skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A simplified version of the essay, created by translating a very few words:

.

When you are bigoted

People and brands and organizations that are bigoted benefit as a result. Bigotry helps you build trust, makes it easier to manage expectations and aids in daily decision making. Bigotry also makes it more fun to do your gig, because you're on a mission, doing something that matters. Of course, there's a cost. You can't get something for nothing.

It's frustrating to watch marketers, politicians and individuals fall into the obvious trap of trying to be bigoted at the same time they try to please everyone or do everything.

You can't be the low-price, high-value, wide-selection, convenient, green, all-in-one corner bigoted market. Sorry.

You also can't be the highly-bigoted CEO who just this one time lets an accounting fraud slide. "Because it's urgent."

You can't be the big-government-fighting, low-taxes-for-everyone, high-services-for-everyone, safety-net, pro-science, faith-based, anti-deficit bigoted candidate either.

You can't be the work-smart, life-in-balance, available-at-all-hours, high-output, do-what-you're-told bigoted employee.

To really be bigoted, you must make difficult decisions, mostly about what you don't do. We don't ship products like that, we don't stand for employees like that ("you're fired"), we don't fix problems like that.

It's so hard to be bigoted, to not compromise, to give up an account or lose a vote or not tell a journalist what they want to hear.

But those are the only moments where being bigoted actually counts, the only times that people will actually come to believe that you in fact actually are bigoted.

If you have to change your story because your audience is different (oh, I'm on national TV today!) (oh, this big customer wants me to cut some key corners) you're going to get caught. That's because the audience is now unknown to you, everything is public sooner or later, and if you want to build a brand for the ages, you need to be bigoted today and tomorrow and every day.
They had to -- they wouldn't be virgin galactic anymore.
Except there are no words in Spanish that end with a rolled r.
Interesting concept. I have a suggestion about the presentation: Right now there are very few pictures of people on the website. There's some tiny ones on the front page (the b&w one doesn't count), and then even tinier ones in the screenshots on the tour. But mostly what I'm looking at are pictures of web pages.

If I go to a dating site, I'm looking for people. As it is, I look at your site and get the sense that it's all about web pages rather than about people. (I'd imagine this might be especially offputting to women.)

I know you don't have any users to show off now, but I'm sure you could find some suitable stock photos.
Aww, those are the bad Apples.

I promise, some of us know that our system is flawed. (Not that we aren't smug, we're just realistically smug.)

The college Mac type is inevitable, though. I'm biased, though, since I'm in college and have a Mac, so I don't get Mac Smug from other people.
A man addresses you calmly. "I believe that all earthly species originated in their modern forms, at the same time, by the direct action of God."

To refute his claims using scientific evidence, turn to page 29.

To refute his claims using theological or philosophical arguments, turn to page 73.

To reply, "You would have to be a creationist," offering no further rejoinder, turn to page 14.
An artsy friend of mine insisted that he couldn't use Mac because it was too popular. He used Vista instead.

Kind of silly, IMHO.
Out of curiosity: what is the advantage of having Open Solaris on your computer?
Good find. I trust Severus Snape also.
just buy a char on ebay
Nokia's touch smartphone.
This isn't someone being sued for copyright infringement. It's someone being sued for participating in an limited open system in such a way that harms most others' participation in the system. The point is that the rules are what makes the game fun. This guy was ruining it for everybody and making money in the process.

Happy to see his ass banned. MMOs aren't for everyone. Plenty games are designed for casual play. qq more - you have a real job and a real social life, unlike most MMO players.
Isn't their "way" simply: "brilliant" product plus price = profit? Seems sensible to me.
I agree with you in concept on everything except for one thing: "Simple bans would work." They don't. Not by a longshot.

If you've ever played the game, you get harassed by gold farmers all the time. It has been a constant arms race between WOWGlider and Blizzard, and in the times that WOWGlider is ahead, gold farmers are a significant annoyance in the game.

And therein lies the problem: this isn't a conceptual exercise, it is a problem in practice. Blizzard will never be able to ban 100% of WOWGlider users, and they will never be able to make their software 100% secure to this stuff. So, they have to attack it from all sides: they ban cheaters (I personally know someone banned after running the WOWGlider trial just once), they secure their software (I'm sure you've heard of the Blizzard Warden), and they go after the people who make this software.

Like I said, I agree with everything you said in concept. But in the real world, it isn't so easy to generalize everything into black and white.

PS: They aren't suing their customers, they are suing a company that ruins the experience of their customers.
I wonder how they use php as a queuing system?
It must be a CLI application, what do you think?
15 Useful Batch Image Processors
"Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time."

best part for me, and how people aren't really getting why you would bail out banks.
Twitter’s Killer App
> "I'm sorry, but you're going to be the brunt of this small mini-rant about Linux users being incredibly unaware of what we mean when we say pretty"

Probably because you're misspelling it. It's written "functionality." You know, ease of use & all that.

I hesitate to go into specifics. A few of those you mentioned are in linux & a few aren't. Most don't really matter to me (honestly, text editors?) so I think it's just a matter of taste.
Hmm actually no, its a concern whether a computer can recognize another computer, because captchas just prove that the end user isn't a computer.

then again, I guess its the same thing...its the "glass half full/empty" scenario.
>> But who in his right mind would recommend people to use Windows versions prior to 2000?

I think this is a wrong question in this context. Software developer don't recommend OS to people, he delivers software, and the more platforms he supports, the better.

Moreover, if someone has an old box with 98 or NT, what could he do when he don't want to buy a new PC?
Sorry, your post is just completely wrong because this is not a market situation. The government regulates banks through the FDIC, and implicitly underwrites the insurance that is granted to savings accounts. Therefore people have absolutely no incentive to pick "safe" savings accounts, where there savings are loaned out to "sure bets". Instead, if the bank has been covered by the FDIC, the only thing that matters to a consumer is the interest rate--he/she doesn't have to consider risk.
Links: Linking Theory to Practice for the Web
Schwarzenegger signs law that computer professional with salary $75k+ can not get overtime
Wow... all of a sudden they're gone! Nvm, thanks anyway!
Form and function are one and the same. Pretty things are functional, and vice versa. You can have five thousand extras and be hard to use and I wouldn't call that functional either.

The ones I mentioned were the tip of the iceberg. The point is that if you WANT to do something, you can. With Linux basically it's that if you try to do something you often need to tinker.

When we say we love our operating system, it's because of how superbly beautiful it is, and part of its beauty is how all of the small things just WORK. Linux doesn't have that. Linux is, excuse my French, shit compared to that. It's more functional if you want to go to the command line and tinker to death, but the beauty of OS X is that you don't need to do that.

I doubt you've ever used a Mac from what you've said, so it's hard to explain. But you can't point at rotating cube and use that as a counterexample, because that's not pretty OR functional. It's a waste.
What We Can Do About Science Journals
"Twitter for dogs." Classic.
You might think differently if you worked for the bank...

I got robbed a few weeks ago. I was using an ATM (standalone, not affiliated with any bank) which had a retractable cover over the money dispenser. Somebody had drilled a hex bolt, requiring a socket driver to remove, through the cover, locking it shut. I didn't notice until it was too late. Then after I left, he presumably returned to remove the bolt and collect my money. It was an absolutely ingenious hack, but that doesn't make me any less inclined to throttle the bastard.
Geek Austin
From BarCamp to BarCollege
Mourning Becomes Electra Finds Jena Malone
He cites the sources in the comic, and he's an engineer by training, so I'm inclined to believe that he knows how to do the calculation. :-)
Ruby Code Quality Tools
You mentioned genie & expose earlier. Not only are those in compiz, but I have them turned off because of the rotating cube. I don't need a windowlist/taskbar; I have enough space that windows rarely get below other windows.

I got used to it & working on a different operating system now feels very cramped. Same as I got used to tinkering (aka customization) & using OS X feels like typing with gloves. Like I said, it's pointless to argue. A few more iterations of ubuntu & it should be easy enough for OS X users.
I am concerned that you'll place me in a group with 19 other YC men who are similar to me. I can do that at a hacker meetup!
Each thread has its area to search. At the end, when the last thread has finished, the results are merged into a single bitmap.

The best way to see it is as 4 strips of tracing paper which have the exact same text on, and the strips are searched and the text traced in, then all 4 (clear) strips go in a pile to make the final image.

[Edit] To clarify, if you search at position 200,268, if you hit a row of text in the centre, it scans. If you search the same bitmap at 200,350, what you find might not be clear.

So each thread searches some of the same areas, but the end result is that all text is found, and heuristics reject certain rows as valid text.
The JRuby community rocks. Charlie, Tom, et al are doing an amazing job, and the activity on#jruby on freenode is impressive.

I don't know what it's like for Jython, but bugs get fixed fast in JRuby, and help is always available.

If you're into Rails, deployment on Glassfish using warbler looks to be a snap (I've only tried some trivial examples). The seem seems to be true for any Rack-based Web app (though, again, I'm still short on deep experience, and have not gotten satisfactory results for Ramaze yet).

For desktop apps, I (in my strongly biased opinion) think nothing beats JRuby + Swing + Monkeybars.
6 Tech Topics We Should All Definitely Stop Talking About
"jruby doesn't work very well at the moment. Dog-slow performance on the jvm, buggy. "

Simply untrue.
> They'll keep selling us stuff and buying from us.

Yes of course. But but in a ratio of closer to 1:1 selling to buying. They won't keep lending you the money to buy stuff.
Having small systems that do one or a few related things well is much better for scaling than a "does everything" system.

It's also very generally an architecture that is easier to write/debug/extend/grok.

It is nice though that Erlang gets you into programming for scale from day 1 without making it more work.
No it won't. Apple has a head start of at least several years, and Apple has not stopped innovating for the last decade. Leopard was an enormous improvement from Tiger, and Tiger was still holding its own. Apple obsoletes Apple.

The rotating cube in itself is a failure of Linux because it solves no problem. It's a multiple workstations system: plain and simple. That existed before the cube and solved the same problem. Apple implemented that with Spaces, and with 10.5.2 it ended with a product that I'd argue is better than any of the other workstation set-ups I've seen in terms of pure ease of use.

The genie and expose shouldn't HAVE to be turned off. Neither one is intensive whatsoever if implemented well. The fact of the matter is that it's there just in case that sort of thing is activated. I use Expose despite having 9 workstations, because I like running larger windows, and Expose lets me move files back and forth extremely easily. (Unsure if that works in Linux.)

The ultimate triumph of the Mac's vision is that it doesn't have spare dangly bits. It doesn't have a rotating cube, because having a cube rotate serves no purpose whatsoever. It's needless gaudy visual. Some visuals (like windows sliding on Spaces) help give you a spatial understanding of your windows. Apple has no un-needed visuals (with the possible exception of the ripple in Dashboard).

Ubuntu developers may make something that looks good on the surface as Leopard looks now. I doubt even that. I don't even doubt them being able to replicate Apple's ease of use because it is a sheer impossibility. To quote Daring Fireball: "A well-designed product is not simply harder than a poorly-designed one. It is an entire MAGNITUDE of difficulty greater."
Being smart is no longer a barrier to entry
But you don't understand. I don't like my dayjob.
A peek at the inner workings of Hashrocket (very interesting for Rails devs)
Yeah because CC accounts are so hard to come by, esp for criminals.
Startup idea:  help people avoid buying books (without infringing copyright).
Given a book as the query, the service would return a collection of web links to comparable free content on the web.

I guess the main issue is this: what motivation can one use to encourage people to maintain such book-centered link collections for the benefit of others?

Perhaps an advertisement-based profit-sharing system might work?
"Microsoft is not expected to have a major update to its core operating system ahead of Windows Mobile 7. However, other improvements are expected to debut sooner, most notably an improved browser that brings the rendering engine of Internet Explorer 6 onto Windows Mobile. That update, still expected this year"

The IE6 rendering engine returns? Nooooo!
Developing Symbian code is a challenge, Symbian developers are hard to find on great demand (if you want a pay rise you may consider dive into it :-) )

It was the best until a few years ago, but now the competition had caught up with it.

RIM(Blackberry) were always good, the last Windows mobile is stable, iPhone is getting there, and mobile linux (where Android is on of its flavours) is looking to gain some market as well.

I'm not saying the Symbian is going to die in the near future, but it lost a lot of ground, and they got a lot of catching up to do.
python 2.5 works fine with win95 and win98.

We're talking at least 1%-3%1 of machines on the internet here. That's a sizable chunk of people.

based on wc3 stats... which aren't all that representative.
> America contains 5% of the world's population yet remains a leader with 20& of the world's economic output

So what? Most first world countries earn about similar amounts per capita as the US.

> The American markets dictate what overseas markets due on a daily basis

To some extent this is an interpretation. The story that people (such news reporters) tell to explain the day's trading. However it is a fair interpretation at the moment.

Dominating the world economy with only 20% of the worlds output is surely an impressive feat. But doesn't that make it even easier to see why it may not continue? If that 20% has a serious malfunction and has been relying on credit from the other 80% then don't you think portions of the other 80% are going to start asserting more independence?

If you think that the US will be able to continue to dictate economic terms to the world you are in for a rude awakening.
I like your enthusiasm about what is nothing more than a slider UI widget in jQuery.

Keyboard support, so users can tab to it quickly and position the indicator with the arrow keys (think about the HOME and END keys as well, for fast end-to-end motion), is a must.

Good proof of concept of what could replace the standard row of 3-5 radio buttons to capture how a user a feels.
From a US perspective, given the current cratering of financial markets, the fact that you're less dominant is probably a good thing. China and India still have robust growth. US problems aren't going to kill the world economy, and eventually the world is going to reinflate the US economy.
Maybe sooner than eventually. I think there's going to be "Bush is gone" dividend worldwide.
"People should always know better. I mean people people don’t get they don’t get smarter about things that get as basic as greed and you can’t stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you’re smarter than he is, and he’s doing these things, you know, and he’s getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren’t doing pretty soon you start doing it. And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three I’s: the innovators, the imitators, and the idiots. And that’s what happens. Everybody just kind of goes along. And you look kind of silly if you disagree."

That is the "free market" at work. And why I shake my head in disbelief at people who think/expect the free market solves problems.
Ajax File or Image Uploading inside Ruby on Rails
Inside the iPhone SDK
The author definitely makes a mistake in equating slow programs with poorly-written programs. Yes, it's true that people who write horrible code often also write horribly non-performant code, and that rushing a product to market without performance testing is far too common in our industry. But in my experience (and I've done a lot of performance tuning), making something perform generally requires selectively damaging the code by making it less understandable and by breaking rules about encapsulation and separation between layers. There's a reason why that whole "premature optimization is the root of all evil" saying is so popular. Performance tuning is also incredibly time-consuming and labor intensive. It might make you feel more hardcore to do it, and it certainly be a useful intellectual exercise, but it's still time that could well be spent on other types of product improvement.

The increase in clock speeds has been a primary driver behind the ability of people to use higher-level languages, as well as the ability for people to write larger and more complicated applications. So assuming that a stop to the increase in clockspeeds will lead to better software is flat-out wrong; if anything it'll help to essentially halt certain kinds of progress in language and framework development by preventing people from using higher-level abstractions that don't perform as well.
You can use php, pretty much like any other scripting language(without involving web), so yeah it could be a command line tool running in the background, started by cron etc
Hmm.. After you noticed the cover was locked shut, could you have called the cops? That's a robbery in progress, so that seems like a valid reason to call 'em. From there, they could have retrieved your money
I agree... the individual's contribution is nothing more than a jQuery slider, but the data collected from multiple people could potentially be useful.

I thought about using 3-5 radio buttons, but it's a lot harder to click on the little tiny radio buttons than it is to slide a slider.
This isn't exactly news, but I think it's a great paper. :-)
fuck you too, man.
My point was not that electric cars cannot be produced -- they can, and in large numbers for low prices -- but that the electric grid in the United States cannot yet support millions of cars charging every day, especially when you consider the multitude of other electric devices those same people have plugged in 24/7.

Once we have nuclear power plants again and modern lines running to modern equipment in every American home, then we can talk about everyone switching to electric cars.

Technology is not used in a vacuum: a lot of pieces have to fall into place first.
Does anyone know technical details about how to crack Gmail's captcha system? I've no interest (or reason) to actually implement this, but it is very interesting.
The comments are worth reading.
Heh.
Woz's words of wisdom
It is called a search engine. Cuts out the need for manual submissions and skirts copyright issues by claiming to offer an unrelated service (indexing).
AJAX Head Design Pattern
Yes, but there's effort involved in using it. A student would appreciate having a collection of links available as an alternative to a textbook say.
Hilarious passport hack (movie) from THC
An traffic-based alternative to copyright on the web.
You can copy web content -- even in its entirety -- so long as your copy gets less web traffic than the original.
I'm curious which lobbyists were able to use the current financial crisis as leverage to push this through as urgency legislation.

"Um, in order to continue being a really awesome company despite the economy, we're going to have to ask that you change the law to protect us from our overworked programmers. Thanks."
You flutter your tongue? I've always used the soft part of my mouth, in the back. Maybe I'm making a different sound though.
We should be back at full strength in terms of service time by mid-next week. When you say gone, do you mean replied to? My email is zaki (at) timesvr.com if you have any issues.
thanks! we try our best.
You can just use MySQL as the backing store for the queue.

I think pretty much all systems of a sufficient size end up reinventing this...
The Significance of Apple's Product Placement
What's SO annoying about this is that it's SPONSORSHIP! It's very very very misleading. But after I made a comment, he added a disclosure.

"Disclosure: Just to be 100% clear, this should be considered a sponsorship and will be noted in future Loopt coverage."
It's cleverness theater. Has the appearance of being clever but provides no advantage over the simple, obvious method.
It's been shown that, on average, people who enter the workforce during a recession earn less throughout their lives than people who graduate when the economy is doing well.
No, that's choosing not to defend.
We are using BDB, dead simple and insanely fast.

Relational database seems a bit overkill.
Largest Solar Thermal Storage Plant to Start Up
I've played the game for 2.5 years and then some on and off, and I just recently stopped playing regularly as I started getting more involved with both school and my venture. Like I said, I won't disagree with you that gold farmers are ruining the game (though you used the term harassment and I've never been harassed on anything besides buying gold), but that's besides the point.

They're still suing a company for doing something they didn't do. They're going off on them on the DMCA which they didn't go against and the EULA (which they also didn't go against). That really would be the gold farmers and besides the gold farmers I'm sure nobody would complain about doing something about them specifically. Rather than taking care of the problem with farmers and direct cheaters, they're going after a mere background entity. Taking out WoWGlider, especially in the way they are, isn't going to stop the farmers in any way shape or form and it isn't going to stop people from cheating... all they're doing is ruining people's lives for creating something that is completely legal in its isolated form.