skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I was catching a 7am flight out of Newark to Tampa, Florida, for a lunch meeting in Clearwater, then heading back to Newark on a 5pm flight, getting me in around 8:10pm, and with any luck, to my apartment by 9 or so. We all have days like that, they happen from time to time."

I don't have days like that, and neither should anyone else. With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene. The fact that an expensive steakhouse decided to pull a cheap PR stunt by delivering a free steak to the airport to some well-known Big Shot is less obviously wasteful, but still a repellent manifestation of gratuitous luxury.

People within the cocoon of the upper percentiles of wealth often have a sense of how they are perceived by others, and usually take some care to disguise their self-satisfaction. It is always educational to get a glimpse into the mental world of extreme privilege.
I don't like sitting in meetings either, but it seems to be that they're necessary when your company is building anything even moderately complicated. I honestly want to understand this no-meetings culture, especially if it can help cut down on the number of meetings I have to go to.

How do you even know what you're supposed to code if you don't go to meetings? Sure, GitHub is a very simple system that could be built by a couple of smart guys over a few weekends, but even granting that, what about something like the decision to build GitHub Firewall Install? Did you really never sit down in a room to figure out what the product should actually do? Or, if you have Product Managers who do that job, did they never call a meeting with the engineers to explain their idea, solicit feedback, determine whether it's feasible, how long it will take, and what other projects might be affected?

I'm a fairly typical programming geek, I got my start on a C64 in my bedroom, and have spent many years of my life writing code entirely on my own, so I know the joy of not having to answer to anyone. On the other hand, having worked in the "real world" for companies that are trying to solve a market need, I find that we can't get away from having some meeting overhead, even if we make a concerted effort to minimize it. No meetings at all leads to developers complaining that they don't have an adequate understanding of what they're trying to build. Institute a few more meetings to get everyone up to speed, and they complain that they're being taken away from valuable coding time. I would love to find the magic bullet solution to this, but I don't see how an IRC chat room is in any way a _realistic_ substitute.
For me, this is really about code generators in general. No need to center Adobe out here, as I can't think of a single IDE that doesn't generate all kinds of extra code that, to me, is useless 90% of the time.

You also should keep in mind that Muse is a beta and the Muse site itself was actually written with Muse.

In this case, I think Adobe deserves the benefit of the doubt. They're trying to showcase this product with hopes that people like us will come to the table and give constructive feedback rather than point to the past and say, "See, I told you! Damn Adobe!".
> If modern compilers were as inefficient and horrid as html design tools were a lot of people would code directly in ASM.

Well, compilers may be good for languages such as C++. But for most languages such as Python and Ruby, the code executed is just plain terrible compared to ASM. I don't see anyone writing Ruby code and complaining about that waste, though...
Sorry, but 'Webpage Screenshot' is a terrible implementation (it doesn't even have a save-button!).

If you want to recommend an alternative then why not point to google's own: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cpngackimfmofbokmj...
Neat story...but he's mixing up the customer service department with the marketing department.
I'd be more likely to put it behind Cloudflare than Cloudfront.
We have to stop pretending degrees are worthless. The way I see it, going to school, expedites your learning process, by exposing you to professors and your peers, it helps you learn best practices, which although generic, saves you a lot of time making same mistakes others (your professors and your peers) have made. Also it gives you the focus and urgency to finish your learning on time.

As an analogy, consider the knowledge accumulated while atending school as open source software, even if your knowledge or the OSS is generic to be fully usable for the task at hand, it almost always gives you a big headstart to get your job done, because it avoids the trivial and non-trivial pitfalls through years of maturity.
Contribute to any of these OS projects and I will help you in any way I can
Office-time for $? No thank you. This might be better.
Now do it for the remake posted up in this thread.
I would like to remark on how complicated Britain's history seems to a US public-school-educated, mid-continent American.

Celtic tribes, Roman conquest, ancient mounds and stone structures, Vikings, Normans, etc etc etc. It seems like something near magical (buried Saxon gold treasure for example) turns up once or twice a year.

The USA just doesn't have that length of semi-recorded history to deal with.
I couldn't agree more. Universities shouldn't be for everyone - they should be for people who are in it for the learning, or for highly skilled research, not degree factories for entry level positions.

What breaks my heart in academia in the UK is seeing courses being dumbed down so that students are "happy" in their courses (i.e. not failing) so that the university gets a good response in the National Student Survey. The other thing I see is an increasing sense of entitlement - "we pay your wages so you should pass us". Going to uni is like going to the gym. You don't get fit by simply having a gym subscription - you have to work at it. Same goes for a university education. Higher fees are only going to make that sense of entitlement worse, which means for more dumbing down... and the cycle continues.
Thanks for pointing that out :-) The reference and the post reminded me of Larkin's two poems, but maybe I didn't phrase the mental hyperlink clearly.

But more importantly, thanks for at least checking the reference out in the parent rather than giving it a downvote, as some here are apt to do.

I guess some think that any poetry relevance would be irrelevant in HN. To those I would reply:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

(from Asphodel, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15541).
I think the colors are still tuples and there's still a lookup either way, it's just that instead of having an expressive human-readable name like "Tomato" they have an opaque code number like "0".
Great story! This happened to a coworker of mine who was traveling KLM. His flight was slightly delayed and mentioned that and that he was flying KLM. He was met in Amsterdam at the gate with a book about the Tour de France (they had checked his profile to see he was a sports fanatic), and surprised him. Then again. KLM has a good social media team too, and they do several stunts like that a day sometimes. They have a website http://surprise.klm.com/ that lists al their surprises.
Unfortunately it doesn't seems a rarely used pattern:

http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=%5C$_GET%5C%5...
If you read the last part of the article you will find he is, in fact, proposing the tuple method and is aghast at the debugging issues/readability of the lookup table, vs arguable speed increase.
You don't have to be extremely privileged to have days like that, though I'm not saying that this person isn't (I've never heard of him, but I'd hazard a guess that he is pretty rich.)

Is it bad for the environment and a waste of time? Sure. But at the end of the day if flying out for a single meeting is going to be better for your business (or for your personal work if you freelance/etc), then you do it. I've flown from London to California before just for a meeting that will last a few hours - I didn't do it because I'm super rich, I did it because it was a good decision for the company I work for, and therefore they paid for it.

(Edit: I suppose a person who has the chance to travel around for free could be called "privileged", but I don't think that's what you meant by it.)
Which browser / OS?
There are a surprising number of services that do this. No one seems to have gotten any traction though. We decided to make it a video service instead of an email service.

We're actually launching our version this friday. If you read this after Aug 19th, it will be at http://senotable.com but right now it's at http://beta.senotable.com. Bugs are basically worked out now if you want to check it out. We'll probably advertise the launch on HN Saturday.
As Deestan said, there's a massive difference between how low level assembly code is, and how high level HTML is. But even more than that is the fact that they're fundamentally different. Decomposing a sequential list of instructions down into machine code is something that a is fairly simple to do algorithmically. But HTML is not a programming language - it is a descriptive instead of declarative or imperative.

In the end, humans are a lot better at describing things than algorithms, and I think that's the biggest problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors.
I played around with this idea. First transforming the visual representation of the chess board and then seeing how I would describe the moves of the pieces and whether it was more / less intuitive.

It is easy to view the board as 64 consecutive spaces (left-to-right through the ranks, then snaking through the ranks, and then a circular representation. The circle was cool because the moves became rotations (a rook can stay in its octant or move an exact multiple of 45 degrees...). I did some 2D transformations with a one space skew on each rank (this made the bishop act simultaneously like a rook and knight which was interesting).

So it is easy to preserve the rules of chess and create a different visual representation of the board. Of course, every one I tried just made the game more difficult to understand. I wonder if there is a transform that could aid in understanding chess.
This is absolutely NOT about customer service and it does a disservice to great customer service to be presented as such. This is a fantastic PR & marketing stunt. Well played.

I'm sure Morton's has great customer service, but this is not an example of it.
thanks gee
We've been working on a product very similar to this for a long time. Traction is difficult, and few people respond well to fear mongering and/or premeditative thoughts that their life may be in danger. In addition, top of mind is also a challenge because the nature of an emergency creates an overload of emotion and therefore often confusion.

The social venture fund I work for provides this product for free because we service underserved and often low-income people in high crime areas around the world. Unfortunately we haven't made the product itself more accessible but we are working on an Android app that will function on some of the cheapest Android phones.

http://www.buddyguard.org
She’s Geeky: The Performance of Identity among Women Working in IT
I'm a little unclear on what problem you're trying to solve. Are you saying you should wait for a second place to set up such a service, sign up for both, and use a simple secret sharing scheme[1] to ensure that only once both go out does anyone know the original message? Or does that not solve the problem you were talking about?

[1]Which in this case would probably just be -- since in this case you don't want it to be reconstructible without all the pieces, and there's not much need for there to be more than 2 -- picking a random string of bits, sending that to one and the XOR with the original to the other.
I recently learned about the A* algorithm from the book Eloquent Javascript. Makes it very easy to understand. http://eloquentjavascript.net/chapter7.html
The boost comes from when the attacker does not have the key; and when the attacker knows the plaintext, key recovery is still difficult. AES is designed to be fast.
What a Home Burglary Can Teach You About IT Security
Voucher Hotel Murah di RajaKamar.Com
The beta is for a "new and improved" version. If you remove beta from the address, you can access the current let's-call-it "stable" version.

I played around with this a while ago. Didn't think the way it's implemented solves the problem as I perceive it. (Plus, the risk of these confirmation emails ending up in spam felt a bit like a downer.)
Yes, rewriting from scratch is considered bad. However, rewriting from scratch isn't the only way to improve a codebase. It's also possible to refactor it gradually, making a series of smaller changes rather than on big change. This has a bunch of benefits:

- It preserves all the built up knowledge encoded in your codebase, as you're never throwing away everything and starting over.

- It makes it possible to continue feature development during the refactor. Often with big ground up rewrites, it's necessary to declare a feature freeze, often for months at a time. Otherwise, the team that's doing the rewrite is constantly trying to play catch up to the newly developed features.

- It can be done gradually over time, which decreases the investment necessary to start seeing some gains.

Many people shy away from incremental refactoring when it comes to making large scale changes to a code base. They seem messy, expensive, and time consuming. And guess what? They are. But a ground up rewrite will generally be even messier, more expensive, and in the long run, more time consuming.
Show HN: A bookmarklet to save TL'DRs of long web pages
Stanford creates organic semiconductor material 30x faster than silicon
The exposition could be better, imo. Nevertheless, nice to know we agree.
I have to actually disagree that complete re-writes are bad. Like anything else, there are very valid reasons for it.

There are several reasons to do a re-write:
1) The technology stack has changed and implemented new features which will make future maintenance easier (or has found issues with underlying implementations in older versions).

2) Business process/site design issues have come out for which patching code will cause undo stress to the code structure.

3) Those edge cases discussed that have been added are causing severe performance issues because the customer/end user is using the system differently than expected.

4) Underlying security vulnerabilities.

Now, re-writing/re-factoring for the sake of doing it is probably a waste.
It is true that degrees are not inherently worthless. They can indicate a lot of prowess in an individual. The problem is that the process of attaining a degree has become too standardized and universal. Now, it is easier for someone to game the system, thereby acquiring a degree without any of the intended benefits of the process.

The meritocracy and strict requirements of more individualized approaches in open source is a good alternative (see my other replies).

Bearing these concepts in mind, I agree that it is important to maintain that a degree is not a black mark on a CV. It remains just as important to remember that a degree is also not the shining star on a CV that it once was.
I have such a problem getting excited about rewrapped Linux distribution releases since these are all just recombinations of the same base software with no new core features.

A different theme? Sure... but is my 3D card supported any better? No. What about printer? No. What about better 3D compositing? No. What about rendering performance? No. What about runtime performance (excluding < 5% gains via GCC args)? No. Better Office file support? No. Better/Different office apps or computing utilities like CD/DVD burners? No. Blu-ray support? No.

I might be interested in a new Fedora release because RedHat writes a lot of its own software. Ubuntu, same thing. Maybe seeing a new release of Gnome or KDE in action in any of these distros is nice... but once you get past that I just don't care what new remixing of all the same ingredients is going to give me. At some point they all just taste the same.

The only differentiator I see anymore is package management systems and that is... probably one of the most uncompelling selling points for a desktop OS I can think of.

Arch vs Apt vs RPM vs Portage vs... and which one makes my linux desktop more functional, compatible and featureful?

Or right, none of them.

I dream sometimes about where the Linux Desktop scene would be if people were capable of working together and not rewriting/replacing underlying frameworks with "so much better" ones every 2 years.

Linux on the server is brilliant, I attribute the benevolent dictator Linus with that; he forces backwards compatibility, consistency and good design into the kernel. Linux on the desktop is passable, has always been just passable and will likely always be passable when compared to other singularly visioned efforts (Windows, Mac, Android eventually).

For those that have been around in Linux long enough, you remember the RedHat 5/Mandrake days when Linux on the desktop, relatively speaking, was exactly where it is now. Always ALMOST "good", never great, and "the year of linux on the desktop" was ALWAYS right around the corner. The next year, the year after that, OH WAIT, right after we get this framework and X rewrite done. Woops, well once dbus is in, MAN, it will definitely be ready then.

The idea that Linux on the tablet/portable computer will ever compete with what iOS, Android or Windows eventually become is... infinitely optimistic.

Even Ubuntu with magnitudes times more resources, focus and vision than the fractured Linux landscape was unable to create a cohesive desktop vision without changing gears mid-stream to something totally new, disliked and likely deprecated in 2 years (Unity).

Linux on the desktop is too big of a problem with too many moving parts. It is more than a GUI, more than drivers, more than the X rendering framework (or whatever replaces it eventually), more than package management and more than 3D acceleration.

It is all of it, plus polish plus apps plus stable APIs, plus support, plus backward compatibility.

And that is never going to come out of the community on its own.
Start with CS106A through Stanford's Engineering Everywhere initiative. It's free and world class.

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx
The reason Israel competes in European football instead of the regional equivalent is to avoid matches such as Israel vs. Syria and Israel vs. Iran.
If I had to bet, I'd say most companies using a product like this are not looking to build a site that'll be around for years on end. Most of these sites probably have a shelf-life of two years at most.
It's not always as simple as that. There are times where it's better to keep certain information from certain people no matter how much you trust them or like them. It's just better that way.

Some of us have had significant others with jealousy issues. It's not that we don't trust them, it's just better if they don't worry about silly issues like whose Facebook profiles we've been perusing. Not because it's a secret or because there is anything to hide, just because it helps the SO control their counter-productive impulses if they aren't informed on the matter.

That same kind of avoidance can be applicable in all other sorts of relationships. It's not that the people aren't trusted, it's just that there's no reason to know, and it will only cause damage if they find out -- not because it's bad or trust-breaking, but because the person's reaction may be problematic for completely different reasons (compulsions, or potential taint of future circumstance).
I concur, with the following additional reasons. First, depending on what you meant by "mess up": there's a chance they're not trustworthy (would read something you don't want read), and there's also a chance they screw up (and lose what you want sent - or send it when it shouldn't be sent).

Perhaps an even bigger thing for me is that an email seems so... off-hand, informal. I think if a friend/relative/etc died and an email was automatically sent to me from them I would feel a lot less... less something, can't quite think of the word, than if I got a properly written letter. Less sentimental I guess, less appreciative of it.
I was a bit surprised to wake up and find this on Hacker News again! I had no idea how popular (~340k+ views) this post would become when I wrote it two years ago. I wrote it out of frustration after reading the Rijndael book that I linked too. I saw a very beautiful algorithm that was mainly obscured in academic-ese.

Some general thoughts looking back at my post two years later:

* I drew every cell with a sheet of paper and a sharpie and then scanned everything in. My living room was covered with all of the cells of this comic. If I did it again, I'd probably just use my drawing tablet. However, it worked out well being low-tech with paper because I drew a lot of the cells on vacation (i.e. imagine me drawing these scenes on a picnic table next to family by the lake thinking I was a bit crazy). Unfortunately, one unforeseen consequence of doing it by hand was that it became very clear that my handwriting was too hard to read, so I had to manually erase all the writing and redo it using a decent looking font. This took a lot of time. I had originally thought about using comic-sans but am very glad I decided to use the Marker SD font instead. You can see my actual handwriting in the "crib sheet" cell at the end. It was going to be way too much work to make it look pretty.

* I was most surprised by how many college professors use my comic in their computer security classes. Hopefully it helps the students.

* I tried to emphasize Rijndael's state matrix by having the stick figure guy carry it everywhere as a briefcase, but I don't think that came across very clear.

* Although I was inspired by XKCD's style, I didn't copy the critical part of a witty comment in the hover text. If I had to do it again, I probably would have done so.

Thanks for all the feedback; it's what encourages me to invest so much time in making posts like this.
This is why I decided to make one of these. I wanted to do it, but I was too worried that it could go wrong. We're doing this but without the "keep-alive" emails. You just sign up, and we know when you die. This unfortunately limits us to the US right now. But if it shows promise, we'll expand.
And the granddaddy of them all:

http://www.peterluger.com/

Peter Luger eats all other steakhouses for breakfast, and I say that as someone who drools uncontrollably when I think about going to either Mortons or Ruth's Chris.
I suspect there are countless CS graduates who can describe Binary Search theoretically but couldn't hand-roll a binary search implementation to save their lives

If this is the case, and I doubt that it is very often, then your CS program has failed you miserably.
Yes and no ...

"here - look at this interesting article on Wikipedia"
... she starts reading ...
... I get bored and go to make cup of tea, forgetting that I hadn't logged out of Facebook ...
... she finishes article, closes tab and finds herself on my Facebook page ...

It is my fault, but a "clear history" (or at least make my history invisible) function would mean that mistakes like the above will have much less impact
I think it is a fantastic story, but is pretty obvious that they did it because he have a significant number of followers and not just because he is a regular costumer. And there is nothing wrong with it, they are just maximizing their gains with this action.