skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is unreadable and unconvincing. Why is it rated up? You could make a reasonable argument supporting the headline, but he doesn't. There's no logical weight behind his conclusions and no evidence that he's actually thinking about any evidence, and the cherry on the top is that he uses inflammatory phrases like 'unquestionably flawed', and then making random arguments about presentation vs data. Plus, web applications are 'by their very nature unoptimized'.

The only conclusion I could draw is that this guy is an iOS developer who likes developing native apps. Fine with me, but he doesn't go anywhere from there.
Careful with that if you are based in Europe, 20 is not enough for some countries.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll update the post ... that's what I get for a midnight article :)
High-frequency trading looks to me much more like a bug of the system - or at least a undesirable side effect - than a lever for the human mind. Most innovations, though, fall in the lever category :)
Yeah, I think it's subconscious. You get judged them based off of it, but you can still hide prison-wall-gravel in them.
Available via Marmalade as well: http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/deft

Just spent a few minutes playing around with it. I like the simplicity, nice work. One thought I had is that you could enter Deft mode whenever you cd into a directory with a .deft configuration file. This file could have a title for the top of the Deft view and perhaps the ability to specify what columns you want displayed. In this way you can have different directories for notes about different topics.
And for those who want to buy it in India:

Flipkart: http://www.flipkart.com/books/9350230398?_l=CJHVEqJO3veuHytb...
Oh, and forget about air conditioning.
The 5th bullet point says 30 days is a reasonable guideline with the bonus after 25 days there to encourage that further.
PNaCl seems like a separate project from NaCl to me, and NaCl itself can't run LLVM IL.

Also, there's really opposition of having it implemented in other browsers, at least Mozilla vocally opposed it. I think that if they managed to do it via a plugin though, that could work.
Except that they have a monopoly position in none of those domains. Microsoft used their power to protect their monopoly. The Dart document itself says the number one reason for Dart is to protect Google's massive bet on the web platform. It's easy to see how Microsoft or Apple could seriously undermine Google by keeping the web platform second rate, which is certainly within their power given current browser marketshares.
Poll: What conspiracy theory does HN think is true (or none)?
This is a real wildcard. HN is an educated, reasonably apolitical community. I'm really interested in whether people believe any of the following conspiracy theories to be accurate.
Assassination of JFK
Elvis still alive
Faked moon landings
Princess Diana murdered
Roswell / Area 51
September 11, 2001
Asian Pacific Islanders (API) (who appear younger than they are in general, in my opinion) have the lowest incidence rates of cancer out of all races (for adults).

http://seer.cancer.gov/report_to_nation/
No redirection: http://www.google.com/ncr

Explained here: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...
Google's strategy may be different than Microsoft, but the motivation is the same: to trap developers, and make them dependent on you, and to differentiate their technology from their peers.
I use a 13" macbook air with 4gb of ram. When I'm at home, I hook it up to a Dell 30" lcd with an old school MS Natural Keyboard and an Evoluent Vertical Mouse.
Cleverbot Passes Turing Test, Sits Down for Interview
This is because the tasks involved with deploying applications and system administration have some significant overlaps. Capistrano is, essentially, a tool layer atop Net::SSH that can execute actions on a server, based on definitions written inside the framework provided by Capistrano. Capistrano was originally written for application deployment, but it wouldn't be "wrong" to use it for system administration. Sprinkle (a software provisioning tool) [1] is built on top of Capistrano.

1 - https://github.com/crafterm/sprinkle
Got my pre-order in. I want to keep it for myself, but I sold Steve Jobs action figures on eBay for around $700 each, and I think this one will go for more :)
I still don't get the point of that over a list, like this:

* 22% interest in tech papers

* 21% in Apple advantage

* 16% interest in ...

As a side note, I usually only care for what the top 5 or so things are, and the percentages aren't that important.
Google Eats Their Organic Search Results
Does Apple make money from the App Store? Last I heard it covered its costs and Apple made from from selling extremely high margin devices.

Also, how do you reconcile the idea of an Apple who wants to maximise profits from the App Store with an Apple who limits what apps can be sold through that store? They're literally turning down paying customers in the App Store because they think it'll hurt their real business, selling devices.
And yet they gave the video away for free to MTV, a company owned by the conglomerate Viacom who honestly could afford to pay to license that content. But no, free! To add salt to the wound MTV doesn’t pay performance royalties to the artists either.

This doesn't make much sense to me. MTV isn't a music distribution service, it's an advertising channel. They promote your music to millions of viewers for free (well, to you - the viewers pay). You want them to pay you? That's like expecting Google to pay you to show your ads.

If you don't want their services, that's fine.
shouldn't the font size be proportional to the size of the square?
Just wondering, how do you know it's going to be the next version?
"What’s normal for time off varies from country to country but a reasonable guideline is 30 working days per calendar year, excluding local public holidays."

They say what's considered reasonable in one of the rules. My personal take is that another 5 days more or less won't be that big of a deal. Combined with the last rule, you actually have a minimum--feel free to take off less than 25 days per year, but you won't get the 50% bonus in December.
I prefer the crippled lambda. If you need more than a simple expression, you should write another function anyways. The restriction leads towards easier to read/maintain code.
This is very interesting, if only for the concept of using twitter as an interface for other services. Good show, man.
Fair point - I would edit it, but it's locked down now. I didn't intend to mislead HN readers with this title.
No risk if you're a VC. Best case, you're net worth increases by orders of magnitude - worst case, you still earn a hefty management fee on all committed capital. If someone else spends five years of their life on a failed venture, its just one company in your portfolio.

Nothing wrong with entrepreneurship. I just find it grating when the benefits are expounded by people who take the exact opposite deal, in terms of asymmetric risk.
Nicolas Garcia Belmonte's JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit -- http://thejit.org -- is truly awesome. He has a lot of cool stuff in that library. http://thejit.org/demos/

I'm using the Radial Graph from TheJit in my "facebook for dead people" prototype http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/view?mode=RGraph&...
Threats That Were Supposed To Kill Microsoft Windows But Didn't
I’m not sure what you’re asking. The Times Atlas design process is mostly digital now, but as far as I know, the flagship products are only available on paper. You can get a basic look at their workflow starting at page 10 here: http://fluidbook.microdesign.nl/geoinformatics/05-2008/ .

I certainly agree that onscreen mapping could be a lot more sophisticated than it is now without too much strain on even mobile devices’ hardware and connections.
It's a laser projector combined with a camera. Nice but nothing revolutionary.
You can build something like this yourself using e.g. a Microvision ShowWX+ ($300), a webcam and some mirrors.
No need to wait for a device that might be commercially available sometime in the future at an unknown price point.
Even better, since Slacker didn't make the essay either.
Wow. An unfamiliar thought. Masterfully repealed, though. Not very logically, but hey, so what. All is well.
no org-mode support?
Tab Debt
Native isn't standing still. By definition, no web app can ever do anything a native app can't - since the browser is a native app!
I've been writing a similar tale of my own - with a surprisingly similar name, as a matter of fact.

It's never easy to watch something you've poured so much work into fall apart like that, so my condolences on your loss

http://lookingbackaretrospective.posterous.com
Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no trouble with multiple outcomes, or to put it in a different way, the whole wavefunction being real. Otherwise you'd have a pretty strange time explaining interference ("oh, one thing is real, but it considers the other possibilities anyways" or "oh no, the waveform hasn't collapsed just yet, but it will once we observe it"). In fact, the Feynman path integral, i.e. the sum over all histories, appeals a lot to me on a conceptual level.

But that isn't the point really. I just feel like saying "oh, it's in some weird quantum state of being both this and that at the same time" is a bit disingenuous, since it is not true in any classical sense, which, shockingly, most people would assume and get utterly confused. It is necessarily true if you consider many worlds as the valid interpretation (which I do like, but let's not go there), but it doesn't I think hint that well enough, nor does it hint that we have entered a cloud of possibilities that is about to collapse if that was the point.

More than just being clear on what is physically happening (and I do say "oh, it's just equations, they have no meaning" is the biggest hand waving of all), it feels kind of immature. The tone hints to a confusion in the speaker, as if we've just gotten these strange experimental results and we're not sure how to deal with them yet. It's something that could've been acceptable when practically nothing was known about quantum mechanics, but more than half a century later?

And to be perfectly fair, I'm not sure how you would phrase the wavefunction / amplitude distribution to at least give someone without knowledge of the subject a workable model. Maybe the inferential distance is too long to even have a not completely wrong intuition, but I feel we can do better.
Find a substitute product. Or just stop buying this one and wait.

There are lots of arthouse and Indy films, for example.
> It's a solved problem.

No it isn't.

> You don't see people endlessly coming up with new syntax for math do you.

Actually, yes, yes you do.
Sure there is.

"You can also customize the major mode that Deft uses to edit files, either through M-x customize-group or by adding something like the following to your .emacs file:

(setq deft-text-mode 'markdown-mode)"

All you need to do is:

(setq deft-text-mode 'org-mode)

Or any other major mode for that matter.
Reminds me of http://newsmap.jp/
I've had this exact same issue - or at least used to. This is my way of dealing with it:

Articles: Get Read it Later and install the FFX extension if that's your browser of choice. One click and it's accessible on your iPad or phone for reading later. Close those tabs.

Forms: If it's for funding, if it's for some organization, whatever - you just don't want to fill it out now. Grab the URL and mail to 1week@followupthen.com to get a reminder via email in a week. Close these tabs too.

Cool Web Apps you want to try out: Sign up then and there, then bookmark it. If it has a high enough value prop to you, you'll remember and come back to it. What now? Yep, close these tabs.

I found that the majority of tabs I had open fell under these categories. Using a mix of Read it later, followupthen and simply taking an action, I bet you could plow through those open tabs instead of going through more Cmd + T pain.
Brendan has previously talked about some obstacles to a bytecode/VM-level specification, and some advantages of specifying the browser language at the source level rather than at the bytecode level:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1893686 (see comments by BrendanEich and others)

http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101122

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/JavaScriptIsAssemblyLanguageFo...
They already do both; have you not ever read Lord of the Rings?
Thanks for the link, but you're proving my point: if I'm building an application that consumes Activity Stream resources, and also other kinds of resources, I have to have a different interpreter to understand and follow links in these different resource types. I don't have to do that for strings, numbers, lists, or dictionaries because those are standard datatypes in JSON. I think we're at a point now where hyperlinks should be a standard datatype too.

A second-best alternative would be a standard way to express hyperlinks in JSON using the existing datatypes. I don't think a key:value pair with a key named 'url' is sufficient though; hyperlinks need metainfo so you can differentiate them from each other and give them semantic meaning, like the 'rel' attribute does in xhtml. I think labels are important too, though they're not always needed.

The problem with this approach is that it's reinventing RDF and XLink in JSON, and RDF and XLink have already failed to be broadly adopted. I think part of the problem with them is the need for an add-on interpreter in addition to the syntax interpreter. If RDF or XLink interpreters were baked-into HTML and XML parsers so that the linking info they provide were as much a part of the syntax as elements, attributes, and strings, they might have become widely used.
No, you'd do it on a Mac Pro, or, if you want to try and save money, on a PC hidden in a closet somewhere. You'll need a PC hidden in a closet somewhere as soon as you need a cluster anyway. Same for compilation, Xcode even makes it easier for you to set up a distributed build.

Now, there are reasons to get a strong laptop. A good one is if you need some serious power on the go. Are you running that bioinformatics software while on an airplane?
Let me qualify that: as a founder, of course there is risk. That's what makes you a founder. And that's why not everyone is cut out to be a founder: you need to be mad. (And there's madness is a bit of all of us, but as a twenty something bachelor, being a mad man affects me less than a 40 something father of three.)

My response was in the context of being an employee. I was an employee at a 5,000 person consulting firm in Australia when the financial crisis hit in 2008 and I had more fear losing my job then then when I moved to recession-plagued America in 2009 to work at a search-engine startup (and Australia has been one of the strongest economies in that period since). In fact, I was paid more (in salary, not counting options), given more responsibility, and enjoyed life more.
I have this problem too. I thought the solution might be automatically closing untouched tabs after X minutes, but I left those tabs open for a reason — there's something that at one point was important to me. But then why do tabs just sit open?

Maybe close tabs after X minutes, except for an exemption list of domains — but that's not a very intelligent solution. I don't know what the answer is except for declaring tab bankruptcy every few hours (or days if you're (un)lucky).
In the linked article Gruber says that this is Apple's most sustainable advantage, and implies it's something that'd take competitors a decade to copy. I'll grant that it's not quite the heat death of the universe, but still pretty damn permanent.
There is the third option of hybrid native/web applications, which I haven't seen considered here.

One example is the Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR, which "... intends to provide a versatile runtime-environment that allows existing Flash, ActionScript, or HTML and JavaScript code to be used to construct Internet-based applications that have many of the characteristics of more traditional desktop-like programs." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

Another example of a hybrid option, one which is much simpler than AIR, and which I haven't seen anyone really trying, is where the application is sold without a GUI of its own. You interact with it through your browser, and it acts as your proxy to the Internet. This allows for increased computation, better display, and optimized communication, such that the experience is somewhere between pure web app and pure native app. The customer gets the good feeling of "owning" the thing for which they paid, and the developer's work is simplified by using the browser as a cross-platform GUI.
I would say that now (post-ajax and tablets), we're beginning to get quite close to your prediction.
The Geography of Jobs
The first Culture novel was printed in 1987, and he's still writing new ones. I don't think you can really say yet whether they'll stand the test of time :).
I find that reading primary sources reminds me that I can be a primary source. It reminds me that these ideas that I rely on were thought up by people, not handed down from Mt. Olympus.

The historian in me is also just fascinated to see the source of an idea that has made a large impact.
Ex-Apple designer wants to "kill math" with better UI
If you are a vim user, I recommend vimwiki:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2226
Data scientist jobs
This point might be valid in general, but it can't apply to programming languages. There is no way to do language design in a committee (one might have a shot at enhancing an existing language, but it's difficult).
End Malaria Day
> It's kind of like saying that

That was the point ;-)
NodeJS: To V8 or not to V8
Note: There's a big difference between voice and cliche. Voice is not being a bunch of rockstar, ninja, pivoting hackers who reach out to people.
Like this one? It looks pretty lousy.

http://www.virtual-laser-devices.com/
> Most people watch television without knowing that the picture is comprised of pixels (or scan lines). Is that also sad?

That they don't know? A bit. That most don't want to know? Very, very sad.

> Why should my mum need to understand what an operating system is, let alone care about it?

To better be able to protect herself against malware, to be able to better understand a very important tool in our society, to be able to understand what your work is about when you tell her.
On the other hand, digital maps have a huge advantage in the level of detail they can provide over a much wider area.

I still carry a Thomas Brothers street atlas of Los Angeles in my car as a backup. If you haven't seen the old Thomas Guides, they're a wire-bound book of a couple hundred or so pages; mostly a grid of detailed map pages, each covering something like a 5x5 mile square of the city. They also have index maps, freeway maps that just show freeways and their off-ramps, dozens of pages of street-name indices, etc.

If I take a few hours drive (say, to Phoenix, or San Diego, or Las Vegas, or the SF Bay area), I probably won't have such detailed paper maps with me, but digital devices would be able to provide a similar level of detail in any of those places.
Would this order of detection be good:

1) Detect in Cookie (Pre-set by user)

2) Detect Browser's locale (You can choose it via options)

3) Guess via IP address (This is if there's no locale for some reason but Geo IPs tend to be bad)

What examples have you seen that are good at presenting English (or similar languages) as an option?

Some examples I know of:

Facebook.com presents most popular languages on frontpage with an option to click more.

Youtube.com where at the bottom says Language: English, no indication of i18n. Even though the website had been used by other non-English speakers.
tl;dr

Things that can help you slow aging.

1)Eat less sugar.
2)Try to keep you metabolic rate low (Dont work out too intensely)

Anyone has a concise argument against this?
Piano Quiz
I do 'Send to Kindle' - via http://kindlebility.com/. Awesome tool that helps me to keep the tabs down to just those shown in the images :(

Followupthen sounds like an awesome tool. Thanks for the heads-up. Will definitely look into it.

The truth is, I don't really keep cool web apps open. I either sign up or close it. The vast majority of those tabs open are things that either can't be sent to Kindle (e.g. Articles that have multi-pages and don't have a single page version, or something else).

I will try followupthen.com to see if that helps me.
Many, many, many, many tasks/problems are CPU bound.
Pace Running Training Tips
LOL @ Tab Bankruptcy. Love the term, it fits in nicely with the theme :)

Well, I allow my computer to declare bankruptcy for me - i.e. whenever Chrome crashes and can't recover the tabs, I consider that Tab Bankruptcy (and it feels good!).
I really love my MacBook Pro's keyboard. It's clean, with just as much keys as I need. I hate laptops with 110 keys, most are useless keys like page up/down, home/end, print screen, ... If I need to navigate to next page (which I often do), I just hold down 'fn' and press the down arrow. End? 'cmd+right arrow'. Admittedly, Print screen is a little harder to remember for the average user ('cmd+shift+3/4'), but MacBook's page up/down and home/end are very reasonable and easy to remember even for non-technical users.

I agree that the 'return' on the British keyboard is very poorly designed (there's an screenshot the original review at ars, but apart from that, MacBook's keyboard is one of the reasons I would never buy a PC in the foreseeable future (other reasons: OS X and trackpad).

Thinkpad's keyboard is much better than that the average PC laptop keyboard, except for page up/down keys getting in the way all the time.

Oh and I absolutely hate the media keys on laptops...
Not quite. If you are a venture partner and you don't produce returns on the fund, you're out of there. The entire partnership needs to show gains on the fund. In my experience, it's actually pretty easy raising money (either from advertisers, investors, or sponsors) but what's hard is ensuring you give a return on that money. You can measure the success of a venture fund not on how much money they raise the first time, but how much they've raised in total over successive rounds.
I have an idea and I would like to work on it full time but I have a family to support. The idea will not make money until it reaches a critical mass of users. If I got funding it would allow me to bridge that gap. That is the reason I would seek funding.
You can get a TN panel in an X series machine? I didn't look, but the viewing angle and contrast of the X220 I had the chance to use seemed to naturally indicate IPS. But the color fidelity was not as solid as my Air's and the brightness, as I said, was not as wide-ranging.

(And IPS isn't just used by graphics designers. :p This said by somebody who just dropped way too much money to upgrade his bargain-basement TN desktop monitors to IPS...)
I just get the webmail control panel for the web host OVH, asking me to choose between Squirrelmail, Roundcube, Horde etc.
I see four reasons for PC laptop makers being so weird:

1) The illusion of control that options give. "My toaster goes to 11!"

2) Building to specs. "This laptop has 20% more pixels than the Macbook. IPS? What's that mean?"

3) Backward compatibility obsession. "I have to have VGA-out because my enterprise customer has VGA projectors. They have VGA projectors because laptops all have VGA-out." Apple will happily pave away old cruft every few years (OS X, dumping 32-bit support in Lion, move to Thunderbolt) for the sake of simplicity and optimal solutions.

4) Consumer confusion. These people aren't stupid, there must be some advantage to having such horribly convoluted online stores. I suspect that it's easier to unload undesirable machines by putting them confusingly next to more desirable ones.