skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, because we don't know, because we're uncertain, because we doubt.

What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate?

What's bad about uncertainty and doubt? What are you afraid of if it "goes wrong"? If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right?
I just recently wrapped up (hopefully) some donated work for a relative's business while it was struggling, financially.

The relative's business partners were repeatedly dismissive, disrespectful, and ungrateful. The financial bind they'd gotten themselves into made my life more difficult in either having to pony up, myself, for what they needed or spend extra time and effort working around their financial constraints.

The only reason I did it was my commitment to this relative, and the fact that they were now "in for a penny, in for a pound" with them.

That business relationship between this relative and their partners is now unwinding, and I am glad to be shut of the latter. Once they started having some cashflow, their first concern was to spend it on other things rather taking care of past obligations, e.g. offering me even token compensation -- or building up some reserve, as I had suggested and in as much as I was not seeking payment.

I write all this as a preface to the not infrequently commented observation: (Most) people value service in and to the extent they pay for it. If it's "free", they can often be endlessly if ignorantly critical.

TANSTAAFL, even when you're buying.
Something to keep in mind is that you can make your C# surprisingly functional using LINQ. It's inspired by Haskell and functional programming. It makes the transition from "imperative with functional features" to "functional" very simple.

And you can use Reactive Extensions in C#, which is the most accessible framework for FRP (functional reactive programming) out there and very useful for UI and asynchronous tasks. I've just started exploring it, but it's pretty fun so far.
Lauren Ipsum, a book about CompSci for kids
Try this. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/106599-first-inkjet-print...
Video-games?

Can this replace a physics dedicated processor? What about latency?
Also, delete all those toolbars.
I've built a custom micro-framework and an async ORM based on a few ideas I had while working on Django-nonrel. The result is wonderfully small, simple, and expressive. We're using it at our startup. I'm just trying to bring back the fun of exploring new programming concepts. In this regard, open-source really doesn't work for me.
From the action deletion discussion:

"The result was delete. As far as I can tell, the numbers are split about 7-6 in favour of delete. That's not normally going to lead to a consensus to delete unless there are unusual circumstances, such as one side having significantly stronger arguments than the other, so much as that can be ascertained objectively. In this case, the final three unchallenged delete !votes—DGG, ItsZippy and Metropolitan90—demonstrate such strength.

DGG and Metropolitan90 highlight a number of fundamental misconceptions behind a number of the keep !votes, such as the inaccuracy of the assertions that the subject's work was covered significantly in The Google story and that The Google story is a Pulitzer prize-winning book. DGG also demonstrates with clear evidence that the subject's own book is not as prominent as asserted, without any evidence, by some on the keep side. ItsZippy is the only editor in the debate, on either side, to comprehensively discuss the sources on offer as opposed to making generalised assertions about the sufficiency of the sourcing.

That those delete !votes have stood for between 7 and 13 days without any challenge leads me to conclude that there is a consensus to delete"

More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion....

Two thoughts: yes, the back pages of Wikipedia are tricky to navigate for non-experts, it took me a while to find that link. No, Wikipedians are not all unfriendly deletionists.
The whole thing simply doesn't work in IE at all (IE9). It doesn't even make a good attempt at working in it.

Perhaps against the grain but not everyone doesn't use Internet Explorer.
IMHO, workalcoholics get short term rewards by working. And they get it every day and with every action that they take.
This quote is noteworthy:

"Does Andreev have Facebook in his sights? "Badoo is more of a social network than Facebook, as on Facebook you interact with your existing friends in an absolutely virtual life," he says. "Badoo is more social: it provokes you to go down on the street and meet these people.""

I hope the next phase in social networking is actually centered around meeting new people. I don't know if Badoo will be the winner here (I doubt it), but some company will be able to win big by helping people meet new people.
As far as I understand it it's far more complicated than you make out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_o...

Also they did rule that this was incompatible with the fundamental right to privacy (final sentence, rest preserved for context):

the Court finds that the injunction in question would require Scarlet to actively monitor all the data relating to each of its customers in order to prevent any infringement of intellectual-property rights. It follows that the injunction would impose general monitoring, something which is incompatible with the E-Commerce Directive. Moreover, such an injunction would not respect the applicable fundamental rights.
IE6/7 users who have Silverlight installed for Netflix or company stuff.
I think the bad part of string interpolation is that it encourages to use it constantly, in place, instead of extracting it to method.

Gluing strings together is the weak point of application, and should be hard to do, to encourage people to wrap it in functions, that can also validate input, escape what needs to be escaped, etc.

Maybe that's my "discipline and bodage" part talking :)
Digital Camera Tripods
Many of my favorite things have been made by people who needed it for their own use first.

It also makes it much more likely that you can promote it to people with something more compelling than an email grab.
Honestly, the service I got from T-Mobile was beyond awesome when I was using a Blackberry. The stores had knowledgable people, the rates were very reasonable, and I never had a problem getting support from their 800-number when there was a problem.

I'm glad to see T-Mobile at least appear to stay independent for now. The USA is a very big country and letting one carrier dominate the GSM marketplace is just a terrible idea.
The problem is that he is either being intentionally deceptive, or hasn't used Siri.

Dishonesty and/or ignorance from someone of his stature merits a public pillorying, don't you think?

Edit: third possibility: he doesn't actually see the difference between voice control functionality (a la Microsoft's or Apple's prior products) and Siri. That's when his senior staff start looking for new jobs.
"why isn't anybody trying to replicate and sell this ?"

Because it can kill you, that's it.

Electrostatic motors(capacitive) are older than electromagnetic(inductive), but using way more voltage than current means touching it will kill you.

A lot of people have died from industrial plastic bags electrostatic charge with friction, so it now uses wire to ground it.
So you want to be a software engineering consultant?
Shampoo Without Laureth Sulfate
That's a fair perspective, although what you call a "mish-mash" I'd call borrowing the best syntax for every feature :) The syntax came out of a community effort over the course of many months, and a lot of thought went into the decisions that were made. (And of course it's still under development!)

Since you mentioned the => operator in particular, I'll defend it briefly-- it's a feature JavaScript sorely needs, and in the situations where it's useful it's a godsend, turning a pile of ugly JS into a single operator. The thing it describes is a little complex semantically, but in practice it's very straightforward, and in the cleaner environment of CoffeeScript it stands out well. It does seem like a small difference, but do you mix up == and -= much? Same deal. Visually speaking it actually makes a lot of sense: -> indicates a vanilla, unbound function, while => indicates a bound function whose context equals the one it's defined in.

I know I'm a bit of a fanboy, but if you do a lot of JavaScript I'd encourage you to at least give CoffeeScript a second chance over a weekend sometime; it's the same, normal JS semantics you know and love, but you get to use all the futuristic shortcuts and clean syntax of a modern scripting language, and it outputs nice, readable, compliant JavaScript. (Say goodbye to JSLint!) That's well worth the minimal learning curve, in my opinion of course.
For some web apps it will probably take long. But with all the developments in browser land there is often more then one reason to develop against the latest anyway. Hopefully this will motivate corporate IT to move faster also.
I think this simplistic explanation does not do justice to the complex subject which is procrastination. If it were that simple, we wouldn't be having those problems, would we?

For a more rounded perspective on the subject of procrastination I suggest reading someone who observed a few hundreds of cases and helped in fixing most of them:

http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-G...
The keyword is "free space optical". http://ronja.twibright.com/
A new way of looking at how to write open source code
Not protocols, but usage. Not emotion, but common sense.

If Skype, a peer to peer network that uses a proprietary protocol and third party servers (neither of which is a prerequisite for a peer to peer network), was used primarily for file sharing over encrypted links, they would have some "big problems", as in "heavily funded lobbyists and plaintiffs", to deal with. These are the same "big problems" that are the driving force behind SOPA and consequently the same ones that have injected some steam into this reddit "think tank". SOPA has some interesting language where it refers to "or any successor protocol". Perhaps the next revision, or the next bill of this nature, will include language that refers to "any internetwork", present or future.

How a peer to peer network is used and who uses it does make a difference in terms of its acceptance and survival, even if in theory it shouldn't.
personally I don't care. It's games...
these efforts aren't terribly useful to society.

I disagree- unless you think movies, music, books and art also aren't terribly useful to society?
Uppercase DOCTYPE is for XHTML5 (HTML5 XML serialization). Basically XML requires to have DOCTYPE in uppercase and html in lowercase. By writing it this way you will conform to both cases.
See also http://www.w3.org/TR/html-polyglot/#doctype
What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate?

I guess they got God's blessing. I don't understand your point.

If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right?

That's exactly the time I would procrastinate. Or am I missing something?
This is a great example why understanding Math is important. It can even help you understand psychological aspects like, why we make the choices we make.
Anecdote: I see these popups and immediately leave the site. A popup demanding my attention tells me all I need to know about the site operator and what to expect while I'm there. 100 http calls for all sorts of crap. Analytics up the wazoo. That is what is important to the site owner. The user's pleasure? Not so much.

Mantra: Attraction, not promotion.
The "problem" with Github (although, he has a point)
deadmau5 4x4=12 continuous mix
I just press shift+´ to get `
It might be hard for you to imagine that the
game you work on will never be important to
a huge number of people, but you have to get
over it. No one owes anyone else a living,
no matter who they are, or how much they need
it.

It's not about me personally.

My last game is still paying my bills and was played by more than half a million people.
Classical music has, in my view, created the most productive 3 weeks I have ever experienced. Check out the Mozart channel on Pandora. Check and mate.
Ask HN | How to answer customer queries
For guys out there who are running own one or more products, what do you use to answer customer queries. Simply via email? A help-desk to raise and answer tickets? twitter ? Facebook ? any other online app or platform ?
I'm curious if they tried to employ BigCouch, the dynamo-esque fork of CouchDB.
Gianina sanchez - Quilting Daily
Molecular formula calculator written using Cowbird (a parser gen for JS)
Show HN: safe location sharing
Dave Sanders: Fiber-Optics Exec by Day, Defender of Justice by Night
I used various versions of Django when I first started hacking on Appengine. Eventually I just gave up and switched to Tornado. Why? Django is a large and tightly coupled beast of a framework. It's very likely that a given plugin reaches down to the DB level meaning that it'd have to be manually ported to Appengine.

Every single project which tried to port Django to GAE relied on either monkey patching during runtime or forking the codebase. This was an enormous amount of work as you can imagine, and the benefits grew smaller and smaller as simpler frameworks became available.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not ragging on Django just because it's large. I'm sure at one point, Django started out as a simple, and clean framework. I am starting to see the same changes in Tornado -- the more people who use it, the more features (and code) are added to keep them satisfied. This goes on until a certain point where the underlying technology (the DB in django's case) changes and it's easier to just start again from scratch.
Changing the law is certainly a worthy goal, and I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from working on that.

Same goes for improving the technology. Making the internet more resistant to censorship, throttling and monitoring by design, is a very worthy goal.
Yeah, I got heat earlier in the year when I had my girlfriend upgrade her 80 year old dad's computer to IE9. Something was different with his favorites. Impossible to troubleshoot over the phone. Hopefully, he's over it by Christmas. :-)

My sister still gives me the "my computer runs slower now" after I had her do IE9.

Personally, I just take the opportunity to work on my sells skills. After all, IE9 is only a Microsoft blessed upgrade.

My mom asked about Chrome because she saw a Google ad. Let's see if I can "sell" her on it. Keep up those ads Google.
Nature Special: The Autism Enigma
In addition to the temporal aspect of decision making given in the top reply, there was a study recently (posted on HN maybe 8 months ago) that found procrastination was a function of confidence in a decision.

I think the temporal aspect of decision making is a red herring and the real issue is the confidence in the decision; which is harder to gauge the farther out it is.

Some people have a great sense of confidence in their decisions and subsequently may procrastination less as their lack of faith in their decisions are not impacted by temporal locality.

This explanation happened to fit my tendency to procrastination to a T, as opposed to decisions simply being farther out on a timeline.
It depends on how much time you are willing to invest in it.

Simple email is easy for one or two people to handle, but from what I've seen Twitter/Facebook interaction (which also doubles as an advertising route) requires dedicated staff, and some companies even outsource the handling of PR through those just because it is expensive and difficult.

For everything small, a help desk tracker is great if your service is technical and your users are technical, it keeps tracking of issues much easier.

However, if you go the route of email, you would still need a tracker internally, and some companies have even plugged their email system into their internal tracker to make this easier.
It is unsurprising that this gets so many upvotes since HN is where many go to procrastinate (myself included).
Hm. I never saw this as a bad attribute nor can I accept it as the reason for procrastination. Yes, sure. People work more for goals that are closer in time then for goals that are further away. But that is not irrational, nor is it the reason for procastination. First let me explain how I see the procastination thing and then let me say a word or two about why I think that temporal discounting is something rational and useful.

Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward. The thing is, that "not procrastinating" is considered work, thus related with stress, concentration and energydepletion. So "not procrastinating" has a cost, which humans overestimate. There is some research (that I can't quote right now, but psychological material here on HN often cites some good sources about that) that people value a cost of an objective value X around 2 or 3 times higher then a reward of the same objective value (so losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good). So most humans prefer instinctively to avoid or minimize costs before they maximize the (stochastic) expected value of an action. Doesn't avoiding cost (stress, "work") seem much more reasonable then missevaluating the reward for procastination? Well, what the truth is can nobody know, because the science also doesn't know yet. But for me it sounds way more reasonable, especially because I know how much I like to not work and to have no stress compared to getting anything done.

So, now why do I think that temporal discounting even is a good thing? Time can change the reward we gain from an object. An object might increase or decrease in value over time. With money we can even be sure that it decreases over time. Also our preferences might change according to our changing situation. Whatever we do now, we can be sure that our situation will be very different one year in the future. And last but not least, the risk increases drastically, that we don't get any reward at all. Dying in a car accident is a very unlikely thing if you sit at home in front of your comuter now. But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore. All risks increase with a bigger time frame. All this leads to a situation in which gaining something now makes it much more rewarding then gaining it somewhere far in the future.

I think the big problem about that article is that it mixes truth with false assumptions. For example saying humans act irrational is true. It is also true that humans discount rewards over time. But both doesn't mean time discounting is something irrational. This article shows clearly that having some right arguments doesn't make your assumption correct. (this might also be correct to say about my arguments)
`let` is good but please, give me `let ... in` too:

let callback = function(a, b) {
// ...
} in
object.registerCallback(callback);
Job ads are a valid indicator of programming language acceptance
And they are building something else themselves? The hell
No. Not all the users are real. Companies employ various methods to create the illusion of activity on their dating sites. You also have to account for spammers/scammers. If you want a more realistic gauge of activity, then take any user number (currently online, total, in your city, etc.) and divide it by 10. At any given time only one tenth of the user base is active and legitimate.

My source: I worked for an online dating company for 2 years.
In my condo, I can see between 15 and 20 other wifi routers belonging to my neighbors. Every single one of them is password protected. I doubt any of them are talking to one another.

Surely there is room for improvement here?
"... he was forced to solve the riddles himself, rather than plucking the accepted solution from a textbook ..."

The thing is, the textbooks also have all the things that didn't work or don't work well. Even some educated graphics programmers often fail to understand that representing 3D objects is just a data representation and transformation problem. Sure, a hard one, but there's nothing magic about it. Representing the data as a bag of "atoms" instead of polygons just isn't a breakthrough. The problem is still spacial search. The problem is still a simulation of optical physics. Graphics is just an optimization problem now. Attend an IEEE conference and maybe 5% of papers will be new theory, the rest will be about effective optimization techniques.

When someone comes to you and says "I have this awesome idea because I didn't read anybody else's ideas", just walk away.
Multiplayer in ImpactJS mobile games via PubNub
I won't join into the chorus about marketing being the key (it really is), but I did see this: "We're the creators of the critically-acclaimed iOS game, '100 Rogues'". I bought that game on sale for iOS -- after it had been updated a few times -- and I'm not sure what "critically-acclaimed" means. It had bugs out the wazoo, barely any variety in items/monsters/levels, and its non-standard UI had frustrating quirks.

If you have neither a polished product nor any real marketing, is it truly any wonder you're not selling well?
Read the ruling, it's very fuzzy, there were choices and the end decision was to declare primacy over national laws.

My point is the ramifications of this ruling are huge even though member states are presently passing laws in direct contradiction with this ruling.

Let's be clear here, I hate the Digital Economy Act. But I want my parliament to repeal it.

As much as I hate the idea of SOPA, as much as I hate the digital economy act, as much as I love privacy and vehemently argue for it, this is a very, very worrying ruling for anyone who values democracy.

As Switch says in the Matrix, "Not like this... not like this".

Perhaps (quite obviously from the d/vs) I didn't say it right or this is not the place to say it or perhaps you think I'm misunderstanding complex laws that I am definitely not even a novice in, but this is how I feel.
My parents are running Linux now, but when they were on Windows, I just changed the Firefox shortcut's icon to be the IE icon. I didn't change anything else (not even the text below the icon from "Mozilla Firefox" to "Internet Explorer"), but my parents of course didn't notice.
Valid points, but entirely unrelated to the UI of deletion review, or the best possible contribution from Sullivan as part of this topic.
Desktop Wallpapers 2012 Free Download your desktop background
X86 kernel build chain - how bzImage gets created
Groupon v. Netflix Stock Chart
Batch Thumbnail Generator w/ Drag and Drop support
- Tug on images to resize them, or enter a specific width and height.
- Crop images "to fit", or "to edges", or not at all.
- Center the image horizontally & vertically, or not at all.
- Add a background color to your outputted images, or transparency.
- Export batches of thumbnails in JPEG or PNG format compressed into a .zip package.
>but some company will be able to win big by helping people meet new people.

I'm finding Google+ is oriented around that. It's basically Twitter, where you can meet people on the network without knowing them IRL first, but with longer more substantial conversations.
Do Startups Need PR Agencies?
Or, over a million people will.

"Today, there are over a million T-Mobile customers using unlocked iPhones on our network," [T-Mobile USA Chief Marketing Office Cole] Brodman continued. "We are interested in offering all of our customers a no-compromise iPhone experience on our network."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/smart_phones/23...
The rise and... rise of Bitcoin
Yup. It’s really unfortunate.

I prefer to opt out of YouTube’s HTML5 mode and use the YouTube5 extension to achieve a similar effect. It also has the added benefit of avoiding the Flash player on videos where YouTube chooses not to use the HTML5 player.