skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The usual phrasing is "X considered harmful," which is a passive sentence and doesn't actually say who considers it harmful. Originally it was used from a position of authority ; E. W. Dijkstra made about forty years of very important contributions to computer science, most of them more significant than: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T... .

Today it's complaining that an academic organization charges for access to papers ( http://se9book.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/acm-considered-harmf... ) or warning about a base feature in a family of languages ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/array... ). One of these is an opinion from an unsatisfied customer ("I don't like the way ACM charges for papers and requires copyright assignment"), and the other is a pretty important point about a language from one of its designers ("Arrays don't belong in public APIs in .NET languages").
Ah, thanks (@darren et al., too). There's always another subtlety to learn...
A Modest Proposal to Save The World (and the secret of happiness)
It's because the reply link requires you to understand what "reply" actually means. Far easier to be a doofus with a tumblr.
The author uses a tumblr. Do you expect any better of him?
Yes, I think you are right. There are a lot of desktops apps.
But even if they were not, right now, the PaaS options like AppEngine or the new AWS Elastic Beanstalk are too restrictive and not mature enough to become a serious alternative for enterprise apps.

But who knows what will happen in the future...
Chrome has a couple good options, fyi:
Right-Click tab strip.
or
Ctrl-Shift-T
or
List of closed tab at the bottom of the new-tab page.
But it doesn't resurrect the whole tab's history like Chrome does. Safari simply opens a new tab with the last-viewed site in the killed tab.
@ktsmith: I wasn't trying to imply that you were providing legal counsel. In addition, we don't change our policy on the whim of our accountant/lawyer... I just don't recall the proper protocol.

With a moment of clarity, I do recall our employees having to go through the W-9 process. In addition, not all work was "under the company umbrella." For example, if a candidate paired with an employee during a users group hack night, that was taken into consideration. Like I said, rules are made to be bent.
...and this is why E-Prime exists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_prime
Great insight into a UI so good nobody will ever notice it (not being sarcastic there). Reminds me of your awesome post on the tab resizing UI for Google Chrome. Well done!
I tend to keep my e-books and research papers in different piles in one sense. Calibre handles the e-books better than just about anything else out there. For research papers I use DEVONThink. I tend to be a bit of a research paper pack-rat and DT makes it easy for me to find what I want in my huge slushpile of PDFs. The current DT iOS app is a bit of a work in progress, but until it gets to the same level us usefulness that the desktop version of DT had I can easily dump papers for mobile reading via the Dropbox->GoodReader path.
Swiftian in its razor-sharp parody of the cliché-tastic, half-digested handwringing that besets us from many corners of the chattering classes.
If it was made by man then it's probably not good for you

I recently decided that it's the best and surest way to explain my eating habits to other people. Using words like 'lipid hypothesis', 'good and bad cholesterol', 'insulin response' or even something as simple as 'paleo diet' just makes peoples' eyes glaze over.
Wow. Rule 34ed on this, and I even had SafeSearch:moderate enabled!
What on earth is wrong with that? Just because you're still in high school is no excuse not to be pulling your weight 40 hours a week (harrumph)
Apple taps Navy techie for global security head
Donald Verrilli Jr is replacing Elena Kagan. Elena Kagan is now sits on the Supreme Court. That should shed some light on how important this position is.

If the RIAA/MPAA/old media (Donald also represented Viacom in its case against Google/Youtube) wrote its own laws the internet would be a sliver of what it is today. Many entities, for profit, not for profit, corporation, or association work to crush individual rights. Few do so to the degree that the RIAA has pursued.

Its sickening and disturbing that any representative, former or current, for such an organisation would be even nominated for such a powerful role in the United States government.

Clearly this guy has had a vested interest in crushing innovation and personal freedom in the United States. And you are irked that anyone cares.
Sure I agree. But on the other hand, the Joel Spolsky article I posted noted that he started having problems once he got to 17 people, which is smaller than 37signals. I was simply using Google as an extreme to illustrate my point.

> Since large organizations, if they are designed well, are just a latticework of small organizations maybe it's possible there is no upper limit.

How do you make a smaller organization though? By giving someone authority over it who can really take control of it.

> Regarding David's larger point I would add that having a boss tends to make people feel slavish and subservient to a certain extent.

Tough. That's just the way it is. You're always going to have a boss. Whether it's a manager, a C-suite executive, a board of directors, or the customer. You're never going to be completely free from someone having authority over you. It's just a matter of how they use that authority over you.

Now, I will agree that bad bosses (which are unfortunately too common) make you feel slavish. If you have a good boss (and let's give DHH credit, he sounds like he is a good boss), then they make you feel powerful. A boss's primary job is to enable you to do things either with encouragement or by taking care of the administrative details for you. Someone once said that a boss is a "secretary who can fire you."
Smashing your face is so funny. It's like those great Social Media Web Comics! Really the this Bryce guy should've made references to Ninjas, Pirates, and Robots to be even more funny.
Last time I had to rent in Australia, which was 5 years ago, it was a combination of the newspaper and property managers. I went to each real estate agent in the area I wanted to rent, and they each had a large list of every property available in the area. Some they had keys for, which they gave you in exchange for your ID, so you could go look at them on the spot.

It's a lot more common in Australia for people to use property managers, and a lot less common to have large commercial rental properties. I believe gumtree.com.au and housemates.com.au are both popular now.
Schools 'should train young entrepreneurs'
Could you explain what you are talking about? I'm aware of the RIAA suing people whose IP addresses were used for P2P sharing of copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright owner, but that wouldn't fit your description, as that is not a scam, as they had evidence against the people they went after in those lawsuits. Hence, I assume you are talking about some other RIAA litigation that I am unaware of.
I've struggled with this as well. There are endless resources for advice, yet no real community. Please share any you find!
I did something similar 9 years ago when I decided to make a 3D model of Escher's Belvedere:

http://home.utah.edu/~u0386084/hsci_old/belvedere.gif

http://home.utah.edu/~u0386084/hsci_old/belvedere_side_1.jpg

http://home.utah.edu/~u0386084/hsci_old/belvederelg.jpg

For those familiar, the software I used (called Alpha_1) was originally written in 1980 as a testbed for the Oslo Algorithm, and basically a NURBS toolkit. The Oslo Algorithm would later pave the way for 3D rendering and ray tracing of NURBS as well as 3D CADD/CAM software.
There are two good rebuttals to this article:

1. Apps are useful in an offline market, like when you are in the subway with no data service.

2. People don't like micropayments. They are willing to put up with ads instead. Why do people keep flogging micropayments and ignoring actual customer behavior? On-search-result ads will get you some slight income without the hassle of trying to get your customer base to adopt some wacky and ill-supported payments mechanism.

I feel that the dismissal of apps in favor of a major shift in customer behavior is at best a sign of detachment from what the end user wants. (And I would tend to go further into "boil the ocean" and "architecture astronaut" thinking but that is not likely to be productive here, so let's leave well enough alone.)
For those who haven't heard of Webvan:

Webvan was an online "credit and delivery" grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001. [...] Webvan as one of the greatest dotcom disasters in history. [...] now owned and operated by Amazon.com.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan
Quora vs. LinkedIn Answers - A Case Study
There have been a few attempts in this space, but I would love Amazon to succeed here. I wonder if this is timed because of their purchase of Diaper.com/Soap.com. That business had a true understanding of how to sort and deliver merchandize. Seems like this would be a great way to leverage that knowledge combined with Amazon's inventory.

Previous HN discussions:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1427668
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1877916
Buying property in Australia at the moment would appear to be highly risky. I was hesitant back in 2002, and it's far worse now. The only thing that has kept prices high is the incredible increase in rent, which I'm still struggling to fathom. In 2004 I was renting a 110^m 2 bedroom apartment on the Brisbane river for $780 a month.

Australia has managed to inflate their housing market further, thanks to government intervention, and it seems that it needs to pop at some point. Long term, these types of capital gains in housing are unprecedented.

Here's a good summary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble
just to recursively link this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2138206
Google submits VP8 bitstream to IETF, but not as a standard
How about:

<noun> is the devil
Stop being a fucking pussy
Remember when people were paid to appear in a corporation's ads?
> I wrote this post since there isn’t a highly ranked piece on this if you search for “Firefox Acid3,” and there should be. Hopefully my site’s search engine ranking can be useful for something.

Am I missing something? Is his site supposed to have great google mojo? I ran the search he specified, as well as several variants, and couldn't find him in the first 12 pages. OTOH, Wikipedia's article on Acid3 [1], which is Google's first result, makes much the same point as he does. In fact, it cites him, which is probably a bad thing, given it's a blog.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3#Development_and_impact
Upstream: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bb320f30-2715-11e0-80d7-00144feab4...

(If you get the regwall, try entering the URL into Google and clicking the first result)

Hot damn have I got my pom poms on for this.

I'm getting mighty sick of the small selection of mostly junk at my one neighborhood supermarket, not to mention trudging out there in the bitter cold, finding they're out of my favorite snack, rummaging to find the latest expiry date, waiting in the checkout line, scrambling to cram everything in my bag, aaaand awkward interactions with pimply teenagers.

If this existed, I would eat much healthier, tastier, and cheaper.

And presumably, once Amazon has their own daily delivery network, they'll use it to ship all their other stuff overnight for free.

C'mon, if we can deliver hot pizza in 30 minutes then we can do fresh groceries in 24 hours.
I disagree. Smashing your face with a hammer is simply pretty damn harmful. There's just no believing or disbelieving this one. Anyone who smashes their face with a hammer isn't doing it because they don't see it as harmful (unless of course they've taken enough Vicoden that they're about to be dead anyway). They're doing it because they want to be harmed. Big difference.
Most (probably all) chat clients (IM and IRC) do this too. I think it is more common than the author gives credit for. It's invisible unless it's missing.
I was brainstorming what words would fit the "X is Y" where X is a thing and Y is one word that describes your opinion. I could only think of things like "my pet peeve", "annoys me", "is something I don't need" and other things that weren't very concise. What are some words in which the idea of Y belonging to the writer or speaker is inherently built-in in such a way as to express ideas like "X is 'eviltome'" and "X is 'annoyingtome'"?

I'm probably just being dumb right now, but I'm posting this on the off-chance I might actually expand my vocabulary.
That's fine. My point is, it's extremely uncommon to come across this kind of structure in Java-land. Typically, there'd be separate classes for these objects - so you'd end up with a Panel class with fields width, height, title, renderTo and items. Items would be another class with it's subsequent fields. And so on with no maps in sight.

You're example Java declaration doesn't seem to actually capture the Javascript code you've got there - ie each initial string does not map to another Map - in some cases it just maps to an integer or string.

By the way - I totally agree that the declarations of stuff in Java with generics is way too verbose.
Friendfeed implements this, on the website, and I really wish quora would also. I'm always in the middle of reading something on quora when the content moves around. It's particularly jarring on mobile devices, I lose my place a lot.
also called "bid to increase your rank in the newsfeed"

I am not against this as long as the stories are marked as sponsored, and not part of the main results. After all that's what Google's adwords are, in a sense.
Two easy ways to improve user experience.
As a user: Use noscript
As a designer: Keep your content above the fold, and your logos not gigantic. There's no reason I should look down 480~ pixels just to see the first line of the content.
Using that definition of unemployment, what was the rate at the last peak of employment? How much WORSE off are we?
Wow, I had no idea so many people were on foodstamps. I really feel like I am missing out on the current welfare feeding frenzy. If I were to get laid off today I think I would be able to turn my 'benefits' into a 2-3 year vacation.
Clearly, customers’ being able to order everyday home items online and have them delivered to their doors would put Amazon in further competition with big-box retailers. As an online bookstore, Amazon has given companies like Barnes & Noble and Borders a run for their money.

Am I the only one who checked the date on the article after seeing that?
sometimes revenue is sadly in tension with user needs.
Quit your job.

Find freelance work or join a startup.

Seek out programmers that are better than you.
Have you heard the "make my logo bigger pills" joke about marketers?
No, it's pretty much always been about petty complaints. As it turns out, Wirth changed the title precisely because it was inflammatory. The first documented use of it is a complaint about rent control: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004675.h...
NoScript is terrible for UX. Every time I wanted to watch a video, or see a slideshow, etc, I had to right click, temporarily allow scripts (or whitelist domain)... It just made browsing tedious. I find AdBlock to be more than adequate, for most sites. The Chrome version isn't quite as good as the FF version, but it should improve.
If I ever release an open source project that I think anyone might be interested in, I'm going to give it a GUID, and request in the documentation that people mention the GUID if they blog about the project or discuss it.

That way, it should be easy for people to search for it, without getting a lot of irrelevant hits from things with the same name that have nothing to do with my project.
It looks like they are a part of the main news feed.
Sometimes hitting yourself with a hammer can be a good thing. It depends on what you know and how it is being applied. For example, when your treating your head as a nail and coming at is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of acne, your likely to get fairer skin. The only reason the hammer is harmful in this case is because he isn't using the right hammer for the job.

</satire>
Ahem... "E-Prime exists for this purpose."
+1 for pointing out the inverse relationship between logo size and usability.
Oh awesome, this must have been it. I conditioned myself for about 3 minutes and it is working now. Let me see how long that lasts.
Using Heapshot (OS X/iOS) to Find Undesirable Memory Growth
yes, but my opinion is that ad placement is doing more harm than good. for the site's audience, I think it's a safe assumption that they are fairly web-savvy and able to detect ads without too much effort. As a google adsense block, it's a cost-per-click ad. You see where i'm going with this... savvy users, poor ad placement = very few clicks = no revenue.

of course, that is all anecdotal... I'd be really interested to see real performance numbers on it.
My first option for developing Mac apps with lisp would be Lispworks http://www.lispworks.com
It's kind of fascinating to peruse the generated js, if you are at all familiar with the CPython code:

http://syntensity.com/static/python.js

Also geeky fun to try to recognize what constants like 4294967295 correspond to -- it's all over the place!

And lots of literal char* strings encoded as integer sequences:

>>> s = [111,98,106,101,99,116,46,95,95,102,111,114,109,97,116,95,95,32,119,105,116,104,32,97,32,110,111,110,45,101,109,112,116,121,32,102,111,114,109,97,116,32,115,116,114,105,110,103,32,105,115,32,100,101,112,114,101,99,97,116,101,100,0]
>>> ''.join(map(chr,s))
'object.__format__ with a non-empty format string is deprecated\x00'
to be honest, it's because i'm new to posting here and felt like being sensationalist
mostly when users are not paying ones ;)
I don't have an iPhone, but I do have a question...

What if you've sorted the list (by sender, for example) so the 'natural' place for the new message is half way down your list? Will it determine a travel delta or something similar to determine whether to snap you to the message?

I'm guessing you can't sort your email.

I've run into this problem before (how to orient a view of a list that is updated in the background). Google, for example, partitions the list into 'all items' and 'new items' so if you've paged half way through the list, the incoming item is added to the 'new items' view and a visual indicator is made that a new item exists (cf. Google Reader).
> I want 3-D. True 3-D. Not some hacked up fake 3-D. True 3-D would consist of a large, rotating drum in the middle of my living room, approximately 6 or 7 feet tall, and several feet wide. Images would display as three-dimensional objects, viewable from all angles.

Do you mean something like this?

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/28/sonys-360-degree-raymodel...
It really wasn't meant to be personal. It was just something I thought I'd observed enough to voice and see what others thought.
Simply Scala
7 Hot Technology Trends for 2011
FWIW, I've heard that Google once had no managers. The person I heard it from started around 2002, when Google was already an order of magnitude bigger than 37signals. So while it obviously doesn't work for all size companies, it seems that you can get fairly big and still do okay without managers.
Oh, so you don't have any concrete examples. Try to find some, the experience might teach you something.

Edit: on re-reading, that sounded way snarkier than I wanted. What I mean is, actually do the exercise of trying to find quotes of scientists playing politics. It's not as easy as you seem to think.
Without knowing the actual details of their financials, it is always going to be blind speculation.

Also, 'viable' would mean different things in different contexts. I think it is certainly viable for the current investors to exit with a good return on their investment if the company goes public.

For the company itself, it can be a different story and we need more information to comment on that.
it wasn't taken so. that's almost exactly where I was coming from to post the article anyway
I've been using Amazon Tote for a few months now. I didn't realise it was 'supposed' to be for groceries. There's a big selection of items that are available via Tote - I suspect it's everything Amazon has in it's local warehouse. The benefit for me is that shipping becomes free on all items, as long as I'm prepared to wait for the twice-weekly Tote drop day.

Also, they have never taken back the bags I left out for them. They are great for toting around board games though.
You don't need to worry about the grammar police. You need to worry about the person with whom you are trying to make an appointment. Saying "let me know when works for you" is about like saying "let me know where you would like to meet at." The former is at best an example of bad style. There is no good reason to intentionally risk making a bad first impression. No one is going to say "I really like this guy's stance against the grammar police. Let's meet with him as soon as possible."
edgy and cool
Can it run NTLK http://www.nltk.org/ ?
> I'm guessing you can't sort your email.

Correct.
The first thing I thought of when I read this post was:

"Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate — and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!"

Make of that what you will.
I just created this article a few hours ago. Google doesn't re-rank results that often, so give it some time. ;)
3-500k won't get much of a McMansion in Australia. It might cover a townhouse.
Sure, I can say more--put bluntly, and despite anything you might hear to the contrary, you basically do need to grok monads and monad transformers to tackle any nontrivial project in Haskell. Even if only to understand the code and APIs of libraries your application will interact with.

Basically, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting monads in the Haskell library ecosystem; therefore, you'll need to know what they are.