skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noticed text objects, %, `, ctrl-i/o, and ctrl-r missing from my most common set of edit commands. That's actually pretty good since t/f are implemented and you can fake a lot of text objects with those. Also, the underlying ace undo/redo keys do work so you can redo, just not conveniently. It's one of the better stabs at a vim mode I've tried.

One bug I noticed: after a f/t motion you have to hit u twice to undo.
Sure, but they were depicted as ugly and, well, borg-like. Whereas I would envision such a race to be highly rational but also emotional (you have access to the world's emotions), perhaps like Ancient Greece, on steroids!
I bet the author doesn't actually know the last time
the USPS was subsidized; he just off-handedly argues
we shouldn't subsidize it more. (clue: no taxpayer
dollars since it was spun off as quasi-governmental)
Un-fixing Fixed Elements with CSS Transforms
I'd say "screenshot." I've always like jQuery's demos, such a thing could be done for the frameworks to provide a quick insight into how they're implemented.

http://api.jquery.com/text/
>If I was President, honestly, I would push for a 0.5% tariff on all goods and services from countries that are not considered first world countries.

An alternate statement of that idea (which I'm not sure I agree with either), is a tariff on goods and service in the amounts required to bring the hourly foreign labor costs up to the US federal minimum wage with no exemptions.
Launch of Boston Globe responsive redesign -
No, you're talking about Hungarian notation, the guide is talking about standardised one-letter names for certain variables.
Selling ISK is explicitly forbidden by the EVE ToS. Buying ISK without going through CCP (by buying game cards) is also forbidden.

If caught, CCP will debit your in game wallet for the ISK you bought twice -- once to reverse the transaction, once as a penalty fee.
Visualizing routes as a DFA state table
The Uses and Meaning of Writing Machines
It depends on a lot of things!

We'll assume that whatever it is you are having people do is something that is intrinsically rewarding, benefits them, and is not taking up their entire life. We're not talking about having interns come in and work 8 hr days on projects you specify for no pay and you retain original copyright ownership as work for hire without pay. It's more like Stack Overflow answers.

As has been pointed out, in such a system by offering cold hard cash, you can and will attract gamers and the wrong element by paying, and you can and will also destroy the intrinsic motivation of the many sincere people who enjoyed contributing for free before.

At some level of contribution there needs to be pay off though, especially if you are directly monetizing contributions. I am thinking of youtube here. There are now professional youtube performers, people who make a living writing original comedy and commentary and skits for youtube and earning money from the shared ad revenue. This is only done with top earners who are making enough from ads to actually be able to fund doing it as a full time job. The result has been higher quality material and more stickiness from popular contributors.
Thanks for the info. I actually do very little with CSS (should have mentioned that / written with a more ignorant slant); in fact the only reason that I started using Less is because of that simple mixin feature.

I can definitely now see that Sass/SCSS is where it's at if one needs to do anything non-trivial with CSS. Guess I should really get back to using it over Less, as the basic syntax is almost identical anyhow.
Edit: I am/was wrong, see below. Sorry! :$

Really, people?

From the site: "αlphaPun.ch will trace the opaque part of your PNG or GIF image. It will then punch through the alpha channel (i.e. the transparent bit), so you can click on things behind it."

What are we having trouble understanding here?

EDIT: Here I am, using elinks: http://i.imgur.com/UaX0M.png I'll remind you that elinks's support for drag-and-drop is, err- limited. I nonetheless have no trouble understanding what alphapunch does.
It works like this:

Every year you have to pay a percentage of your total payroll as a tax, called Unemployment Insurance. If someone is fired or laid off, its from this pool their unemployment checks are drawn.

The percentage each company pay is based off a table. On this table there's 2 rates listed for each business size (its tiered, bigger businesses pay more). Rates last year for my company were around 1.7% and 3.2%, IIRC.

So, if you fired >=1 person in that year, you have to pay the higher rate. If you fired nobody, you pay the lower rate.

Note: if you fired 1 or 10 people it doesn't matter - you're paying the higher rate.
Arrington now officially out
A supercomputer predicts the future
It seems that in general this decision should be made more frequently than it is, at least for new projects. Why do not more people select Postgres? Is it comfort level with MySQL? Tools and extensions?
Currently at work so I'm using IE8. It seems to be completely unusable. I hate thinking about it just as much as the next guy, but it's probably wise to support at least 2 versions back for IE.

I recommend keeping the landing much simpler and more focused. I have no idea what is trying to run when I load the page, but whatever it is probably isn't strictly necessary for the front page. Link to the more complicated stuff for those who become interested.
Pierde peso comiendo
PVS-Studio: analyzing ReactOS's code (or Tabs vs Spaces)
Windows 8 Could Make Or Break Microsoft
Reductio ad absurdum is not necessarily a fallacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
YouTube Founders: Revamped Delicious Coming Later This Year
2003 Mercedes-benz ML 500 sport suv,black on tan leather,all wheel drive
It's a bit frustrating to see very insightful contributions like my comment here downvoted. Downvotes isn't meant to be for good points. Let me make it more explicit though for people who have difficulty understanding things.

ENGINEERS THAT CREATE THE THINGS YOU SELL DO NOT CONTRIBUTE BY THE HOUR. THEY CONTRIBUTE BY THE QUARTER, THE YEAR AND THE DECADE. HOURLY WAGE CALCULATIONS ARE THE WRONG WAY TO CALCULATE HOW MUCH THEY ARE PAID BECAUSE THEIR FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF TIME ISN'T THE HOUR. WERNER VON BRAUN DIDN'T DO ANYTHING NOTICEABLE IN ANY GIVEN HOUR OF DESIGN WORK.

What does this mean in practice to the MBA set? It means that measuring engineering work as cost per hour means there is something seriously wrong with your company because you don't understand the fundamental nature of the work.
Employers are not going to want to see:

Marital status

Number of Children

Probably not pictures either

They don't want to be sued for racial or marital status discrimination.
This is good news. Erick is a great reporter without all the conflicts of Arrington.
Nonsense! - the site is a picture of 'Y U NO man', saying "WEB BROWSER - Y U NO DRAGNDROP?!"...
3 Tips for Building a Web App That Can Scale
It’s Official: Arrington Out at AOL; Schonfeld New Editor
It doesn't just sound insulting, it is insulting.
The way I'm reading it, they're casting a wider net than Hungarian notation, but it's similar to it.
Even better, teach your kids to code. Cut out the middleman.
Guilty as charged. I did absolutely no cross browser testing with IE for DailyChomp mainly due to time constraints with school starting. No excuse but thanks for the good reminder. I will try to fix up the IE issues as soon as I can. Sorry about that!

I've made a screenshot for you to see how it looks at the moment: http://f.cl.ly/items/3r1H280A2U3G1w0N1d1w/Screen%20Shot%2020...

I did try to put a focus on simplicity. Let me know if you think there's still some unnecessary stuff on the page :)
On Safari, one only sees "WEB BROWSER [meme image] Y U NO FILEREADER?!"
The hardest question which I battle with is knowing when is the right time to fold and start afresh. PG's 'Relentlessly Resourceful' post ties in very well this - http://paulgraham.com/relres.html

Great story, very inspiring!
An Article of Faith for Marketers: Place No Faith in Articles
I think I speak for everybody here when I say that 1.8 + 0.2 = 1.10.
For those who just want to see a screenshot:
http://f.cl.ly/items/3r1H280A2U3G1w0N1d1w/Screen%20Shot%2020...
You know what's fun, programming. You know what's not fun, general problem solving. You've got it all backwards. I learned to program when I was 8 years old reading books and modifying games in BASIC. It was a great time. I never considering it work.
It kind of reminds me of Mach's principle

"There is a fundamental issue in Relativity theory. If all motion is relative, how can we measure the inertia of a body? We must measure the inertia with respect to something else. But what if we imagine a particle completely on its own in the universe? We might hope to still have some notion of its state of rotation. Mach's principle is sometimes interpreted as the statement that such a particle's state of motion has no meaning in that case."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machs_principle
The USPS is still actively subsidized by the US government, even if it doesn't receive budgeted funds (although they're coming this week to ask for funds and permission to cut service.) The government enforced monopoly on mailbox delivery is effectively a gigantic subsidy, as is their exemption from paying real estate taxes on thousands of buildings they own and vehicles they operate.

An organization doesn't have to receive cash from the government to be heavily government-subsidized - Fannie and Freddie effectively receive billions in subsidies from the government each year because of how much they save on interest via the implied government backing of their obligations. Those kinds of subsidies are far more pernicious because their cost is hidden in a way that budgeted subsidies aren't.
Common User Agent Problems
Mike Arrington out at AOL
Why your IT project may be riskier than you think
Copyright troll lawyer taken to the woodshed for serving improper subpoenas
I'm interested in learning more about MongoDB so that I can use it for web apps. But some comments I've heard about it(especially here https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/WQYLkopE...) seemed to discourage its use. Can someone explain to me why it is "criticized by academics"? And what its pros/cons are?
$300K to $0 - Career ADD or How I Wound Up Doing a Start-Up
oops! My apologies; I tried the site with firefox then with elinks, it wasn't until I tried IE that I hit the sweet spot of too-few-features-but-not-so-few-the-feature-check-doesn't-work. Sorry to3m et al.; you are right that fallback is horrendous and unacceptable, no matter the limitations of the contest.
I'm fine with logos being all lower case or whatever, but to me it should match how you write it in the text. If you don't do that, it is hard for people to write about you because they don't know how to write the name.
Once possessed by mind-altering virus, caterpillars are turned into zombies
Yes indeedy. The "2.0" versioning is seriously annoying me.
Starting a tech company is so cheap that funding should never be the bottleneck. If your idea is too expensive to start with a laptop and cheap hosting, think of another idea.
Erick Schonfeld has been named the editor of TechCrunch. TechCrunch will be expanding its editorial leadership in the coming months.

This makes me somewhat skeptical about how much autonomy Erick will be given in the long run. Unless they mean the expanded editorial leadership would ultimately answer to him.
Ask HN: What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup?
I appreciated the previous posts last year[1] and the year before[2] where people listed the services they paid for to run their startups.

I think with more than another year gone past, it's time to ask again: what services does your startup use and pay for? What's changed since last time and why? I appreciate your responses.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499186

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=545229
Posterous Swaps Blog Platform for Social Network
- 15" MacBook Pro (2010 Core i5) with 8GB RAM. Swapped out the stock HD for a 120GB SSD and used OWC DataDoubler to put in a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive for media/scratch.

- 27" Apple Cinema Display.

- OS X Lion
Human Serial vs. Parallel Processing
Show HN: New Wunderlist update just available for Mac and Windows
Mostly the lesson I'm getting from this post is not to quit your day job until you have some evidence of traction.
I do not understand why the subclauses of `case` are not to be indented.
Is this just PR releases or is the full text of the bill out? After the pre-press on the health care bill versus actually reading the thing, I really want to see the actual text (and the follow-up rule making).
I don't think aspir said anything contradictory. His point was additive to the article, just addressing another possible mis-conception about these cables.
Building a Music Visualizer with Unity3D
Unity3D has a reputation as being a gaming platform, but there's a lot of untapped potential to it. Over the summer I built an app in Unity3D that acts as a live music visualizer. Here is a showcase of the work, as well as a tutorial on how to do it yourself. Hope you enjoy it.
Mojocast #3: Authentication, Helpers, and Plugins with Perl's Mojo web framework
I don't have facts to back up my opinion - It is formed by memories of articles I've read.

I believe CouchDB is a better choice for very large data sets because of its design.

+ CouchDB uses a Map Reduce design that I believe would scale better over very large data sets.
+ CouchDB always stores data in a consistent state on disk. You can literally pull the plug on the server at any time and the data will never be inconsistent.

MongoDB is geared for performance and is a great bridge between a relational database and a high-performance No-SQL database. But I don't recall that it's strength is handling large datasets.
No answer you get to this will possibly contain empirical evidence or any scientific rigor, and yet you asked it hoping for information. Philosophy isn't science. It's not much more than unusually thoughtful literature. But that's still useful sometimes.
Adtech Is Harmful to User Experience
A+.

I have my 7-year-old using Scratch and she loves it. It's a great intro to analytical thinking & problem solving. Even if she doesn't carry on programming it is a valuable thing to learn for life in general.
What your email account says about you
Yes it's a dreaded infographic but still pretty interesting imo.
You are assuming there's different work delivered. The null hypothesis has to be that there is the same work delivered, unless there's evidence to the contrary. And it's clear getting unbiased such evidence is difficult, at best. Hence, a reasonable baseline is same pay.

Note that they have different levels of positions, so "the same" is only valid within a level. If you are so awesomely skilled and productive, presumably you will have a higher-level position.

You are focusing on one aspect to the detriment of others. If you have individual (i.e., arbitrary) salaries that lead to people who are better negotiators getting higher salaries for reasons that have "nothing* to so with work delivered, how can you say that is fair.

The world is a big optimization problem, and in my opinion the policy described in this post does a pretty good job at that optimization.
I meant 'entitlement' as a value-neutral term as a legal program. Looking into it a bit more, Social Security may not fit the definition precisely, but I still did not intend for "entitlement" to be a negative. I'll keep that in mind before I use the term again.

However, Social Security is most definitely not like a 401k, IRA, or annuity, as Supreme Court cases have firmly established. Not only can you be denied payment, you're not guaranteed to out what you put in, and may very well pull out more than you put in. It's "insurance" and not a retirement account.
The biggest criticism, for a long time, was that it wasn't guaranteed consistent; a crash could leave your DB in an inconsistent state, and you were supposed to address this by writing data to multiple nodes before deciding it was okay. This is rather mitigated now with the journaling options (which are on by default).

There are lots of other criticisms, but it's a fine data store, if you're dealing with data that fits it well. The best way to think of it is as a hash store - you can store N-deep hashes in it, index pieces of those hashes so you can find whole records ("documents") quickly, and that sort of thing. You can't perform table joins (or don't have to, depending on who you're talking to), but you mitigate that by designing your data such that you get what you need for a given resource in a single query.

Personally, I'm all on board with it for web apps. I think it fits your typical web app's data requirements far more closely than a traditional RDBMS does, and I'm using it very successfully in multiple production systems.

The biggest remaining fault, in the context of web apps (IMO) is the lack of transactions - if you have an application that requires transactions to ensure proper operation, don't use Mongo. Do recognize, though, that many transactional use cases are replaced with Mongo's atomic operation set.
You act like this was an unknown cost of having employees.
Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics
I think the point was that you should be able to flip a switch and get mongo in a fully functional Rails stack just as easily as you flip a switch and get mysql (sqlite being the default).

FWIW, I agree shoehorning mongo into a RDBMS role is a bad idea, but at the same time, devs who don't understand SQL are shoehorning all kinds of horrendous code into their ActiveRecord apps anyway. I've long criticized many NoSQL advocates (the extreme type who say SQL is dead) as simply being ignorant of the value of SQL and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As much as I stand by that sentiment, it doesn't mean Mongo doesn't have a viable use case as a primary data store, and if you know what you're doing you shouldn't have to wrestle with Rails to make proper use of Mongo.
It seems pretty clear to me: "Use one-letter variables"
I am a bit confused by this post. You have a multi-million dollar project that runs on a port of Quake 2?
Arrington Moves On
It seems as if you've allowed your UI to get in the way of your service, given that you've chosen features that are inavailable on so many web browsers.

Was your intention to provide a service or to push the limits of UI design? I can't tell.
We need an international police force to fight cybercrime
CSS: Taking control of the cascade
I think it's telling that the final sentence uses a word which contradicts his intent (emphasis mine):

an electron is not a thing, it is something that happens under the right conditions. just like every_thing_ else.
I was under the impression that most Linux contributors were actually paid by some other employer who happened to use the Linux kernel in their own products and contributed their patches and drivers back upstream. That said, there are still a large portion who do the same sort of work completely for free.
On re-reading, you're right. My fault for giving them the benefit of the doubt. One letter variables? I'm a little bit speechless.

I don't recommend one letter variables. I don't know if I've ever seen an official style guide that has.
Nerdy Day Trips
If you believe that past behavior predicts future behavior, they are manifestly worse than Google, and probably worse than Microsoft or Yahoo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Privacy_c... (it's a long read)
Comparing map/reduce in Mongo and Couch is really apples and oranges. They are designe to do two different things. i.e data processing vs building views.

Mongo is designed from the ground up to deal with large datasets. Take a look at their sharding architecture.
There are different disciplines within the field of philosophy. The scientifically-minded philosopher might be interested in Metaphysics & Epistomology, or roughly, "what we know and how we know it". A standard approach in these fields is to address the Skeptic; someone who logically disagrees with the fundamental assumptions of the philosopher. This is where you get someone like Descartes writing "I think therefore I am" as a starting point for further arguments.

Other disciplines are less concerned with Truth (big "T") so much as they're focused on practical lessons on how to live life.
Can anyone give an example use case for this? I'm not sure I fully understand what it means.
git-TFS
I'll agree that Woz was able to simplify the Apple I so that it was affordable but it was Jobs who was able to market it to the masses. Like any substantial venture it was more than the work of two people. I argument is that the article about the "next Jobs" didn't demonstrate founders with the same level of breakthrough technology or market that Apple created.
OK, nice to know this through tech-media. Not that I was using this on daily basis but I thought as a registered user, I should have known first via email.
Its still a good business to be in
Your 'about' says that you learned Django and Python, is that what you are using for Yipit? What does your technology stack look like?
Exactly. I really liked Yudkowski's framing of the rationale behind his political beliefs and agreed with his progression of ideas until he reached his conclusion. In particular, I liked his stating the issues in terms of pragmatism rather that principles because it allows for some consideration of "the public good" (which idealistic libertarians bristle at), even though that idea is admittedly hard to pin down.

I won't hesitate to acknowledge the (seemingly inherent) problems with government. However, laissez-faire capitalism has it's own inherent failings: every non-libertarian has their own list but they tend to include externalities (environment, public health, ...), ideas of "fairness" (large income inequality, valuing lives in terms of income, opportunity, ...), commons (turning things that are naturally shared---public spaces, roads, ideas, water---into private monopolies). There are well-worn libertarian responses to all of these concerns, but each issue is complex and I've not generally been satisfied with purely laissez-faire approaches (so far).

I like the idea of government serving as an (imperfect) check-and-balance on corporations, just as voters and separate branches are imperfect checks on government. As broken as government tools like regulation can be, I suspect the threat of their use is government's most effective tool.
Ask HN: Review my startup
I'm working on a startup idea, zoomforth.com , which I envision to be where a non-traditional Vault Guide meets vimeo. Basically, I want to create a career search engine that profiles jobs through thousands of videos of short informational interviews, and provides users a search tool that uses tagged values to expose users to appropriate jobs. Ultimately, Id like it to be largely user sourced content.

In addition to general reactions to the idea, I'd love to get feedback from the HN community on specific UI suggestions for laying out content - i.e. how best to have a user navigate the video, as well as text content, that will embody each "job" page.

I'd also love some suggestions (as I have no development experience) for tools that might help to generate search capability in the same way that something like 8tracks.com does.

Thanks for the help! Chris
Sorry, that seems to be a problem with the theme we're using or the way Tumblr handles submissions... we're looking into it!