skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree with your view of productivity. You seem short term focused.

Spent 2 years as an online poker player, you learn that your short term productivity is an illusion. What is most important is a type of effort that produces long term gains. With that perspective you become better at prioritizing and understanding what both you and those around you (customers, investors) want. So the only way to be "unproductive" is to not follow through thoroughly on what you are doing now.

But you need to be smart enough to get out when the long term is, as we say in poker, -EV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value)
ITA powers kayak.
AmEx Teams Up With Foursquare
Yes, I didn't notice that at first.
notphilatall: I get "oops" on every click. :( But, I'd LOVE to see my Instagram photos on a Map!
I think that's a good point. You can still have a functional web page working in an older browser. Graceful degradation. I use a modern browser, but I turn off a lot of the functionality - so the web works for me. Accessible websites get a thumbs up from me - you are catering for more than just ie6, by doing so.
>IE8 is better than IE6, but if someone is going to upgrade their browser, they should upgrade to the best one available. On windows XP, they can't get IE9, but they can get Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.

As I said in an earlier comment, it's not in Microsoft's best interest to move people off Microsoft browsers but it is in developers' best interest to have them move to at least IE8. It's a much better browser that requires very little hackery to get layouts working on. When people finally stop dragging their feet and upgrade their decade old OS then we will have a better Web experience. Don't get on Microsoft about this, blame the people who refuse to upgrade their software.
Quite the opposite. I'm only in my 30's, but I no longer feel fit as I once was back when I could run a 33 minute 10k.

Even long after leaving serious training behind and getting a bit heavier, I continued to go for a 3-4 hour run in the mountains every other week or so and did shorter runs at least a couple of times a week. As recently as two years ago, I had a resting pulse of 48 BPM. I lived at the top of a 6 floor apartment building. Unlike my guests, I was rarely winded at the top, even going up the stairs with a backpack. I even played pick-up games of basketball in the park after pub crawls with my buddies. It felt like my energy was boundless.

My habits changed after moving to Beijing. The air here isn't so good, so I don't enjoy running anymore. Instead, I've been going to the gym and doing something very similar to what the article recommended, actually! I'm stronger than ever before, squatting about 170kg. I'm not fitter, though. I'm fatter. My resting pulse is up to 70 and while the subway is no problem, several flights of stairs are off-putting. A full-court game of basketball would probably make me feel ill.
Oh I like that! Manually curated I assume?

Good use of (what I assume is) jqTouch.
In the same (not so) alternate universe where Microsoft offer you the choice of a host of browsers when you first launch IE?

And just because it's the logical thing for them to do, it doesn't mean it's a good idea for our industry.
I would rather encourage users to download an easy and newbie-friendly Linux distro and experiment with it.

Sure, XP is an obsolete OS. Modernizing the whole stack is a much better solution than adding a modern browser to an obsolete OS.
Dont count on it. They will patent the encoders, the decoders, the container. Unless you code to the exact bitstream using the same exact software to encode that bitstream they could go after you. You are precluded in entirety from doing anything novel if you want to "use the patented inventions." These patents don't compose, they compost America's ability to innovate.
Conan O’Brien spoofs Apple iPad 2 event as "a little bit cocky"
And this is why HN rocks. Thanks Daniel
I tried your demo but it didn't work for me. I opted to verify by phone, got the phone call, entered the verification code but it said verification code incorrect (i typed it correctly - did it twice).
They need to post real-time lists of most popular books/materials checked out.

It's the same mechanism social sites use. They need to at least show people that they're popular.
What about doing drugs, having an affair with your secretary or trading in "hedged" derivatives that could only lose money if the entire housing market faced a downturn?
I didn't say it was shady or even controversial, just that it isn't as good a deal as it seems. I had a whole "jumping from the fire back into the frying pan" analogy lined up, but couldn't make a snappy title out of it.
The source is available: see ftp.redhat.com:/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS for instance.

Maybe explicitly asking for the source is considered different somehow from just ftping it, but I doubt it very much.
That is because they didn't catch up that far until version 9.
Sam, as a British Citizen who has spent far too much time traveling through the UK border, and as a world traveller who's been through his fair share of borders, I'd agree that other countries are tricky, maybe even trickier.

However, I'd have to say that the most nerve-wracking insane experience is the US border. You cannot believe policies, as they are implemented in strange and weird ways, dependent on the officer you get to speak to.

Who are all armed. And trained in special-ops interrogation techniques.

I'd say Israel is on par with that, (though i haven't been through), however they fear daily attacks in Tel Aviv, so there's plenty to worry about.

The US Border - possibly the most trafficked today, is also the most hostile compared to what it _needs_ to be. It doesn't even matter if you are a visa waived traveller, you still go through the same crap as if you were on any other visa.
Shows how much I know about html5 :/ I've been hesitant to delve in to it, because it would drive me crazy that I can't actually use much of it when supporting all browsers.
> That's why it's great news that Microsoft wants users to upgrade to at least IE8.

Which is the worst browser you can easily download these days.

> They will have IE9 once they upgrade their ancient OS as well.

After they failed miserably to move Windows users out of IE6, forgive me if I am a little skeptical when they suggest the move from IE7 and IE8 to IE9 will be an easy one.
you are absolutely right, most hotornot sites have that kind of low barrier to entry. my problem is that people who vote but don't submit photos don't really add to the project (not an ad site like hotornot and especially if they vote poorly and are taken out, the votes have to double up for them to have meaning to prevent random voting etc), right now there are actually way more votes than needed in proportion to people who submitted their photos.

but yeah it might need some re-examining.
New music industry plan: halt flow of money to pirate music sites
Data classification: start with the end in mind
Yes, it's much better to monitor and manipulate than it is to openly oppose the crowd. The general populace is often bigger than you are. Nowadays, they can coordinate and communicate.

If the Tiananmen protestors had waited until this moment in 2011 to protest, then you would have seen the fall of China. As it is, I suspect that the Chinese government was forced to wise up about controlling an Internet-connected populace.

As for psy-ops and media control, that's been going on since the late 19th century, and was down to a science by the early 20th.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6718420906413643126#
There is humor embedded all over the site. I especially love the "el Pollo Diablo" plan.
Your argument is sound, but overlooks that most people don't consume their entire daily caloric intake in a single meal. If I have a Big Mac, Fries and a medium soda, I'm almost certainly overfeeding myself for that meal.
In lots of Africa, there is an extremely poor standard of governance. I'd expect South Africa to be much stronger than average, and Botswana too.

In preparing my earlier comment, I originally typed out and then deleted a long section saying that we need language that allows us to distinguish regions of India, Brazil, South Africa where it's straightforward to do business, and to distinguish that from places where it's not. That the term "third world" is too broad.

People like you, however, who make these blanket
statements about how it can never be improved

I did no such thing.
I wonder which of Red Hat's actions make you think that they're trying to create an artificial scarcity. There are hundreds of other ditros. How does Red Hat keep them from creating a quality product?
Are the new elevators bad design? (Norman)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_(medicine)
I find it amazing that people seem to be more concerned about upgrading the browser than upgrading the OS. The delta between XP and Win7 is so much larger than IE8 and IE9 that having this discussion is almost embarrassing.

While I get that this may make the life of the HTML5 dev easier -- its just dwarfed by the importance of getting people off of a dangerous OS.

While in theory it would be nice to see MS support XP with IE9, I much prefer they use any means to get people off this OS. I'd even love to see them offer Ubuntu or Win7 as upgrade path. There's just no reason to be on XP. And everything we do to make their lives seemingly easier, really keeps this in this precarious situation.
Thats ok because after I code for Firefox or Chrome, my work is done and my employer and myself can get onto the next project. The cost and losses having to develop/support all IEs(maybe not 9) is enormous.

There should be a website where all coders go to detail how much extra time they had to spend to make their code work in IE and every six months the site sends Microsoft a bill for lost time & productivity!
That's exactly the point- since they're holding off on upgrading their OS, potentially for a much longer time, they won't even have the option of updating their web browser. An OS upgrade is a much more monumental decision than a browser upgrade, and the inertia is much greater.

At any rate, the fact that IE9 can't backport parts of its OS dependencies is kind of an implementation detail. We're saying Webkit has no problems providing a self-contained modern browsing experience, so IE9 doesn't have to be any different.
IIRC the GPL does, actually, require you to enumerate your changes to the code. This doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of a diff, though, and can be in a ChangeLog instead.
>In IE8 you barely even need to tweak sites to get them to look right

Yes, but that is today. As the web moves forward and these users are stuck on IE8 we have the same problem again.
TL;DR: We found a loophole on the license, we are going to abuse it , Problem ??? :trollface:
Music Visualizer in HTML5 / JS with Source Code
Python.

I've been recommending Zed Shaw's "Learn Python The Hard Way"[1] a lot lately. The way it's structured makes it suitable for a pretty wide range of skill levels, as someone with a bit of prior programming experience can just go through the exercises they understand more quickly, learning the Python syntax along the way.

So even if as you say you won't have any problems learning the language, it's still a good way to do that, and once done, you can learn a lot more from the docs, reading code, and other books.

[1]: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
The locations are based on airport codes.
I want to hear about the talentless hack...

Not sure I qualify, but here goes:

Teen years - flipped burgers & partied
Age 21 - graduated college, flipped burgers, & partied
Age 24 - touched my first computer
Age 25 - wrote my first program
Age 27 - touched my first PC
Age 31 - wrote my first low level code
Age 32 - started my first business
Age 39 - started my second business
Age 41 - accessed the internet for the first time
Age 44 - wrote my first browser-based app
Age 51 - found Hacker News
Now - starting my third business

It's never too late, you're never too old, and it's not whether the glass is half full or half empty.

It's about getting up off your butt and filling the glass the rest of the way.
You have all of the freedom to change the code that you always had. The code is exactly the same, but instead of being released in small chunks, it's released in one big tarball. The commit splitting and commit messages could be considered documentation, they are not part of the code and not covered by any license.
>Which is the worst browser you can easily download these days.

This isn't some utopia where we can all get what we want. If I had my way there would be no IEs. I hate Internet Explorer. The reality of the situation though is that IE8 is the best option available [for people who don't know any better] in the world we live in. IE9 will soon be the best option for people who have an up-to-date operating system. Then we can all whine about XP users refusing to upgrade their old software so that we can also have more up-to-date browsers surfing the Web.

>After they failed miserably to move Windows users out of IE6, forgive me if I am a little skeptical when they suggest the move from IE7 and IE8 to IE9 will be an easy one.

Most users have IE8 already. The move to IE9 won't take as long as you think. I'd like to know where you got the impression that Microsoft failed to move huge swathes of people over to IE8. IE is installed via automatic updates.
This might be a little bit off-topic, but has somebody played with the tools that blind cs programmers use to program? Read/write/navigate,...

What I mean is, has somebody any insight if it would be worth it, from a productivity point of view, to use those tools for non-blind people?
From a societal perspective, education is infrastructure.

But unfortunately, America is in a prisoner's dilemma where individual interests are eating away at our ability to see the big picture (i.e. - educating poor people who will be in even larger numbers in a few decades).
It's not a virus, it's a protozoan parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.
We have these in the 33 story building where I work. They can be frustrating, and fantastic. Hopefully one of these days I'll figure out the "cheat" codes to skip the bidding system that occurs to determine which elevator to summon first.
Upvoted to get useful information above the bickering.
RavenDB - Open Source .Net Document Database (NoSql)
The government mandates various coverages, restricts competition, taxes health care extra if purchased by individuals, restricts the number of doctors, and gives trial layers free run of the place.
I was once sitting at a table in a restaurant, eating lunch by myself, when I overheard at a nearby table: "... it's my `N - 1' theory of work: you always work on the second most important thing." It was so true, I burst out laughing.
Ask HN: How did you become a hardcore back-end developer?
In the course of reading lots of tech news, and occasionally hanging out with other hackers, I've come under the impression that there is some kind of intense, difficult black art to building large services that scale to 10^N number of users, for any impressive value of N.

I'm a dev of 20+ years who has worked on everything from games, to desktop apps, to web apps. I worked as a front-end web development lead at Microsoft on several small web apps, and as the back-end dev on a small web service.

I think I could get interviews at any number of interesting places, but if I was going for back-end work (the part that interests me), I feel like I would simply be out of my depth. How do I get there? I'm sure there are obvious answers like "read books", "learn on the job", or "try to build youtube/facebook/twitter, and succeed". So specifically, my question is for those who have already learned to build medium-to-large services: what was your path to acquiring these skills, and do you have any advice for people like me?
Nitpicking I think is perceived by the relevant knowledge/experience of the subject matter.

Mac to MAC. RAMs to RAM. Very different things.

There is no such thing as Psy-Ops/PSYOPS/PSYOPs at least according to the US Department of Defense. There is only the singular PSYOP. To have interviewed a commissioned officer and present a report whose whole article is on a single subject, I am disappointed that the magazine could not throughly investigate what it is they were reporting on. An article that implicates others (whether they are a general officer or not) in some light that is less becoming of their expected role bears extra responsibility to be a credible source.
Check the website of my company, http://turkeysandwichindustries.com, for a map of places I've been. The past few years I've been living an expat traveler lifestyle.

Yes, other countries have visa requirements; I myself was bitten by the Schengen Zone requirement last time I was in Belgium and Germany. But the point is that I don't need to spend hundreds of dollars, navigate a series of confusing bureaucratic hurdles, and then have my body and bags x-rayed and the minutiae of my personal life cross-examined by high-school graduates on a power trip just to have a 4-hour layover in most other countries... unlike America.

To contrast this, the last international flight I took was entering Mexico last month (where I am now); the line was long, but I wasn't asked a single question before my passport was stamped. The 2nd to last international landing I had was in Belgium: I was asked the purpose of my visit and was waved along in 30 seconds.

The most complicated visa requirement I've run in to was Vietnam, which required a stamped visa to be processed before you crossed the border. Even then it was a matter of giving $25 to my travel agent along with a short customs-style form.

Yes you can say that, say, an Iraqi citizen will have a hard time getting in to any country, not just the US; but when we're talking people from England, Europe, China, hell, even Mexico and Canada--neighbors and close allies for generations--the process can still be harrowing. And that's not just unfriendly, it's damaging to relations in the long-term. 20-something backpackers who get hassled crossing into America today, or who choose to go to a different country for 6 months instead of face American border bureaucracy, will take those experiences with them when they enter industry and leadership positions in the future.

Edit: another anecdote--on entering New Zealand I was asked for proof of onward travel (as I later found out, a requirement to enter the country). I didn't have any; I had planned on staying a few months then carrying on to Australia when I felt like it. When I told the agent this, she laughed and waved me on. Can you imagine a US border agent doing that?
It is not enough to be PR 2.0 compliant, which requires ending of control over the message, but it does ensure that adoption is much easier.
FUD. "Share a youtube video. go to jail." That didn't happen, the individual in question embedded copyrighted videos. He didn't just share links and he didn't just embed YouTube videos. On top of that nobody that has written about it seems to know exactly what he's being charged with so any conclusions about sharing a link to a website = ending up in jail is not substantiated. Yet someone went though all the effort to make some kind of reddit-worthy mob enraging site. Maybe if the author of demandprogress.org knows they should post the actual charges and some of the evidence and arguments. As it stands none of this seems conclusive or convincing for people who will require more than a big image of a clenched fist and large red type to get upset.
From the cbp.gov website:
"While CBP recommends that you apply at least 72 hours before travel, you may apply anytime prior to boarding. In most cases, a response is received within seconds of submitting an application."

You have to leave North America within 3 months

I know the US is powerful, but I really doubt they can require you to leave North America. I think you're reading something wrong.
If you are using your biceps at all when deadlifting you are doing it wrong and will eventually tear one of them.

The thing to do to build biceps without doing curls are pulling motions - rows and pullups.
That makes sense! I wish the down voters would have specified that rather than down-voting an honest question:)
So the problem is actually users refusing to upgrade their OS, not Microsoft not supporting XP after 10 years. It seems like we jump on people for not upgrading anything -- except when it comes to their OS.
Good article, and kudos to him for making it work over the long run.

However it does seem odd that in his search for reading he did not stumble across Up The Organization by Robert Townsend, who wrote in 1970 that "people want to work". He also abolished the HR department.

Good thoughts, however, for a startup.
US military pilots in wartime are expected to operate for longer than 12 hours at a time, supported by speed pills.

If it were legal for truck or bus drivers to do so, companies would compel them to as well.
Would it be safe to assume then, that Google tests it's software upgrades with 0.02% of it's gmail account? (However many thousands clients are affected, it's probably better than affecting ALL their clients).

I wonder how they choose their 'test' client base.
CrowdGather raises $7.85M to roll-up the Web’s forums
I was under the impression that Novell no longer works on Gnome much, and that the torch (and many of the engineers) have moved on to Red Hat and some smaller companies (Igalia, etc).
Yeah, 72 hours is just the recommended time, but you certainly can't do it once you land.

The US can't make you leave North America, but if they find out you're in violation of a visa waiver (e.g. if you transit back through the US on the way home), then they can deny entry.
What he means is that the first time a JSP page is loaded it will be compiled on-the-fly which can be quite slow.

However, if that's your problem then the solution is simply to precompile the page statically. This can be done using org.apache.jasper.JspC. This won't only accelerate first-time loading of the class dramatically, but also slightly improve subsequent load times because the JSP servlet won't have to check file modification times to see whether the JSP has been touched in the meantime.
Will the real Silicon Valley North please stand up?
At the end of the story:

"When I announced that I was going 'solo' my mom freaked out. I was 22 at the time [...]"

Dude, after all that crap I figured you'd be around 35...
I agree it will be interesting to see what he's being charged with. I'm familiar with the site, and yes, it did embed players into windows that would pop up when you selected what you wanted to watch. I think the interesting part is that the embedded players were things like youtube videos or justin.tv embedded players, so the site was never really streaming anything or hosting anything. I wonder if there is a line in legality between a link and an embedded player.
Yes you're right, 'moving' isn't accurate there, whoops!
Buying the medicine in the open market adds some moral clarity. You are left with whether performance enhancing drugs are ok or not, which is an ambiguous issue. I don't think that coffee should be equated with Adderal, but I am not sure where the line is.
> While this story is uplifting, it's a lot more about being in the right place at the right time.

You read the part where he applied for the programming jobs in his bank department for 2-something years, right?
If you walk across a minefield, you might step on a mine. Singling out minefields as particularly hazardous because of mights smacks of FUD.

Joking aside, this is a false dilemma. Patent trolls actually exist, inadvertent patent infringement is not some purely hypothetical risk. Particularly in fields like video codecs where the mines are laid especially thick.