skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny. I almost mentioned Google -- both as a good example and a bad one. Just compare and contrast the organization over time.

From the systems standpoint, Google is great. People continue to think that if we just got the right people -- smart, college-educated, libertarians, whatever -- that systems wouldn't ossify. But until you've seen a group of brilliant people self-create themselves a living hell, and realize that each person was acting in a reasonable, intelligent fashion, it's tough to really grok that. We naturally want to assign blame. It prevents us from doing the meta thinking necessary. One of the reasons democracies work so well is that we can easily assign personal blame to a politician, then peacefully get rid of him and bring somebody else in. There's a tremendously useful social mechanism at work.

I think there's a separate discussion about what you want government to do for you. I've gotten to the point where after listening to so many idealists on both the left and right I just gave up: whatever your social goals, that's fine. I just want an acknowledgement that you are aware of he trade-offs you are creating. I prefer lots of little, agile, self-optimizing systems. I think over time people could probably reach many of the social goals they have. But to do so you need to have the right tools. You'll never get from point A to point B trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer.

As an example a lot of us can relate to, there are a lot of technology teams with a huge amount of personal freedom that have all sorts of benefits and create vast amounts of value. We got that way by millions of little failures from which we harvest some generic best practices that then we pick up, try, and adapt one bit at a time for that particular situation. But there are even more folks, hundreds of thousands of people, living a death march because they tried to create huge systems with lots of little rules and processes. These huge systems never spring forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus. When you really start looking at them, it's a story of incrementalism and tough trade-offs. Everybody has a little architecture astronaut inside of them. Maybe not a lot, but enough to cumulatively screw things up given enough scale and time. If anything, smart people are the worst at this. They can even understand my points and try as hard as they can not to do it -- and still do it. Hominids are funny creatures.
I agree with what you are saying in the context of taking on another's program. In similar situations, I have also attempted to rewrite the body of code. Once it was a necessity, as the code was perhaps 50% wishful thinking and never worked. I have tried in other cases, unwisely, and failed.

But when you are confronted with a pile of bad but working software, I have done what what you are saying here--dive in and understand what is happening.
Firefox: Color your Firefox tabs with ColorfulTabs.
Treats. Free donuts, coffee, pizza, beers, etc. That kind of thing is low-cost and highly appreciated.

Plus there's the communal, social factor of all eating/drinking together as a team.
Most of the commands there can be replaced with vi keybindings.

That is,
set -o vi

You can type that directly into your terminal for use just in one session or in your .bashrc

Type <C-]> or <Esc> just like in vim to escape into "command" mode. Most command mode commands work. E.g. '^' goes to the beginning of the line '$' goes to the end. 'i' sets bash back into insert mode.
Docs for dquery, a useful tool for handling dates and times (javascript)
Save Arrington
Using [Javascript] AMD loaders
I don't buy this rant. I found his last argument a bit weak. Just because you can't write a number because it is so big, it doesn't mean it can't be simbolized by a handful of characters, or abstracted successfully.

Also it is more powerful to abstract than it is to enumerate.
"While the "how" behind it is no doubt complicated..."

Doesn't seem that complicated, really. The OpenCV book on the table is a nice giveaway to how it's put together.

After working with OpenCV for a while, it's an awesome and totally underrated project. I think anyone working on this new wave of apps (mobile, Kinect, etc) needs to know how to use this library.
Anonymous, the hacker group, is not synonymous with people who are sympathetic is some of their real world actions. The best way to separate the pure anarchic core from people who are just pissed would be to address some of the most obvious injustices currently perceived by Anonymous' target audience. If we're really at the point at which it's impossible to recognize differences of opinion, or more specifically, belief that laws should be upheld as a "grievance" then things are much worse than I thought.
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I'm with you.

I'm very inspired by this scrubbing calculator because I think it is the perfect tool to introduce algebra. The abstract concept of a variable is not something that comes easy to everyone. This tool allows you to visualize the idea of a variable and play with it.

I think this would allow the introduction of algebra at an even earlier age for some, and make the transition much smoother for the rest.
Anonymous is just a label for people who are fed up with the government

I get the impression that often 'being fed up with the government' is just a label for 'people who want to cause trouble'.
I recently lost my job (unrelated to work performance) and I have to say, I was so damn happy. Like cletus mentioned, I was burned out, and just generally unhappy in life because of it. Now I'm happier, job hunting, and learning Java because I want to make a game for the fun of it.

I don't know where my next paycheck is coming from, but god I'm smiling.

(Yes, that in itself causes some awkward feelings, but I'm dealing.)
"One person who buys a house they can't really afford is not a big deal. Let such a person make that bad decision if this is their inclination is a libertarian attitude. But millions of people make a similarly bad decision affects us all."

I assumed you were describing a recent real-world scenario where exactly this occurred. What did you have in mind, if not the recent US mortgage crisis? It seems, to me, that real examples are more useful than imagined ones. If we are using imaginary problems, we can come up with all sorts of interesting solutions, but they don't necessarily carry over to real world problems.

Thought experiments can be useful tools, but when the results conflict with reality, you have to be willing to adjust and accommodate new data.

"Especially in the presence of cartels or monopolies."

Which cartels and monopolies do you have in mind? The biggest monopolies and cartels I can think of in the US are those that have government support to protect their monopoly. Phone, cable, power, water, are the most firmly held monopolies (occasionally duopolies) in the US, for instance, and all are protected by government. Toll roads in the northeast are another good example of government-endorsed monopolies (I'm not saying the toll roads are necessarily a bad thing, just that they are solidly a monopoly; you can't really drive from NYC to anywhere without travelling on those toll roads, and they are, by far, the most expensive toll roads I've ever driven on, and I travel full-time in a motorhome, so I've seen a lot of toll roads).

Microsoft was frequently called a monopoly for several years, but the market eventually removed those monopolistic powers. Anti-trust actions barely put a dent in their power, and targeted quite small, quite unimportant elements. The market is where the real change came from. Heck, many of the remaining strongholds for Microsoft are in governments, which are unable to move as fast as private organizations. And, a not insignificant amount of Microsoft's power came from having a stranglehold on government schools, offices, etc.

I can't think of many other good monopoly examples that aren't government-backed, though I'm sure there are some examples. I'm willing to believe that anti-trust legislation has a place; but I'm also very suspicious of the argument that all government is good government because monopolies and cartels are dangerous, which seems to be the root of your bias against libertarianism or reduced government.
That's not true. TYPO3 is an open-source CMS/CMF licensed under the GPL. Contao seems to be a spin-off of it.

TYPO3 has its strengths in being very modular (even the core is nothing more than an accumulation of (system-)extensions), powerful (*nix-alike) user handling capabilities, its own domain language for website-integrators (confusingly called 'TypoScript' [it's not really a scripting language, more of a description language]), a very very sophisticated handling of workspaces (they may "shine" through each other) as well as a very flexible templating mechanism (called TemplaVoila). Its multi-domain and multi-language concepts are imho superior to what i've seen somewhere else (XLIFF coming in the next few months).
Of course, there's generally no "this one fits all" solution and due to its complexity, TYPO3 has a rather steep learning curve. However, held in capable hands, TYPO3 rocks in use-cases described above and mostly sucks if you just need another simple content management system, since it's rather huge in its nature. A last comment on the documentation: yes, it is very strong in Germany and because of that most tutorials and books are in german, but there is a drive towards i18n. However, the main and most important doc stuff is in english. [1]

Give it a try, i think it's really worth it!

[1] http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/
For a high-powered version of this written in CoffeeScript which works over arrays and lazy sequences (streams) look here https://github.com/swannodette/fun.coffee/blob/master/src/fu...

ClojureScript of course takes it even further.
fuck caps-lock platitudes.
I'm willing to bet a large part of it is that essentially, Samsung lets the carriers talk them into each getting their own custom build of the phone. Both Sprint and T-Mobile US are getting a variant with a 4.5" screen, and there's rumbling that the T-Mobile variant is using a Snapdragon instead of Exynos to take full advantage of T-Mobile's DC-HSPA+ network. And for some reason, Samsung insists on using a different button layout on their US models (flat home/menu/back/search in US vs. menu/raised home/back on the Euro model).
This comment thread reminds me a bit of "The Emperor's new clothes". I think the code for sieve (even though I understood what it did) is way too unnecessarily confusing and I would not want to see it in a project I'm on.

However, I do appreciate the usefulness of lazy evaluation. Still, I think this documentation could benefit by not making outlandish claims ("it will change the way you think") and just saying the author has implemented lazy evaluation in javascript (and maybe link to the wikipedia article on lazy evaluation and this stack overflow to explain why it's useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2151226/what-are-the-adva...)
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Right now everything loading from the facebook domains (facebook.com, facebook.net, fbcdn, connect.facebook.com) are blocked. Then the extension allows the like button to work when a user explicitly requests for it.

You are right that only the like button among the Facebook widgets is implemented. This is just a very start, we can progressively add more features.
Yep, Agree. Then we will see how additional tabs emerge in Firebug and Chrome Developer Tools, I can see them already: "IL View", ".NET Refactor", "JSIL View" hehe.
1. be neutral about where work gets done

2. be neutral about when work gets done

3. be neutral about how work gets done
What are Payday Loans
yeah that shocked me a bit. that's why I created the whiteboard and wanted to admin it a bit - but I guess the crowd has policed it now :)

i've also added a note to the whiteboard about adding/using e-mail addresses.
more or less done now. i thought the writeboard would suffice when I created it, but it seems google docs was a good idea. i've removed all contacts from the writeboard and added a note.
am i the only one here who finds the whole "omfg, this is so amazing!!1" tone of this article mildly offensive? i mean, it's not like he has a self-levitating hamster or anything.
And lexical variable binding comes with significant extensibility downsides when misused.

It sure does. Consider the draconian module system in Node.js that wraps all your code inside a lambda sandwich, shutting it away completely, and then forcing you to petition for access to it on a case-by-case basis. (The justification for this apparently being nothing more sophisticated than "But encapsulation is good.")

This is the programming equivalent of bureaucracy stifling innovation. It is particularly disastrous for writing new tools, which of course is an area where Emacs shines.

If something is not easy to extend in ways that were not intended, it is not easy to extend.
1. Respect
2. Autonomy
3. Control

None of those cost money yet so few workplaces value them since disrespect, micromanagement, and industrial era style division of labor are addictions of the corporate management crowd. It's gospel to Ivy League educated and Old Money.

As a separate issue, "As startups, we can't really offer top-dollar salaries to our employees." is complete nonsense. First of all, "we don't pay top dollar" is doublespeak for "We pay below market rate." Nothing says "We don't respect you." as much as that does. If you can't at the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent you require you shouldn't be in business. End of story.
Single page (print) view for Instapaper, Readability, etc: http://www.anandtech.com/print/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-inter...
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There's a lot of room to grow here. Mostly the choices in channels are limited. I think that if people could write and share channels through some API, a ton of use cases could pop up.

This reminds me of Yahoo Pipes, but with webhooks instead of pubsub. Although, it seems they are using polling instead of webhooks.
I will say, I have this phone. And I love it. I am not surprised by the glowing reviews for it. Best phone I've ever owned.
DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents. What browsers need is something akin to encryption, where you're not asking for compliance, you're denying access.
The last time I bought an HDMI cable I checked local stores because I didn't want to pay shipping on a $5-10 cable. The cheapest cable I found was on sale for $20 or something. Turns out it's cheaper to go with Monoprice and pay shipping on a $4 cable than to get one on sale in real life.

On top of in almost every store when I balked at the prices of $30-70 the salesman would try to tell me that if I bought a cheaper cable it would be subject to interference and would not work well. Most people who aren't technical and don't know that's bullshit don't stand a chance. They listen to anyone they feel is an authority on the matter. "Surely the guy at Futureshop or The Source knows more about tech than I do, I should listen to him. I can't find a cheaper cable anyway."

The margins on TVs and such are apparently pretty low and the way that they make money is on the high margin accessories they push on you. They will give you a "deal" on the cables so it looks like it's working out in your favour but it's still a scam. Hook, line, and sinker. Because it's only $5[-100 over the price of the set, which is likely over $1000, most people will just go with it because it seems like a small price to pay to get the most out of their shiny new TV.
Being An Elegant Business Programmer
It's the norm to have to write applications for the platform you want to run them on. Nintendo 3DS, Playstation 3, Wii, Steam, Android, iOS, Windows... these are all different platforms. Write-once-run-anywhere is a myth and it seems that web developers deploying to one platform (the browser) still can't grok the idea of multi-platform development that desktop, mobile and game developers have understood for years.

You can't get the best experience for each platform if the tools and frameworks you use are dumbed down to accommodate the lowest common shared experience across everything.
Embracing functional programming in Javascript is trending. All these dollars, underscores and streams will make for an interesting benchmark against ClojureScript as it matures.

In ClojureScript, streams or lazy lists are an integral language feature. Standalone javascript libraries can not provide a functional framework of the same calibre. You would naturally end up wanting to, e.g., run an underscore.js chain on a stream and that would require more work.
Recognizing everyone has their own patterns and giving them the autonomy to maximize work given their own patterns is certainly important. Of course step 0 of this prescription is hiring someone who is trustworthy and self-aware.
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Somewhat related: Tetris in Clojure and Penumbra[1]

[1]: https://github.com/ztellman/penumbra/blob/master/test/exampl...
> For example, he believes that the study of race and IQ is not a "legitimate matter for scientific inquiry".

Define "race" in a way that is scientifically rigorous and whose members can be classified in an objective, non-arbitrary way.

To save you the trouble, after mucking around with measuring skull shapes etc. you'd eventually find the only objective classifications were based on the genes themselves and gene expression anyway, and none of the resulting classifications of people looked like your original notion of "race" anyway.

It's probably possible to study "race" scientifically, but you probably don't learn much by doing so.
if you're surprised by a typo in a job posting, you haven't read many emails from recruiters.
Have you used Sencha Touch or the other mobile app frameworks? They're good but not great. There's still a real difference in the user experience between them and building a real, native app. It's fairly obvious due to clunky scrolling and choppier animations throughout the app.
My personal problem with that service is that there is very nearly no reason for it to be a service. It ought to be a program you run locally. (Observation: For the vast majority of things that is doing, you only care about whether your "ifttt" is occurring when you are actively online.) Even as the current software, packaged up, and accessed through a web client locally. This is a case where the service disempowers people, when it should be empowering them.
Depending on your business and your employees? Equipment.

I recently worked at a TV station and regularly asked my boss if I could do things like borrow a camera on a weekend, or installed a single game for some of us to play after hours when no one was working.

The answer was always "no". That was unfortunate. The camera I kinda get; it could break. But using my computer at work, when no one else is? Seemed relatively harmless.
My Colonoscopy
What part of design *is* possible?
I coded the first two Crash games with Andy (and, on Crash II, with two other really awesome coders as well). I couldn't agree more with the recommendation of picking an old-school game and setting out to copy it. When it comes down to it, I pretty much learned to program games by, uh, programming games. Crappy ones, initially, but eventually pretty good ones. Then, an "A+" title at Naughty Dog.

I remember "discovering" double-buffering in high school when my friends and I were creating an Archon clone for the Atari ST (a 68000-based machine). My sprite was tearing and flickering all over the place; I then realized that's what double buffering was for. Sort of in the spirit of the modern (and massively overhyped) hackathons like the one that's going on in NYC this weekend, we'd stay up for 48 hours straight coding. Snow days were the best: you might get 4-5 whole days of hacking in! Man, we learned a lot coding clones of old games.

We made a PacMan clone with 100 levels. Sure, it was just a PacMan clone, but we had incredible fun making it, and it ended up being not only a great lesson for me in game programming, but an early lesson in how to structure a "big" program. ("Big" in quotes because it was only big relative to other stuff I'd written.)

And lest you think this kind of thing went out with the 16-bit era, I met a 13-year-old earlier this year who made a very convincing Pole Position clone in Flash. I'm totally hiring this kid when he's old enough for me to legally do so... unless PG funds his first startup when he's 15. :)

So, yeah -- if you want to learn how to code games, start coding a 2D sprite classic from the 70s or 80s and, most importantly, finish it. It might take you a year or more, but by the end you will have learned a lot. Then do the same thing with a more modern 3D game (a Doom-style POV game, for example). You will reinvent a lot of stuff, but you'll really know it cold. And these little games make great portfolio items that will help you land a job on a good game development team.
Do you think that a person with measured IQ of 70 is going to have just as foo (e.g. "easy a life", "much success", etc.) as a person with measured IQ of 130?

Your overall position sounds to me like you want crisp, 1-bit, binary, black-or-white definitions or measures for everything, which is a pretty absurd demand. The real-world is n-bit. If you're looking for mathematically rigorous tools, fuzzy logic and probability theory help a lot in this area.

The race problem isn't that hard qualitatively, either: part of the reason we say Obama is a black man is because he says he is himself, another reason is because his skin is more on the darker side of the human skin scale, without prior tanning, than others. You can come up with other reasons I'm sure. You can also go down to the genetic context if you wish, but I'm sure you know the public has been beaten over the head enough times for the past however many decades that race in a genetic context isn't quite as visible as in a visual or cultural context. (Depending on your samples, anyway.)
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If you can't beat 'em, join 'em! Encouraging bootleggers helped the Dead. Why not others?
My initial feeling from the title is that they've just taken a few buzz words and said "that's what we should do".

Reading the article confirms that feeling. Video, Social and Mobile are not goals, and Yahoo needs a goal.

Facebook's goal isn't 'social', it's to keep people connected (or something like that).

The goal of YouTube is to 'share videos', and if you look at what YouTube actually does well, it is that.

Google of course organizes the worlds information.

Could Yahoo! keep people informed? Entertain people with knowledge?

Just saying "we're a content/marketing/media/something" is where Bartz failed. As has been said many times before, people don't know what Yahoo! is trying to do or be. Video, Social and Mobile doesn't really help either.

Yahoo! needs to find it's purpose. If you don't have a reason for being, you shouldn't be in business.
This is another great solution. As a vim user I haven't much looked into the emacs keybindings in readline. I'll have to read up. Also the terminology was a little confusing. I didn't realize that killing a line was the same as "cutting".
This phone is awesome. The screen is amazing, fits great in (my) hand, it's very light and TouchViz 4 isn't that bad.
> DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents.

Well, robots.txt is a simple text file that politely asks robots to not spider parts of your website.

It is completely voluntary and unenforceable, but works very well.