skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At one of the companies that I worked at, one of the high-level architects had the same message. His message was simpler, it was something along the lines of:

"I'm on vacation and will be deleting all my accumulated emails when I get back. If it's something important, please resend me the email after <date-of-return>."

Personally I think this is fair because if it's important, the onus should be on the sender to make sure that the receiver reads it. Chances are 99% of his emails were just cc'es anyway, but if it's something that really needs a decision, then the sender should resend it.
It's true that drug war articles are fairly off-topic for HN. I'd rather see more mathematics and CS content.

However, I think it's pretty apparent that ending the drug war would benefit more people in much more profound ways than all of the software everyone on HN has ever written. In fact, I'd say only the computer revolution as a whole has benefited humanity more than ending the drug war would.
Normal = not eccentric.

It means he's someone you wouldn't mind having as a colleague.
I love the tools and resources that are being available to kids these days! The sad thing that I find is that some of the younger generation now do not have the same amount of curiosity and imagination that we had when we were younger. Most kids that I encounter now don't even bother to ask why or how a specific thing works. This kid gives me a lot of hope :) I'm glad that there are kids like that out there, willing to understand and absorb the information available to them, especially in this day in age where information is so easily accessible.

I wonder what we will shape for our kids. I hope its not useless iFart apps and social networking junk.
PS If you read the Mark Pilgrim IRC logs he caricatured the response he often found when criticising any aspect of accessibility best-practise as "OMG!!! YOU HATE BLIND PEOPLE!!!". It's an effective way of shutting down debate and doesn't help anyone.
Vanessa Minnillo Bikini Candids in Hawaii
> Given the dynamicness of PHP, the editor support may never be as comprehensive as VisualStudio/C#,

Exactly my point.

But indeed, you're right - used Netbeans for PHP a few years ago, and it was awesome compared to the text editor I used before (but not like Visual Studio with C# by far).
CMD+` will cycle through applications' windows, but it won't restore minimized windows.
Downvoted. I was with you (and had upvoted your earlier posts) until the last sentence.
TELUS HTC Amaze Review
I've read it as "works nice with others".
> Most kids that I encounter now don't even bother to ask why or how a specific thing works. This kid gives me a lot of hope:)

It is really up to the parents. Extreme example, I remember having lunch with my cousins and one of them asked how a microwave worked. The dad, an engineer for IBM, disappeared and returned with a magnetron from his basement workshop. And then told his sons exactly how a microwave works.

The eldest son is now an undergraduate studying physics. He was about ten at the time of the question.

As a lesser example, my sister (who is not a Ph.D. like my cousins' father), loves BrainPop. BrainPop makes science fun without getting into too-many of the nitty-gritty details. Which is enough, when you are just 5.

http://www.brainpop.com/topics
Not to be too harsh, but I agree, this is hardly a "viable" product. It pretty much is a college-level assignment where you just graph data in a database. It's needs a lot more work before it becomes minimally "viable".

Why make people guess the names? Every name I picked seems to drop down dramatically, but if I want to find the most popular names, I have to guess it? Why not show the top 10 most popular names?

What about a logarithmic graph? If you graph "Isabella" or "David" next to any name, it renders the graph useless.
It's more complicated than that. Dieting itself saps your willpower (related to glucose in the brain). Letpin issues plague for at least a year after you lose the weight (making you overly hungry), making it extremely likely you'll gain the weight back and more.

Willpower can stop you from originally gaining the weight, but once on, it's a different story, and one that society doesn't really solve yet in a repeatable fashion.
"Of course, there's also the fact that people email/IM/FB others simply because they can, whether they have anything of import to say or not. You'd think twice if you had to walk over to somebody's cube to show them a picture of a cat, but you wouldn't blink an eye to post an article with the same content to 100 people on FB."

I think you encapsulated YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, among a myriad of other websites with that last comment. That's why I just don't turn any of those on at work. People don't even mean to distract you, but inevitably, they just do. I also keep throw-away email addresses for receiving the (mostly unnecessary) email updates those websites send for notifications and the like. The borders between procrastination and working have blurred so much these days that, even when all studies demonstrate humans cannot and should not multi-task, it's become the norm for people to work with loud (not classical or meditative) music playing, several social networks and news media open in a bunch of tabs, and a miscellaneous distracting website in the background, all while they work urgently on an assignment.
You should give a good instance / concrete example of what your previous employees did that demonstrates your provided view...

1. It entertains us even more!

2. Half the time it turns out the problem is really with the person talking (there is a reality distortion field turned on).
The US already does produce and distribute illegal drugs. They just do it in secret. If you think I'm crazy, just search for: CIA Cocaine. They've actually been caught red-handed a few times.
There's no payoff for me as a developer to make my website 'semantic'. The only semantic part of my websites is 'robots.txt'.

A nice step forward would be by giving me a way to separate data & presentation. E.g. when a user navigates to list page 2, let me send only the data and reuse the layout html like how we can do with css.

Now, I also happen to consider the Semantic Web to be a delusion that sufficient semantic information can achieve strong AI. I may be wrong, but not any time soon. :)

(edits)
...and my assistant will get back to you. :-)
Jabber is now XMPP which is a hugely used platform all over the internet for many many purposes including web and in-app messaging. It is fully interoperable between domains (if the server allows it).
Sorry, but I've never accepted that argument. No Photoshop mock-up is going to represent exactly what all of your client's visitors are going to see anyway. Are you really going to make multiple Photoshop mock-ups showing different responsive designs or how a fluid layout looks at different window sizes, and then two or three variations of each using different anti-aliasing settings to simulate how the text will appear on different OS/browser combinations?

Meanwhile, you can show your clients a static page using HTML+CSS just as easily as one using Photoshop, and they will see how it actually looks. And you can still change border radius in CSS more easily than the hassle of working on rounded corners in Photoshop, which still defeats the entire premise of that part of the article.
There is a continuing misunderstanding between "suits" and dev's, where most dev's _do_ learn the business through experience, but the suits continually choose not to, and instead of working as the "teacher" and filter between both areas, just push the demands down to the dev.
And "yes": teacher is always part of the job.
Hm, I don't remembering the "for free" argument in your article :) (but might've read over)

I completely agree with your point on learning other languages and frameworks, btw - the story on your journey was an interesting read. I'm just a bit staggered on how your journey ends with you choosing what I consider to be vastly less powerful tools (e.g. vim) when you know that there's tooling out there that, well, in my opinion is just plain better.

If money is really the main argument, then, well, fair enough. Even then I'd choose Java, once again for the refactoring/maintainability support, but people have called me an idiot for less so I guess that's just me :)
He's the one who is responding to her promptly. Methinks he's the one being conditioned.
It is hard for a dev to say a crash is a feature. It is easy for a designer to say an unusable UI is an intentional exploration of a new paradigm for modality in transhuman existence.
I'd love to see what your procmail setup is like.
As a data point, I went on a tour of the AT&T Global network operations center (in NJ) in mid October, and they showed us some stats -- one I recall is 2.3B texts on the AT&T network in the past 24 hours. So WhatsApp is closing in on half of AT&T's SMS volume.

https://twitter.com/#!/savraj/status/126718943179190272
Ask HN: What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading

The Code (By Charles Petzold )

Brain Rules (John Medina)
I'm already teaching my kids physics with moai and lua .. ;)
Letpin issues plague for at least a year after you lose the weight (making you overly hungry), making it extremely likely [that you will choose to eat more food than you need to maintain a healthy bodyweight and] you'll gain the weight back and more.

Fixed that for you.
I think it's also a cycle. If a parent is repeatedly dismissive of a child's questions, the child is conditioned not to ask them, and so becomes less inquisitive as a result of nurture. It's clearly not nature, as the generation isn't intrinsically different. Parents don't necessarily need to do something like the extreme example mentioned above, but they could certainly plant a seed by being more open to a lot of "Why?"'s, as annoying as it can be.
The blood brain barrier stops many things, I think they'll just test if this does.

More troubling is fat in myelin on nerves in the body (It has fat as one of it's components, and loss of it is bad).
Salud Emocional
Oops, sorry, accidental downvote.
Mobile flash and flex.
Not much to tell. The cost was because of testing, but by the time the app actually ran, the band wasn't interested anymore and people's interest in handset games was waning.
Read http://blog.wolfram.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-a-few-memories... for a nice story about that.
Something weird happened. Ubuntu used to be amazing: hr easy to install and use district, the world-changing help forums and wiki. Then Unity seemed to upendded everything. But look: MacOS is getting phased out by iOS. Google is converting all their apps to a touch-optimized UI that makes no sense on a desktop or laptop.
Windows 8 is doing the same, and MS's TV ads trying to convince people to buy a touhscreen 27" monitor.

Maybe they are right, and the future of mass computing is in entertainment consumption and not productive work. Maybe the dream of a popular powerful OS is dead. Maybe it's time for power users to return to being a.nich
Ireland has (or had?) a pretty good economy too with well paying aerospace and other tech industry jobs.
NASA releases new images of nearby asteroid
Opera, Chrome, and Konqueror. In Chrome it seems to work fine, in Opera the reflection is missing and in the Konqueror there is no reflection and it is not animated.
You got unlucky. I suspect that on a different occasion with a different machine you'd never encounter anything that required reinstalling or FixIt or anything like that.
Show HN: Rantr.ie - express yourself online anonyously
Red Hat Co-Founder’s Latest Venture Prepares to Battle Amazon
I think this is an example of limited perspective. I spent two recent summers working with kids ages 9-17 and was delighted at their curiosity, brightness, and willingness to get involved in elaborate conversations. Granted, the older kids were also trying to get in each others' pants, but that's the fun of being a kid, right?

I don't mind the social networking junk too much either; it's detrimental in the short term but everybody I know is getting weary of how pointless it is. I've been reading A. S. Neill's fantastic Summerhill School, where he details the things he learned after 50 years of teaching children, and he argues that letting children play is essential to their growing up properly. Freedom to play eventually leads to kids deciding what they most enjoy doing, and it leads to them being more willing to work within their society. Since reading that, I've wondered if social networks aren't just our modern form of play: useless wastes of time objectively, but people will move on from them and find better things to do.

(I hope. Facebook/the status feed are still only half a decade old. If five more years pass and everybody's still just as hooked, we've got a problem; I think we'll see feed obsession subside, but I could very well be wrong.)
They mention in the article that it had a dose-dependent effect on renal function that was both predictable and reversible. You're definitely correct, in that I wouldn't trust any fat-loss mechanism that works through accelerating apoptosis without extensive human research.

However, it's effect on various cells is understood, as it is determined by the type of protein evident on the cell surface. Fat cells are understood(under the vascular mapping prepared by the lab in question) to have this in far greater numbers than any other cell type.
Reminds me of:

"Children in professional families are talked to three times as much as the average child in a welfare family," Hart says.

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/10/132740565/closing-the-achievem...
Archive.org: Scanning a Braille Playboy
You're right, in that they're not the same - I use the terms interchangeably sometimes and shouldn't. That said, my snow leaopard Terminal doesn't have those keystrokes working either. :/

I typically use iterm2 now, and I mapped option/left and option/right to ESC-b and ESC-f, and all is well for me. Hope that helps someone else.
>Please provide an example of a single billionare or minor celebrity who isn't an asshole.

What about Warren Buffett?
I wouldn't call him great, but I think it's really adorable how he takes his cadences/writing style from popular tech presenters. He's an excellent mimic.
Great find! Awesome. Thanks very much!!
Start Puzzle Time
Brilliant! Can we have the source code? It's brilliant!
How did testing end up costing a million dollars? Forgive my naiveté.
Something weird happened. Ubuntu used to be amazing: hr easy to install and use district, the world-changing help forums and wiki. Then Unity seemed to upendded everything. But look: MacOS is getting phased out by iOS. Google is converting all their apps to a touch-optimized UI that makes no sense on a desktop or laptop.
Windows 8 is doing the same, and trying to convince people to buy a touhscreen 27" monitor.
Gleick makes the point that this might be code for "Jewish, but not really", as he talks about the bias against such people back then.
For his Age definately. He Has this Aura of a Star Speaker.
Here's a couple of telling examples: I asked one of them to read a book on improving customer service and give me a report with 3 suggestions for what we could do. It never happened. Asked her to call a company to arrange the purchase & delivery of glass whiteboards. Never happened.

This is not hard stuff.

When my partner was VERY sick and yet we had a major server problem, and he went into the office to fix it -- telling them he was on his way -- both employees expressed anger at him for kicking them out after they had left the house & were on their way. (They didn't want to catch his virus.) This is despite the fact that this server problem meant we weren't able to charge customers. The most obnoxious one bitched later about the cleanliness of the office -- apparently my sick partner left Theraflu packets lying about in the kitchen.

She also made derogatory comments about the way I wrote the copy on the site, after I clearly told her it was a matter of branding.

When I held a meeting on "how we could work together better," one of the employees had the gall to tell me "Sometimes you hover." This is the employee who failed to complete basic tasks. I told her, "If I hover, it's because I don't feel like I know what's going on. You could give me more updates." Of course, the real reason I hovered was because the work didn't get done. (And trust me, I didn't start off hovering -- I don't have the time and energy to waste on it, that's why I fired them.) I probably should have just reamed her out right then -- maybe that would have clarified things. But I don't think I should have to tell somebody something so obvious.

Naturally, when I would walk around our teeny tiny office, every time I went over to this employee's desk, she'd have Facebook up.

The few times the employees did come up with an idea, I praised them and told them to make it happen. We'd sit and make plans, I'd outline what I wanted to see, and when I wanted to see it, but "somehow" they never kept it up.

I'm sure I'm not the ideal boss. Obviously I spoiled them and led them to believe they were more important & more critical than they were. Nevertheless, I never yelled, never criticized in public, never did any number of "bad boss" things that might have actually gotten me what I wanted. I tried to accommodate them and be gentle. Instead, I had to fire them. Sad.
Spotting a qualified person is impossible without domain knowledge.
The Bill Gates comparison was meant to illustrate the perception people had of him. Originally, (after his rant about people stealing his Basic for the... IMSI? Name escapes me) he was perceived as trying to do the things that the common man wanted. Remember the "Information at your fingertips" marketing crap?

Shuttleworth started out the same way, except with Linux instead of DOS/Windows, and now he's insisting on making unpopular changes because he thinks he can see the future. Remember when Gates believed there was no future in the Internet?

Anyway, I'm rambling so I'll stop here.
Protecting the family business on divorce
I am a bit suprised to not see TDD or any of its siblings being pulled into the discussion.

To me, the better someone is doing TD, the better the code communicates because TDD makes you think about the right things when coding. It sets your priorities straight.

So the question of n00b or vet for me is just how well someone does TDD. And there is also this great book by Kent Beck about Implementation Patterns that is all about well-communication code.
This isn't news, its just a random rant. I agree that as OS X adds complex features we lose flexibility in other areas. Many of these are are not frequently visited but its still annoying and unacceptable. Fortunately, if Tim knows where to find these files and really wants to delete them, an "rm -rf" from the offending directory would do the trick - I'd like to think that 99% of the people reading this forum know this. Ditching mail.app for GMail? Seriously??
From a 2050 interview with Sarah Winston, former President of the United States
This reminds me of "Email sabbatical":

http://www.danah.org/EmailSabbatical.html

At its most crass level, an email sabbatical is when you make all of your email bounce. But you can't simply turn off your email without pissing off countless people in your life. Thus, an email sabbatical is actually a series of steps to let you step away from your inbox guilt-free and return to an empty inbox upon your return.
This happens to everyone I think. I had numerous "leads" tossed my way by recruiters and (unfortunately) a few interviews last year that revolved around my experience with <buzzword>.

Since I don't particularly want to work doing <buzzword> it is not anywhere on my CV. Good manners keeps me from saying "Did you arse holes even READ my resume?" when you've pulled me in for an interview for a position I don't want.

I understand that not everyone involved in the selection process will have a deep comprehension of technology, but the department you are hiring for should. Send them your shortlist for vetting, or better yet, let them send YOU the shortlist. If you're a 3rd party recruiter.. ..educate yourself.

It will save a lot of wasted time all around.

/rant
Thanks a lot for the jqfundamentals link! I'm a front-end developer who knows nothing about JavaScript and hasn't ever found a good place to start. This looks like it might be really useful.
The business guys tend to have the checkbook. So, if they're intellectually lazy, they go with what they know rather than whatever they might need. Given that you're not going to be able to hire Bill Joy very often, there's a lot of developers out there looking for work. Anywhere there's "lots", there's downward salary pressure (chemists, engineers, ...).

Things might change a bit when they can outsource management or when non-Western competition truly arrives.
How Not to Implement Mobile + E-Commerce + Promotion. Too Common
I think what you're seeing now is the cost of that "good economy".
Dnsimple's new ALIAS feature
This work came from my lab -- most of the research was completed before I joined. AMA I guess...

Edit: I'm walking out the door at the moment.
I think many people who could do these jobs very well would rather be doing something else. Therefore supply is low and demand is high.
Whatever you try, make sure it does something that he is actually interested in. I remember being introduced to instructions that "did calculations" I had no real use for. Quite abstract, and without much underlying explanation. (This was also a time when many machines did not "do graphics".)

"What's the point?!"

Make sure you provide a sufficient answer. Not in words, but in engagement: His, genuine and unforced, and yours, helping him.

Just the other day, the NYT had an article on MIT's Scratch. I'd suggest having a look at it, whether via that article as an introduction or all that search will turn up -- stuff describing kids' engagement with the platform, so that you can decide whether it will work for you.

P.S. Others are mentioning Logo, which I'd forgotten. And maybe 7 is more the age for Logo than Scratch (9 or 10?).
I see this attitude of "read the library source" most often from Ruby people, but some advocates of larger PHP frameworks advocate that approach as well, and I just don't buy it. At least, not across the board. Sure, if there's a bug, I can try to track it down, maybe submit a patch, but if something can't be bothered to be documented, I'm not sure I want to spend my time depending on that library.

I've certainly made exceptions to that - we probably all have - but treating that as the defacto way to approach using third party libraries is wholly inefficient (as you said).

One might take a better approach by saying "read and learn from the test cases". I've often found that for the libs I try that with, that have tests, they're often rather... what's the word? I can't easily figure out how to apply the library to the problem I have at hand. Sometimes it's because my problem is ill-defined, and sometimes it's because the tests only cover superficial cases, and even if the lib docs say "can do xyz", it's not tested not documented.

Such is software...
Interesting. I wouldn't have guessed such a connection, given Einstein's apparent popularity in that particular circle.

I find it amusing to be reading this important recommendation letter to a university on the same weekend that someone asked me to look into the background of an applicant for an important position at another university. This person might be a homosexual, and the contract for the position states that they cannot be involved in an "alternative lifestyle". In that regard, not much has changed regarding the politics of universities since 1943.
Travis CI keeps getting better: Now supports multiple PHP versions
Must see  How hacker hacked harward university websites