem I have with the menu button, and all the Android buttons, is they are disruptive to the flow of using the software. Until the touch buttons are as sensitive as the touchscreen itself it's going to be a bit jarring to switch back and forth. This raises the problem of the touch buttons getting activated accidentally if they are too sensitive. I prefer having all the UI elements accessible from the touchscreen itself. It's probably a bit of a compatibility nightmare to attempt to solve now. Using touchscreen UI elements in tablets and a physical or touch button in SmartPhones is definitely not the most consistent way to approach the problem. Many people use their phones in a landscape orientation. IIRC at least one Android phone maker implemented the menu/back/home/search buttons in a second small LCD. This would probably be the best approach. The buttons themselves could change orientation as needed.
The Jobless Recovery Hits a New Victim: College Grads
What is the argument against a national ID system? Can someone enlighten me?
Sure. But you have to sacrifice someone's rights, don't you? By not enslaving those 10 people, you're sacrificing the rights of those 100 people. And while that doesn't mean that you're ever safe, it does guarantee that you have the highest chance of being safe.
>"There's got to be a better way to prove you are real and legit, than giving some company the right to pull a sub-one dollar sum of money from your bank account and then confirming that to them online"

I've never had any problem with this method, what are your objective quantifications for why a 'internet id' from the Commerce Department would solve this better? Why does taxpayer money need to be spent on a problem that is already solved to a sufficient degree by commercial forces?
Quite disappointed to find out that it doesn't tweet on its own.
It is never right, to do wrong, for a chance to do right.