skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really cool - I wish there was something like this happening near me.

I know it's impolite to say this, but I hope you understand it's coming from a good place: your website is awful. That may not seem important but a first impression like that nearly made me skip this post entirely when the only cost involved was reading it.

My suggestions:

1. Make the website look prettier. If you google for "free css templates" there's a site that has hundreds of them with the only requirement that you link back. They come with pre-made HTML that you just chop around as you see fit. Just looking a little different from the bland defaults stands for a lot.

2. Reorganise your visual hierarchy[1]. Your main page makes my eyes bounce all around the place because the different elements are fighting with each other for attention. MATHS JAM! SIGN UP! LOG IN! NEWS! - it can't all be important at once. If you look at something like the Business of Software front page[2], the order of importance is clearly name > when & where > price > register button > description. Different priorities are okay, but it's important to understand visual priority is a ratio, not a sum - adding 10 to everything leaves the values unchanged.

3. Multimedia = social proof. Back to the Business of Software page, there's a video halfway down that gives you a description of the conference. Why do that when it's already written out in more efficient text that you don't have to click anything to read? It's because you get to see all those beautiful panning shots of the crowd, and earnest people (just like you!) talking about how excited they are to be at the conference. Words are good at conveying facts, but if you want to convey an experience it's got to be pictures and video. If you have pictures of the last MathsJam, they should be sitting right on that front page. If not, it's worth making happen for next time. You want an image that says "we're having a fantastic time, just like you will".

There's some other stuff, but I hope that helps a bit. Again, I'm not criticising to be snarky. I think what you're doing is great and I'd rather see it have a good website than a bad one.

[1] http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/visual-hierarchy/

[2] http://businessofsoftware.org/
SSE solves notifications

WebIntents solve his "register as content handler" bit.
They are currently successful because they are "cool".

People have not realised that they are not that practical yet when you have to actually do something important or useful (other than consume at the vendors' whim).

Ask a typical tablet user what happens after about 6 months. It gets used less and less when people hit a productivity brick wall. I've witnessed this happen in at least 10 different people now back from the day of:

"Wow look at me, I've got a new IBM X61 tablet" ... 6 months later ... "I've lost the pen and just use it as a normal laptop now"

-to-

"OMG ipad rules - I can do everything on it" ... to 6 months later ... "I'm using my laptop now because it makes my hands hurt and I cant get it in the right position ever."
I find a very great deal of agreement in what you have said here.
A good example of one of my firehose feeds is HackerNews. I don't actually know what proportion of the posts I read, but I would guess it's significantly less than 10%. Sure I'm wasting some time scrolling away most of the headlines, but since one of the primary functions of a human brain is to discard irrelevant inputs, I'm able to do this pretty quickly.
The reward is that I get to read articles that I would never otherwise have seen if I just followed 6 people I already agree with.
The author neglects an obvious point: stupid people can be very useful, in that you can get them to do harm to others, while you benefit, and they get nothing.
(Bear in mind that for the duration of this post, I am adopting the definition of stupid as given in "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity." It is not quite the same as "unintelligent", and it is sufficiently well-defined that it is no longer merely an insult, either.)

Amusing, but less insightful than "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity". While it is true that you can construct cases where two stupid people may ruin one smart one's day while coming out with a net win for one or both of them, you have to go farther and show that this case dominates. I would submit that it in fact does not, and stupid people will still tend to harm themselves more than anyone around them, if for no other reason than that is the easiest outcome for them to obtain. I do not thing there is a great benefit in running in a great herd of people who are constantly causing the herd a net harm (by definition of stupid), and the herds in this case would tend to eliminate themselves.

I think it is sufficient to observe merely that being smart is hard. In the great space of all actions one may take, the vast bulk of them are bad actions that will cause harm. Rather than complicated and IMHO probably false theories about how stupid people can win in herds, somehow converting their huge set of transactions each of which is a net harm into some sort of benefit, one need merely point out that as more people become intelligent, it actually raises the bar for further intelligent actions. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked. For example, some people who were very well adapted for producing net value in the 20th century find it much more difficult in the 21st because we've successfully captured so much value already.

(Also the article falls prey a bit to the idea that a carefully constructed game play strategy can fall to a player who acts stupidly. While, again, you can construct scenarios in which this is true as was done in the article, it is the exception. In general good gameplay strategies do not fall apart when presented with a stupid opponent, they win swiftly. If you really believe this is a general property of game strategies, I invite you to download any competent chess playing program and attack it with a "random" move strategy. It is true that you may force it off the opening book relatively early, but it will still efficiently tear you apart, not react with the AI-equivalent of stunned confusion. This is a sort of low-grade AI/game theory urban legend.)
894 likes, 35 +1s, 160 tweets
But isn't that a much more active way of enjoying music than just sitting listening to it? Rock Band, Guitar Hero and their ilk have imparted an active sense of rhythm, at the very least, to millions of players. And in the case of the Pro Expert mode in Rock Band 3, you actually do play using real guitar chords and drum patterns.
Football without blocking or tackling is a completely different game. Might just as well just play soccer or ultimate. Which, in fact, people do.

Those who want to poke maximum fun at couch potatoes always seem to pick American football for their examples. That's because civilians don't actually play American football, so there's relatively little danger of an embarrassing counterexample popping up. (Actually, plenty of teenagers play American football, but perhaps teenagers know better than to try to argue with curmudgeonly trolls on the Internet.) It's rarer to hear people try to make fun of Americans for not playing basketball or, god help us, golf... because in any city in America a golf course or a pickup basketball game is probably no more than ten minutes away. I know a bunch of middle-aged adults who play basketball. I know this because they occasionally turn up with basketball injuries. ;)

Incidentally, I only just noticed an incredible folly at the heart of this article: If you sample teenagers, you'll find a much larger percentage of them playing sports. But a smaller and smaller percentage of the American population is under 25. Is it really such a terrible thing that so few 55-year-olds play contact sports? Aren't our emergency rooms busy enough as it is?
Funny Insect Using Social Engineering - CEH
That's what we're cutting Social Security and Medicare for... so some Goldman-Sachs or UBS investment banker can guzzle $1000 bottles of wine and vomit them back up again.
Eh, who wants to live forever? Your body is already aging anyway, might as well go out (going out in this context means injuring yourself badly) in a flame of glory.
if anyone is interested in the library (heatmap.js), here's the link
http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/heatmapjs/
I absolutely don't get it. The CoffeeScript code looks way to obscure to me. I don't need more punctuation marks. List comprehensions can just be written in JavaScript very easily. jQuery provides them OOTB. Improved switch statements seems pointless when you can use a dispatch table. I'm all for better OO syntax, but I'd much prefer something slightly more verbose and transparent. This looks like an attempt to put Perl in the browser.
I haven't seen that yet but I can imagine it happening. I love Javascript but coding lambdas always felt ugly enough that I used it more in C# than JS. It is definitely true CS fixes that for me.
America’s Sentimental Regard for the Military
Which keyword is useful? Var? CS will put it back at compile time, don't worry. And it will do it in more consistent manner than many coders will manually.
I have no problems with symbolless maps, and CS will save your ass from being bitten by IE because of stray comma.
It is my opinion that the article does not suggest that "it's so terrible that
I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea
fishing myself." It actually directly chastises, in the following quote, the
people who make such claims.

There are men who feel that the entire problem with males today is that they’re
too obsessed with college and professional sports. But that’s as wrong-headed
as thinking that indulging in a straight diet of passive entertainment carries
no ill-effects whatsoever. Rather than suffering from spectatoritis, these men
are inflicted by high-horse-itis.

The writers further clarify their position in the paragraph following the
above one. They insist that "a problem only arises when instead of being a
supplement to your life," it becomes "a substitution, a way to feel better
about something you personally lack."

I'm a fourth year undergraduate at a university in Boston, MA. I have had
roommates who watch television many hours a day, do their homework with no
passion or interest, and then proceed to drink and party all night. I will not
argue that any of these actions are individually "bad," but I will argue that
a life consisting primarily of these activities is devoid of creative output
and is qualitatively "bad" under my philosophy.

A life of raging all night at a party and, assuming an impressive alcohol
tolerance, waking the next morning to start creating something is not a
a life I'd call "bad."

I believe this is a faithful interpetation of the article's position.
I'd argue that the key difference in Firefox was the UI. It was slimmed down and tidied up, with all the unnecessary clutter removed.

Firefox also shamelessly copied and polished up the best features from Opera (i.e. tabs and integrated search), attracting many early adopter Opera users, plus the fact it was free rather than ad-supported gave the browser a wider audience than Opera ever could.

Changing the name, the theme and the unused Communicator bloat (Mail, Composer, Chatzilla) was more symbolic in distancing Mozilla from the negative associations of the mostly terrible Communicator than anything else.

It's interesting to read the comments from Phoenix 0.2 on Slashdot (http://developers.slashdot.org/story/02/10/07/1739241/Phoeni...). Their comments system is terrible these days, though.
I loved this article. Mostly because I see a bunch of "spectatoritis" around me all of the time. I swear that the inland empire is just a bunch of passionless zombies living their lives waiting to die. I really don't see any get up and go or any enthusiasm for much of anything and this article mirrors my observations perfectly.
horseshoes is hellbanned for this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2928894

This is why I browse with dead comments enabled. A single particularly poor comment is a rather inaccurate indicator of future comment quality.
Maybe it doesn't, but it could. So the first law doesn't seem correct.

As the simplest example a multi uses unix operating system allows lots of people to run programs on the same computer and barring errors it works fine in separating them.
Stupid quote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes?qt=qt0427901
(shameless plug) I'm creating a list of the best Zip.ca and Netflix.ca movies and tv series for us Canadians, still a work in progress: http://bestmoviescanada.com/ (for Netflix you can click to watch the movie directly)
Flyer and Brochure Printing API
Node Knockout 2011 -- Top Entries to Watch
They even made movements of the fingers. One step before inverse kinematics.
My dad always described television as watching other people live life. It was an observation I'd forgotten. Thanks for posting this article and reminding me of it.
Interesting! Thanks for the clarification and I definitely agree that :sav FILENAME is a more accurate Save File As... than :w FILENAME.
I think if one were to try to sue them, one would have to mount an attack along this vector. The editorial nature of their review system could be seen as a generator of new content (even if it is based on used-submitted content); the end result (in terms of message and tone) is considerably different to the initial material.

I wonder though if such an approach has any legal merits. I've heard of something similar with copyright, where aggregating data for example and presenting it in new ways is copyrightable. I think one could expand upon that approach and use it as a basis for the complaint.
Fuck everything about this!!!
How to Do Nail Art Designs at Home?
Lisp will let me "balance weasels on a rake"? [1] I'm sold! :)

[1] See video at 3m55s.
I was on the borderline between vim and emacs for a long time. I finally ended up with emacs because it handles editing multiple files and switching between them way better than vim in its default configuration. It also has a saner scripting language. Plus, I get a bunch of goodies, such as org-mode, RPN calculator and an integrated shell. Though I still start vim when I need to edit one or two files on a remote computer via ssh connection.
There's an assumption that "content creation == typing".

Sketching and making music (Garageband) work very well on the iPad, videos too, to a lesser extent - certainly better than on a traditional laptop.
Resetting the Righthaven Fiasco, Part I
> your website is awful

Yup, I know.

> Make the website look prettier

Yup, I know. Not going to happen. There's no one I know who has any real skills in this area and who also has both the time and the interest to do something "properly."

This isn't me simply ignoring or dismissing what you say. I know that proper web site design is both an art and a skill. I know that with the investment of time and effort it can be made enormously better.

I don't have the time. Really, I don't.

In truth, I'd desperately love to have the site designed properly. Even more, I'd love to take the time to learn what I need to do it myself. I'd love to run A/B testing, to draw people in, to get them involved, to have progressive sign-up, to get full engagement, and all the techniques I've read of.

Don't have the time.

In some senses I wish I did have the time, but what would I give up? I have a full time job, I give 100 talks a year, I have three side-projects, all of which are active with users.

<sigh>

But I've saved your references, and appreciate your time and effort. I wish I could act on it.
Why is it in there? Is it a test case?
a couple of mistakes and comments:

* "File>new" can be done by ':enew'

* top of the file is 'gg' and not just 'g'

* bottom of the file is 'G' and not 'GG' ;)

* in addition to ':20<CR>' you can use just '20G' to go to
line 20

* to sort all of the file use ':%!sort<CR>', no need to use '0,$'
Please follow me on twitter. I'll be announcing blogs and email addresses in the near future.
Terra launched one earlier this year too (http://videostore.terra.com.br/Web/VideoClube) 1/3 more expensive, not-so-good selection for the subscription service, also has "rentals")

There's also http://www.netmovies.com.br/ , which follows the original disc-by-mail model, but has a very crappy online selection.
Nobody? How about the UK government? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7037671.stm Incidentally, outside of their own field, every scientist is a layperson. Their opinion counts no more than yours or mine.

oil companies buy a whole lot of television time falsely claiming the science on global warming isn't settled

And scientists are not swayed at all by the eternal quest for funding, I suppose? Al Gore doesn't own a carbon offsetting firm? Or live in a 12-bedroom mansion with a heated swimming pool?

Climate change is real, sure, anyone who pays attention to the weather can see that. But beware those who are exploiting it for their own political careers. Oh and "global warming" is NOT settled - that is why we now say "climate change" instead. Especially here in the UK where summer has been cold and wet!
Some of the stupidest things I have ever seen were done by people who, by any reasonable measure, are extremely smart. I've never personally met anyone who was "smart" in every possible area of their lives - its not just "work/tech" smarts that count if you insist on making this evaluation.
What you learn from fixing 5 years worth of broken links
Already have! OK, I'll keep an eye out for updates.
shit, too late! if someone else has an invite :) hegemann@gmail.com
thx!!
What the what SSH Fingerprints are and why should I care.
I'm not convinced that there are really two distinct sets of people in the world: stupid and not stupid. In my experience, most people are pretty good at some things and stupid with other things. I notice that in myself to a certain extent, and forces like the Dunning-Kruger effect probably prevent me from noticing more.

In terms of the original article, I think that answers the question of why stupidity continues to exist. Most people (even ones who appear to me to be stupid) are smart enough at enough things that they continue to live and procreate.

The game theory examples the author gives in the second half of the article over-simplify the issue by assuming stupid is a binary on/off attribute. Within a game, you can assume that's true by assuming the people make stupid decisions within the rules of the game. But in real life, there isn't one single set of rules that determines whether we or not we live and procreate.
Netsniff-ng - the packet sniffing beast
They will be using the local currency for every country.
It's only clunky when it isn't second nature. If you invest the time required to use it without thinking, you'll find it's quite elegant.
sublimetext has that feature also, and that's one of the key features that I love about it.
In related news, Microsoft actually built an OS years ago based on .net technology called Singularity.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
PeepOpen is the main reason I use MacVim. So excellent.
Zed, that's what he wanted. As I suggested there are alternatives to prevent someone from changing even one word.
I protect my ass with VIM -- any "IDE" likely has an equivalent.

au BufWrite *.js mark` | silent!%s/,\(\_s*[}\]]\)/\1/g | norm``
I really like your comment, but I don't think we should judge an odd philosophy on the basis of one of its most banal articulations. The article belongs to a genre with a pretty decent tradition, but its relation to that tradition is derivative in the worst sense (in fact, it's at least a second derivative, so to speak, rehashing an already bastardized rehashing of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). Every age diagnoses the malaise of the age, but not every age does it equally well. One problem with the modern era is that we don't have a Kierkegaard or Nietzsche to write our critiques of average modes of existence.
Since the Pentium-Pro / P6 era there has no longer been such a beast as a "CISC" processor or even an "x86" processor per se. Modern IA32 processors have a RISC core that executes x86 instructions via opcode translation. So you are exactly right, the more obscure x86 opcodes are likely to be implemented inefficiently.
Making the Star Trek Food Synthesizer and the EyePad
Sperm donors might have dozens of kids - what effect on gene pool?
Use your ears. When you are based in Western Europe and call a UK number rerouted to India you have a nice lag and dumping of the voice plus the VoIP noise. This is physics, you cannot escape it, it takes time for the signal to go there and come back.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

My pet theory corollary to this (and one that I think has become increasingly prevalent in the age of anti-elitism and -intellectualism) can be described as "never attribute to human achievement that which can be explained by religious miracle".

It's gotten so prevalent, in fact, that Apple uses it in it's modern marketing campaigns. The idea that a consumer electronic device can be "magical" is a nauseating reminder once again that, because of globalization and layers of both self-imposed and corporate-sponsored abstraction/obfuscation, we no longer know how even the most basic concepts operate or what things we consume are made of.

It's gotten to the point where we openly discourage tinkering. For example: What once was a proud young hacker's rite of passage going to Radio Shack and buying a breadboard to make LEDs shine and motors whir, is nowadays seen with derision or as malicious alchemy ("he's a terrorist building some kinda bomb or sumthin'", et al.).

And, it's not even about education, though in many cases you'd think it were. When a doctor has slaved away for years in academia, plied his trade in residency, done fellowships and participated in research for novel procedures and drug discoveries, their saving of a patient's life is more likely than not attributed by the patient to God than their exhaustive efforts. Ditto, any economic downturn/upturn, droughts and bumper crop seasons, etc.

Most people don't know who Norman Borlaug is, but they sure know who made their drought- and pest-resistant, season and climate-independent, abundant and hearty sandwich bread be so cheap and taste so good: God.

In politics, one need not look further than the Tea Party to see that this "magical" thinking is rife in political discourse, with so many clinging on to America's "manifest destiny" and "American exceptionalism" as the answer to both why we got to where we are and where we need to go. Nevermind that most of our "exceptionalism" stemmed from the fact that we were the only industrialized country left standing after WWII and had factories ready to serve the world. Now that we have no war? It's the illegal invader's from Mexico's fault we're going downhill, which isn't even Occam's razor "a => b" thinking, just simpleminded bigotry.
Paladin, a new JS 3D game engine by Mozilla
I was hoping this article would address the dysgenics-based[1] theory in the film Idiocracy: fertility decreases with rising intelligence[2], resulting in a severe "brain drain" and producing a profoundly stupid, simple society.

Regardless, I appreciated the extension of Cipolla's ideas into game theory -- stupid people can do everything from take your money to kill you.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenic#Intelligence_dysgenics
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
Wikileaks: Microsoft aided former Tunisian regime
Send Out Tweets of your Old WordPress Posts Periodically
I recently wrote something very similar to Emacs' ^xf for VIM. Sadly I haven't the time to work on it as much as I would like. For those who are interested: you can grab it at https://github.com/Bogdanp/quicksilver.vim .