skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I highly recommend Charles Petzold's 'Code'. I originally bought it for my father, but soon ended up reading it myself cover to cover. It fills a lot of blanks in in my understanding; blanks that were also glossed over in my education as well (Waterloo CS & C&O, 2002).

The book starts from the most basic 'switch and a lightbulb' circuit, and takes a stepwise approach that ends up disassembling x86 by the final chapters. Although it can be a little pandering in points, and the rigour certainly isn't there (I can't remember for certain, but I'm pretty sure it violates my 'must have footnotes' rule regarding non-fiction), in my opinion it's a wonderful nightstand read regardless.

Indeed, there are a couple of spots the book knocks it out of the park without (I think) intending to. As an example, the book presents Turing machines (not by name, mind you) as a moving head traversing through a fixed memory, whereas all of the theory I learned in school presented them as a moving tape passing through a fixed head. It's a seemingly small detail of implementation, but it made an enormous difference in my understanding of how the modern computer evolved from Turing's work. All of a sudden, an ALU + a program counter becomes a modest leap from the theory of a TM ripping through a tape.
Actually that piece really doesn't modulate what i've said. I'd be interested in seeing the distribution of walmarts relative to the levels of poverty across the US. That article even starts with the caveat that there are urban areas which still have a dearth of access to fresh foods.

This is an empirical question, we should probably find actual data to back it up.
Hi, thanks for the feedback. What browser are you using? I'd like to investigate the performance problem.
The Summary – an introduction to #TheBigDeal
exiv2 -d a *.jpg
Most of those comments don't strike me as trolling at all. Just because something is negative or dismissive doesn't mean it's "troll." Sometimes it's constructive criticism, or a valid point about the likelihood of the idea being successful.

Are we all so thin-skinned here that we expect - and can handle - nothing but praise, compliments and accolades for our efforts; no matter how ill-conceived they may be?

Personally, if I launch a dumb startup and announce it here, I want people to say "that's f%!#ng braindead." One of two things should happen: I realize that "they" are right, shut it down, and move onto something more profitable, OR I take the criticism as a challenge, buckle down and work that much harder, and have that much more of a chance of being successful.
Yes, just send email to support@mediaroost.com.
Advertisers paid big bucks for AOL Keywords.
Former Manufacturing Engineer here. One plant I worked for is gone. All 1000+ jobs are in China now. Another I worked at is half its former size locally, with the other half of the jobs shifted to Mexico. A third was a smaller plant, with only a few hundred workers but 5 unions. They still have an operation locally but shifted their growth operations to a right to work state.

You could make all the charts you want that show some vague correlation and dismiss my statements as anecdotal, but in some areas the jobs have just gone and the anecdotes represent the lives of real people.

The site linked to (ourfuture.org) is a progressive site, so I'll link to a conservative piece as a counter-argument. There has a been a significant difference in the manufacturing growth in right to work states vs forced unionization states:
http://www.americansforprosperity.org/021909-right-work-and-...

While the site I linked to tries to make a single issue of it, there has been a large scale shift from the rust belt to the sun belt in the last few decades. Right to work vs forced unionization is one issue, but I'm sure that state taxes and regulatory policies played a hand as well.
It's a fad, nonetheless -- just a (currently) popular platform to be associated with.
Two questions:

1) Why would I go to that site? Just to see who is supposedly trolling" What is the value-add to me as a user, other than drive-by gawking?

2) Several of the comments I saw there did not seem "trollish", but were just legitimate questions about the viability or application of some projects.

Not every comment is going to be unicorns and rainbows. I have seen some comments on HN that are unjustly harsh, but every criticism or negative comment is also not a "troll".

The real legitimate trolls seem to get dealt with via downvotes, and I can't say that I've noticed a strong trend of any one user being an ongoing ass.
MS doesn't like your activation e-mail.

Microsoft SmartScreen marked this message as junk and we'll delete it after ten days.
I doubt that the Chromium authors are concerned about trying to catch IE by having a larger version number. Their development calendar (https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/calen...) looks as though they have a rigid two-month schedule per version number.

I myself am already running version 11 (screenshot: http://jhn.me/4RYO) via their nightly builds.
Site not responding for me. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I believe that UPS Financial has a division that does this insurance. There is a good guy named Frank Hermanns that works there that I know personally.
To answer your first question, you should simply benchmark against the average Mechanical Turk worker's ability to classify links. Build a set of tests from the workers and every time you update your algorithm, you'll need to run against the dataset to see if you've improved anything.

For the second question, your product would be most valuable as an aid to contextual advertising (what ads should I display?), and its possible that you could charge per 1K requests. I have a need for this myself, so I would be happy to be a beta-tester.
Phpsh - Facebook's PHP REPL
And what advantages does it provide over comparable free apps (namely, http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net)?
yes. But you are supposed to be semantic when handing out classes and ids. So don't use <h1 class="grid_2"> but just <h1>. Don't use <td class="rightalign">, but <td class="number">. And so on.

Also, you shouldn't add divs at will because correct styling requires it. You are supposed to be able to style whatever the structure of a given page looks like with just CSS (this still isn't possible due to IE's crappy selector engine).

If you are willing to compromise on class names (grid_2), why are you not also willing to compromise on tag names (<table><tr><td>, even <font>)?

Again, playing devils advocate. It's not my intention to be trolling, but to discuss the issue and to illustrate my general dislike for these grid systems. I'm NOT advocating going back to soups of tables if it's only for better reusability of site components (which, again, is hampered by this grid_<number> nonsense)
The poverty line is actually a defined number.

Students do appear as a statistical aberration in most of these counts since they have no income, but they tend to have access to credit and fewer costs than those that are older than them (health care) or those with families.

So yes, you're right, but i don't think it matters all that much. Studenthood is a transient state which is designed to eject students after a period of time (and you have to fight really hard to stay a student). Poverty and destitution are the opposite.
Labels VS Magazines - The Major Differences
Both labels and magazines have comprehensive differences with each other. That is why they are considered to amongst the demanding products these days. Company offers cheap label and magazine printing.
I'm a longtime user, probably one of the first. This has proven to be a vast asset for me to track tv shows.

One negative point though is that since I've discovered this app my tv shows I follow probably increased threefold, which at times has had its consequences regarding productivity :p
I wonder if AOL will try to buy Gawker too.
In addition to the other points, you need some engineering buffer anyhow. Whatever system they are testing this number on, it probably won't be the bottom of the line they want Firefox to run on, and even if it is you still want good responsiveness anyhow. Because of the wide variance in the systems that run Firefox, this is probably less a principled number coming out of extensive research than a line in the sand. But a line in the sand is fine.
Your link doesn't point to the original homepage of the data. Click "Release" then "Link", then "Documentation", you get the answer.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/
Thanks. We've seen other email systems mark it as junk, we are working on this. I assume you can get it out of junk. Is there any way to see why MS thinks it is junk?
I think the author of this article has no experience with consulting companies. $100/hr is well below what Accenture, IBM Global Services or any of the other big names charge. And clients, by and large, are fine with it; it's just a cost of doing business. And it's hard to argue that any of them haven't "scaled"; Accenture is 200,000 people!

Remember, in business there is no such thing as "cheap" or "expensive". There's "worth the money" or "not". A decision maker has decided that paying a consulting firm $250/hr/consultant is cheaper than it would be to do their own SAP implementation (and in turn, that SAP is worth more than it costs...)

FWIW a consultant as a rule of thumb would probably see 1/5 of his billing rate, tho' I have seen some get 1/3 and some as low as 1/8.
But why have they chosen to version their software like this, in contrast to every other browser? They could have gone with even numbered point releases.
This is very useful.

I have been using a similar program for Windows for ages : SequoiaView
http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visu...

It seems that it has been written by the folks who wrote the paper that you referred to.

The first analysis can take some time, though. How fast is your implementation for Mac ?
Exactly. In the ideal world, I would simply create a web app, and it would run on all browsers. No more keeping 3 VMs just to do some browser testing. Alas, until there is a high enough price for not following the standard to the letter, we won't see this happen.
Its the release that brings all apps(ie google ones) to work on both single and dual core along with the all the UI Honeycomb changes so not a complete load of bull as you claim but big enough that Google told OEMS to hold off on updating to 2.3 and up-date to 2.4 instead. Its real dude..even my google contacts confirm
Stopping progress to support the old ways is (IMO - and there we agree) no solution.
But ignoring the short-term problems of said progress with the argument "in the long run we will all be better off this way" sounds a bit cynical to me.
Friend of a Friend ... his dad worked in a high tech lab and their machines got upgraded ... I literally rescued them before they went into the skip (they were rich, selling them was more trouble than it was worth)

I had great fun with those machines ... including daisy chaining them all up COM1 -> COM2 -> COM1 -> COM2 and writing a chess program in C to have the machines play games against each other ... took me YEARS to do, but great fun and learnt heaps.
Web-Based E-Mail Is Losing Popularity
Correction, the vast majority of users will not be able to explain that they feel a responsiveness issue, but they do indeed feel it. Less hardcore gamers will often just blame other things -- loose controls, or ignored button presses, or what not.

I see it pretty regularly in playtests and such. Anyway, it's not something someone can simply say "Hey, this app took longer than 50ms to respond!" It's more of a gut feeling that something about it is slow.

They are likely aiming at the 50ms threshold because that's the point at which you really can't notice it, most of the time. At > 50ms, it becomes more and more noticeable, and by just 100ms people actively start complaining about the slowness of response.

edit:

As for the FPS gaming issue, the reality is that you don't notice it in FPS gaming because the games are built to hide it from you -- when you press your fire button, your gun fires, regardless of net latency. And that has been true for a very long time. I think the last game to really wait for server response before doing anything was Quake 3, and probably some of the Quake 3 engine games.

I could never stand Quake 3 for that reason, if you had anything higher than 30-40ms it started feeling like you weren't controlling the game.
The schism between classicism and romanticism, as presented in "Zen", changed the way I view the world. I've been slowly teaching myself to see both, and to switch between those views at will, though it's occasionally unsettling to do so.
My theory is that they wanted to avoid PHB types saying 'Internet Explorer is at version 9 - this new Google browser, only version 3? Is it ready for the enterprise?'.
Try holding down the arrow key (or j/k), goes through pages fairly quickly.
I think this could be a revolutionary way to think about how 'work' is done in a startup. Short sprints of 2 days with time in between to recharge could work well for some. The time constraint forces you to focus and changes your mindset about what is possible. Maybe not 15 weekends, but a month could be composed of 10-12 solid 'weekend' sessions. To me it would be more about energy-management than time-management.
As per the last paragraph of this post: http://blog.chromium.org/2010/07/release-early-release-often...

"Please don’t read too much into the pace of version number changes - they just mean we are moving through release cycles and we are geared up to get fresher releases into your hands!"
I'm not talking about IBM, I'm talking about most individuals doing consulting.

"Clients by and large are fine with it." --Only big companies are fine with it. If you're a web designer for local business, they would not be fine with it.
I find the creation of the body text kinda ugly. Isn't Clojure a way to make code easier to read and write? Why does the body look so ugly?
> The Duke Computer Science Department ... taught me almost nothing about how to program in the real world

That's because that's not what you learn in CS. You wanted to be doing a software engineering degree.
I don't know why you don't see the racism as a portrayal of casual American incidental racism. It is not (in my view) an endorsement of casual American racism.

Yes, sez me. the point was to provide my opinion.

It wasn't a humorless public service announcement, it was a bitter statement about the absurdity of American culture and the fact that the commercial itself would reflect in no way on its profitability. The PR mess will cost them nothing--at least, nothing important.
I came here prepared to ridicule this list but (which is my default position when it comes to anyone--particularly journalists--predicting the future), honestly, a lot of what's on this list has actually happened.

> 1. Admit it. You're out of the hardware game.

This one is interesting. It recommends outsourcing hardware production, which is clearly what happens now, but Apple is ultimately a hardware company now. All the design is in-house.

> 7. Don't disappear from the retail chains.

And now we have the Apple Store.

> 8. Buy a song.

Apple's advertising through the last decade has been iconic. Starting with the iPod, Apple has attached their advertising to a particular song (eg Jet's "Are you gonna be my girl?") launching a few music careers in the process, branding themselves and identifying those songs with the company.

> 10. Get a great image campaign.

Check.

> 12. Build a fire under your ad agency.

This one is both right and wrong. "People want to know about power". No they don't. Part of what makes Apple's campaigns of the last decade so successful is the simplicity of the message. Consider this classic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CPab8U5zTU

Apart from the very recognizable graphics of people dancing with their iPods, the ad says three things:

- iPod

- Mac or Windows

- Apple (logo)

Look at one of the iPad ads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP8wKtFA4Io

Unlike what competitors are still doing (which is bullet-pointing tech specs and saying what the competition can't do), Apple gives a very simple and crafted message about what you can do and how easily you can do it.

> 16. Take better care of your customers.

Check.

> 19. Get rid of the cables.

Check.

> 27. Relocate the company (to Bangalore)

This one is downright hilarious.

> 29. Work closely with Hewlett-Packard,

This one is about battery life, which Apple leads the industry in (now).

> 31. Build a PDA for less than $250

iPod Touch anyone?

> 34. Port the OS to the Intel platform,

Check.

> 37. Take advantage of NeXT's easy and powerful OpenStep

Check.

> 39. Build a laptop that weighs 2 pounds

Check (Macbook Air, arguably iPad).

> 47. Work on ways to make your lower-end models truly upgradable.

The increase in computing power has solved this problem. People don't like upgrades, or rather they don't like needing upgrades. People are still happily using Macs from 5+ years ago today for most things that most people do, which interestingly has screwed the Microsoft business model (which was and still is reliant on churn).

> 50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development.

HUGE check.

> 70. Simplify your PC product line.

Check.

As lists go, this one isn't bad.
The new stuff in CSS3 is so useful that this is an opportunity, not a curse!
Brain-hand response isn't what it's about here: it's about synchronicity, the notion that clicking the mouse and effects on screen occurring at the same time. It's quite easy to see (and hear) relatively small differences between two events that are supposed to happen simultaneously.

For example, of my two monitors, one is lagged by one frame. I can see this easily by taking a white window against a black desktop, moving it so that it straddles both monitors, and moving it rapidly up and down: the monitor that's a frame slower makes the window look a bit like it's made of rubber, that it's bent away from the direction of motion. And that's just a 17ms difference in two events that are supposed to be simultaneous, an order of magnitude less than your factoid of 200ms.
The only one I can figure out is the "Steve Jobs as God" metaphor from the bleeding heart makeover of the Apple logo.
I agree. It suggests that version numbers are essentially meaningless when the consumer of the versioned item is only concerned with what is supported.

It almost seems reasonable to think any browser level 7 should have full HTML5 compatibility. Level 8 should have IndexDB as the built-in database.

I haven't spent a lot of time considering this idea, but I'm attracted to the stability that could be gained from having versions somewhat mapped to implementation standards.
You know, if they want to keep up with Chrome, they could just skip 5 through 9 and go directly to 10.

Wait, that sounds familiar...
Gentlemen, we cannot allow a version number gap!
Does it seem like Mozilla is lowering the bar as to what will constitute an integer release (4.0, 5.0, etc.)? It was July 2008 when FireFox 3.0 came out, 19 months later, 4.0 hasn't come out yet.
You realise of course that this is unlawful copyright infringement?
I love NewsRob app on my android, it syncs with my Google Reader for offline use.
64-bit build for Windows?

Can you please provide a link to that, I'd like to test/use it.
"The problem with people trying to directly answer such questions... does come from people, where else would it come from?"

My point is that it specifically comes from the people making that error, not humanity in general, which would be meaningless. You tried to make it sound like I'm making a null point, but there is a point there. I was reacting to your own categorization as Philosophy as a distinct entity that can be disliked. Perhaps what you really meant is "Non-questions like these are also why a great many people dislike philosophers." I wouldn't have responded to that.

Now I suppose I'm qualifying for the category of people who are disliked. Well, that's neither news, nor particularly fair; I'm very not post-modern and while I fully understand the idea of the journey being the good part, the destination is very important too.
Texas faces $27 billion budget gap
Could you clearly state what the problem is?

Is the problem simply this? "Standard of living has dramatically increased for everyone (some more than others), but some people who only received large increases are jealous of the others who received huge increases."
Consulting vs In-House Design
Andrew Warner is out of the hospital
Do the rich need Americans?
Upvote x 100. This is the mentality all developers and entrepreneurs should have when pursuing a serious project. Unfortunately, we don't hear wisdom like this enough.
i've grown from 1 (me) to 10 since october. we're trying to scale and it's tough. i'm exhausted. i'm working A LOT. i've got too many clients... but i can see the light toward having a stable set of clients with solid revenues - and i'm creating jobs for 10 people in a developing country, which i'm getting more satisfaction out of than i thought i would.
While I agree with the general "consulting is not the path to riches" tone of the article, I have a small nit.

What the author is doing is adding up all the worst case scenarios into one big ugly pile of bad.

It reminded me of an mp3 player I designed once. I had to allocate z-height for the LCD. An LCD can have a lot of subcomponents (EL Backlight, FPC cable, rear reflective film, glass, front polarizing film, plastic protective lens, etc. All of these have min/max dimensions on the spec sheet. An inexperienced engineer, such as I was, would just add all the max dimensions to get max z-height of the LCD and design for that. But I also needed it not to rattle around, so I needed my design to also work if all the dimensions came in at their minimum. Woops! It's thickness could apparently vary wildly. I didn't want to burden my product with the complexity it would take to handle so much variance in one component.

I then learned that tolerances are never added up "worst case" or you'd never get anything built. Instead, you do a root mean square of them. The chances of every component in your subassembly coming in at it's absolute maximum are minuscule. The root mean square method accounts for this.

Anyway, I felt that the author of this piece was doing a little max tolerance stacking.
New directions in web architecture. Again.
Why The Smartest Developers Will Rush To webOS Tablets
The example in the README is intentionally minimalistic: it relies on no external libraries. The Clojure ecosystem has several highly respected libraries for handling server-side templates, e.g., Enlive and Hiccup. All work fine with appengine-magic.
Definitely one of the kindest people in this space - welcome back Andrew!
Assuming I don't consider manufacturing unions to be my political cronies (which I don't), why should I care about the declining political power of manufacturing unions?
I'd imagine that's the IE check's fault. I can switch it over to James Padolsey's check to see if that helps. (http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/detect-ie-in-js-using-c...)
All you see then is process names. You can't see real CPU time, etc.

You can do heuristics, etc, but you have a huge mapping problem of programs to actual apps
He coded great black boxes, so we made an awesome Arduino-powered one for him
I'm the author of appengine-magic. Rather flattered to see this on the front page of HN. If you have any questions about appengine-magic, or running Clojure on App Engine, I'll answer as best I can.

One thing to keep in mind: the latest version of the App Engine SDK is fully supported in the development (version 0.4.0) branch of appengine-magic (https://github.com/gcv/appengine-magic/tree/v0.4.0). I'm not quite ready to finalize and release this branch, but it's stable enough for in-development applications.