skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a bit of a bait and switch, you don't let people know that you think it is a "damn good tool" until towards the end. I'm ultimately neutral on this. It sort of works to keep your audience engaged with your writing, but is a bit of a cheap trick to not put all your cards on the table until the end of the article.

Oh, and when you are writing you are almost always writing for an audience -- esp. when you tweet the result right afterwards and show up on Hacker News to discuss it.
Lots of these new technologies are still in the tech demo phase, exploring the possibilities. Many of these demos, including this one, serve no practical purpose beyond saying "Hey, check out this cool new feature". When these technologies are actually used in applications, they will be used as progressive enhancements: if your browser supports them, you'll see some neat visual flair; if not, the app will still work and you'll never know you are missing something.
Interesting question. After some consideration, I think it depends on whether we are using an optimizing compiler(!) or not.
mooki - If you do a survey, you'll find that maybe 1 in a hundred people have even heard of direct connect. It may be the case that all of your friends were using it - but in the scale of 250 million americans, I would be shocked to discover that more than 2.5 million of them indicated they had used Direct Connect to share a movie.

The RIAA/MPA and friends are concerned about the 247.5 million people - less concerned about the 2.5 million people.

It's why Usenet basically contains every single media property of interest - the decent search engines for it are pretty much buried in the blacknet, and will stay there, out of sight of the 99%.
Didn't work for me in Chrome, but it worked in IE. Figures eh?
Bro, you get parallel operation anyway, that Fibur.pass just added scheduler overhead.

The whole point of Fibur is you don't need to use #pass!!!
LXDE and XFCE - the other desktops
> The problem with "practical application" questions is that the answer almost always comes down to "it depends."

Agreed. Talking about application of theory is way too vague and leaves way too much room for bs. But I think my original point was unclear. I'm not suggesting that interview questions be "When would you use a linked list?" but rather "Let's hack on something using a linked list (something beyond just simply reversing it)." Like the article mentions, once you've built a linked list before and have optimized (and reversed) it to death, there's little to be gained from doing it again for somebody else.
Most LaTeX question are not programming questions, so they get shipped over to the TeX site. You'll likely get a better answer there than on SO (that's the whole point of creating all these sites). And as phwd said, all the content (answers and comments) also get moved.
You missed the rest of the essay, wherein Raganwald described how CoffeeScript “features” are a shorthand for common JavaScript design patterns, forcing everyone to use the same patterns in the same way. [In other words, he answered your specific comment at great length, rendering your criticism of one out-of-context quotation a bit weak, eh?]

Specifically, most major JavaScript projects have some kind of class implementation which makes inheritance, creating new classes, &c. easier. Some of these are quite elegant, but they end up being annoying anyway, because each system is slightly different. CoffeeScript takes one particular pattern (which is thankfully compatible with the expectations of Google's Closure compiler) and gives it a shorthand, so that everyone writing CS code will be on the same page.
Everything is available on the torrents/usenet. Everything.
Not everything is available through streaming (or even for sale)

Try and purchase Game of Thrones. I spent 20 minutes looking for a mechanism I could purchase it - no luck.
MetaCPAN Logo Contest
You're advocating a complete overhaul rather than iterative improvement. Complete overhauls are nice, but iterative improvements tend to work better.

Oh, you're scrounging for rags and ash to catch period blood? I have a machine here you can buy that will let you make napkins from tree bark. I'll even show you how to use it. That's not a subsidy, and it is very much improving the technology at their disposal in a very intentionally iterative way. This isn't a subsidy.

The same goes for teaching farmers sustainable practices. Much of the developing world's issues with hunger are due to poor land management, not a lack of technology. Buffer zones to prevent erosion and good irrigation need to be subsidized in the short term, but in the long term they're going to be self-sustaining.

In general, you're talking about this as if it's a straight giveaway. It's not. It's coming in and saying "you are having health issues/money issues/food issues because you are doing x, y, and z wrong. Here's how you can do it better." Some technology is definitely helpful. But western-style factory farming isn't the obvious solution for subsistence farmers, not by a long shot.
No, a really important feature of fascism is this hate component which keeps being omitted.

SOPA sucks, but it isn't driven by an ideology of the nation's renewal through purges of some undesirable class, return to cultural and religious fundamentals of the nation, pressing need to defeat communism and prove the nation's glory with war and occupations...

Whether or not the US is moving toward fascism in some way, SOPA is incidental to that - SOPA is nothing more than a big present to certain industries
Wikipedia was my first thought, but it's more encyclopedia oriented (naturally).

I was thinking something more along the lines of what they did with Scala:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/scala/info
I WANT THAT FUCKING CHOICE. Don't you DARE take away my fucking choice. I WILL CUT YOU! rages

[I exaggerate here, but I think my point is clear. Not every user thinks choices are a bug. I will switch away from any platform with less choice to any platform with more choice, every single time. And I am not alone.]
I had the same thought, but maybe our research would "feel" like a research. It would have forms, focus groups, funding, schedules... a very different situation than his, I presume.
These are all great points, Joel. Being in the middle of this myself, every title and summary I skimmed through are 100% vital to getting your startup off the ground. Nice consolidation!

Cheers, and best of luck!
AL
This is almost exactly evidenced by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3370428
awesome! thanks for the tip.
I see that in addition to choosing a title that displeased you, in responding to you I failed to make it obvious that I agreed with you somewhat. I didn’t say I don’t write for an audience, I said that I selected the title for my own amusement, and that it would be better in some ways to refrain from enjoying my own little joke.

Nothing you have said is wrong.
"You 'Da Boss?" Collective Creation
what's wrong w/ javascript? fill me in, because i for one totally love js the way it is.
The Truth About 2K, 4K and The Future of Pixels
Maybe they simply agree the question doesn't fit the SE model? I'm not saying the company running SO doesn't want it closed, I'm saying it's unfair to assume that's because it's "inconvenient" to them.
Passport Guide: Simple, unobtrusive authentication for Node.js.
My Startup - an Instant Search Enginge for Quotes; Please Give me Your Feedback
I feel bad saying this, because I respect raganwald greatly and I usually enjoy his writing, but this post is somewhere on the border between facile and false. For example:

> CoffeeScript has lots of more subtle transformations up its sleeve, like comprehensions, destructuring assignment, splats, or the "fat arrow" some rail against. Here's the secret to understand: None of these things are "language features" that compile from a language that has them—CoffeeScript—into a language that doesn't have them—JavaScript

Well, CoffeeScript does have these features, and JavaScript really doesn't have them. Would you describe JavaScript as a language that has them? Destructuring assignment doesn't exist in most implementations of JavaScript. It will have that feature later on, but it doesn't now. It also doesn't have comprehensions or splats. That's why the JavaScript that CoffeeScript generates doesn't just use JavaScript's syntax for these features — they aren't there. Instead, you have to do something else that gets the same effect.

This is also ignoring bigger changes, such as the fact that everything is an expression. That isn't true in JavaScript at all, and can't be mimicked with anything that even vaguely resembles it. You have to do what CoffeeScript does in the generated JS — constantly be storing intermediate values at the place where they're produced and assigning them afterward if you want to get a value out of most constructs (such as an if).

The two languages do correspond pretty closely, and that's intentional. But the same is true for C and machine language. If you think that C is just a shorthand for machine language, I guess you're welcome to your opinion, but you're pretty lonely with that one.

Any source language can be said to be a simple transformation of its target language, since that's what a compiler does. That doesn't mean they're the same.
Visualizing Device Utilization
And Dwolla would still cost HALF of what you pay.
Not disagreeing with you here at all--however, Heroku also has a generous free tier for their core services (and most addons).

In the next part of the series I'm going to elaborate on their pricing in comparison to Rackspace for my work project. Heroku is actually significantly cheaper for us, considering we don't have to spin up additional instances for backups, load balancing, etc.
I'm guessing by how this article on how to use UStream (sample advice: "While you're live, there will be a live chat from the fans that you need to engage with!") has already hit the HN front with 8 points in almost as many minutes, that we'll someday see a "How to Get 30000 HN Karma!" piece
> Find a way to transfer it where the conversation can continue to flourish.

That's exactly what happened. 99% of questions get answered on the LaTeX site. It's one of the best communities in the SE network. Compare that to only about 90% of questions tagged 'latex' getting answered on Stack Overflow. Not bad, but still better to migrate them to an active site dedicated to the topic.
In all my history of interviewing people, I've always found there's almost no info to be had in correct answers to any kind of question. You learn about a candidate once you guide them into territory where the fail.

Both where that line is, and how they handle the failure tells you a lot.

(Caveat: Make sure you're keeping it on the fail/no-fail edge, and you treat the candidate with respect. The point is not to show them that they're wrong, but to explore the boundaries of their skill set. Without being mean is a major goal here)

And if you can't push the candidate there: HIRE THEM. Right away. If they know that much more than you do that you can't get them beyond their limits, they are a fantastic addition to your team. (Provided they match personality-wise, too)
Because I'm not interested in downloading an app for every site or social network. If viewing a G+ post without having a dismal experience is going to require a dedicated app, then I'm simply not going to use G+ at all. That represents a really lame barrier to entry for alot of prospective G+ friends, so why bother? Particularly in the case of a social network, I expect the user experience on the plain old web, mobile included, to be a first-class concern.

For all the UI's clean, minimalistic pretenses, it's ultimately a hog underneath. If there is no adult supervision on the G+ team to prevent this mess happening, because after all people should just download the app or something, then again, I'm inclined to steer well clear of it.
Or just not as generalizable as you'd wish?
I'm not really impressed with RED cameras either. They're cheaper than any other higher resolution digital cameras because they traded spatial resolution for bit-depth. Red returned to a bayer-filtered CMOS array, abandoning the higher quality 3CCD sensors. RED has marketed to the higher ups that feel they don't need to listen to digital video engineers about signal quality, and its worked. About the limitations of bayer filtering: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3370690
I'm not deliberately de-normalizing figures. What?

What I did is a fair comparison and one of the main reasons Dwolla is already very popular for paying rent and for paying wages.

How can you chastise me for improper comparison when I used their most basic use-case, the one they're actively working on, and you bring up a completely unrelated benefit an employer provides for their employees.

Google can spend what they want, but that doesn't change the fact that $0.25/transaction is crazy for a businessman used to paying 3% of his business!!
Of course they do; it's the same semantics under the hood. CS is mostly different tokens plus some sugary shortcuts.

That doesn't mean that it's not OK to prefer it over JavaScript (or vice versa) if you find those differences make you happier about coding in it.
I don't see how this valid commentary on client side templates. In general, most implementations I've worked with store the markup in a script element so it is not rendered by the browser.
Apps sometimes appear to be reinventing bookmarks.
Where Are the Talent Shortages As We Start 2012?
They have it. But only for few selected partners.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/11/third-party-tools-to-hel...
Does It Feel Like Lego Bricks Just Keep Getting More Expensive?
Is this truly the core of the library?

https://github.com/tenderlove/fibur/blob/master/lib/fibur.rb

What am I missing...?
From Wikipedia:

A number of Cornellians have been prominent innovators, starting with Thomas Midgley, Jr. ('11),[287] the inventor of Freon. Jeff Hawkins ('79)[288] invented the Palm Pilot and subsequently founded Palm, Inc. Graduate Jon Rubinstein ('78)[289] is credited with the development of the iPod. William Higinbotham developed Tennis for Two in 1958, one of the earliest computer games and the predecessor to Pong, and Robert Tappan Morris developed the first computer worm on the Internet. The most direct evidence of dark matter was provided by Vera Rubin ('51).[290] Jill Tarter ('66)[291] is the current director of the SETI Institute and Steve Squyres ('81)[292] is the principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Eight Cornellians have served as NASA astronauts. Bill Nye ('77) is best known as "The Science Guy".[293]

Really, you should know the Robert Morris one off the top of your head at the very least.
HTML Comments: The Unlikely Solution to Valid DOM Bindings
FYI, Heroku also offers 750 free hours per-app.
Course material (lecture notes, projects, some have links to videos of lecture, &c). for every undergrad berkeley cs course is available for free if you know the website!

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html has links to all course websites and archives.

you can look at what courses descriptions here:
http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_list_crse_req?p_dept_nam...

the main courses are:

/cs61[abc]/ # intro cs

/cs70/ # discrete math

/ee122/ # networking with a cs bent in fall and an ee bent in spring

/cs160/ # ui

/cs161/ # security

/cs162/ # systems and os (not recommended right now; the class is going through a restructuring and completely sucks)

/cs164/ # compilers

/cs169/ # software engineering

/cs170/ # algorithms, this class usually doesn't have a website aside from homework assignments; i'd recommend just buying the textbook since its only $30 and the course very closely follows the entire text (save for the quantum chapter at the end)

/cs172/ # Computability and Complexity

/cs174/ # Combinatorics and Discrete Probability

/cs184/ # graphics

/cs186/ # databases

/cs188/ # AI

Lower division classes are numbered between 0 and 100, upper division classes are 100 to 199, and grad classes are 200 and up. A tens digit above 4 indicates a cs class, and a tens digit below five indicates an ee class.

To get to the archive for a class without having to navigate to the first link first, go to inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~<class>/archives
if you want to go to the most recent website, just remove the /archives.

EG, cs61's website archive is at http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/archives and http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a will redirect to the most recent course's website.
I love these techniques but wish they'd market themselves differently. This is hardly able to detect true relationships between variables---the false positive rate will likely be astronomical even with their MCMC p-value table on the website---but it is a more efficient way of exploring a high-dimensional data set than just comparing it blindly.

I think put in the camp with Hadley Wickham's Grand Tour methodologies, this is pretty interesting. Outside of that, it's just a well-marketed method jut waiting for failure.
I have some simple baseline questions I ask everyone. Getting it right just means we continue the rest of the interview, but doesn't get you a job.

I almost always have a programming question I just made up 30 minutes before the interview. I make sure that I can easily do it in 10 minutes and then ask it. It really isn't important to me if they get they answer, but I want to see what questions they have, and how they think. Good candidates will usually get it coded, but some may get hung up on something early on, but still make good progress.

If they come in with a precanned response to my question then they're either a mindreader or can time travel. In either case, I still went them on my team.
I remember when I had marketing questions, Joel answered me even though we had only corresponded on Twitter a couple times. I'm rooting for you dude! :)

Also, Buffer App is one of the only social media tools that I've really adopted in my day-to-day life. I use it every time I run into an industry article and it just goes on the pile of "to send". Brilliant! If you want to make Twitter a little easier, try out Buffer App
Online Anonymity, Warts and All
Would the internet really be a better, more civil place if anonymous comments were banned?
But I can't help feeling that you're needlessly limiting your applicant pool to only those who got a CS degree (and paid attention during the process).

Why is so much emphasis placed on the theory of how linked lists work (for example) instead of the practical application of where they'd be used?

Edit: Big O notation is great and all, but shouldn't the emphasis be more on shipping than optimizing? You can optimize your MVP to death, but if you never finish it what good does that do?

I feel the third paragraph here conflicts with the second one. In effect, understanding Big O would help you identify where linked lists are applicable. You seem to want to be given an exhaustive list of where they should be used. Sorry, but that's not how programming works.

Secondly, I take issue with the "limiting your applicant pool to only those who got a CS degree". If you're going to work in the CS field, I think its only normal you are asked question to see if you've got a grasp of the foundations of your job. You don't need a CS degree for that, there exists such a thing as self-study, and I think its a very reasonable thing to require if you're trying to transition between fields.
"....this process, starting from ~50+ raw leads whittled down into ~40 initial phone interviews/coding challenges, which went to ~25 next stage interviews, eventually down to ~6 really good offers, all in about ~1.5 weeks."

Does this timeframe seem a little dubious to anyone else? I count 65 technical interviews plus interviews with hiring managers, etc., followed by receiving offers. And all of this happening in about 8 days. This story would be a lot more believable if it had a realistic timeframe.
Yes , he may be able to optimize the cost of the napkins even further. But currently , they're cheap enough.

The real problems are marketing(which the article says is a huge problem) and distribution(which from what i read about india, is a huge problem too).

The franchise model seems like a good way to solve those problems, and from what i read about this stuff it's pretty common as a way to solve marketing and distribution in india.
IT Needs to Come Together as a Service Delivery Team
NYT: Apple secretly working on wearable, Siri-compatible computers
No no no, a thousand times no. It is the job of the Congress to understand the things it regulates! They employ thousands of "expert" staffers and are supposed to be drawn from among the best and brightest of the citizenry. It may be hard to believe, but details actually matter when you're screwing around with a $15T/yr socioeconomic machine.
I was flabbergasted that someone was asked implement a linked list in Ruby. My initial reaction was 'That is an incredibly stupid thing to do.' My slightly more in depth reaction was "Isn't that what mutable arrays are for?" And my final reaction was, "Maybe I'm missing something." At which point I tried to figure out the benefits of a linked list over a ruby array. I wasn't able to come up with a good reason to use a linked list in Ruby, but maybe someone could enlighten me.
http://projecteuler.net/problems is a nice source
Google out-Appling Apple at the browser
To elaborate on this: that's enough to run an entire website for free (excluding celery).

If you want to run a celery worker (including beat), you're looking at a total cost of 30$ per month. That's enough for most moderate traffic websites. :)
If that's all Zynga paid in underwriting fees they got a good deal.

There's usually a 7% commission for underwriting in the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/is-under.... Odd to be criticizing the underwriters for making too much money when they seem to have cut Zynga a rather good deal.
Does your company do a lot of back-end SQL updates / changes?
The company I'm currently at constantly has things "come up" where they have to "make an exception" and break the business rules to do something through the back-end in the DB that can't be done through the user interface. I understand this may happen once in a blue moon but here its a daily occurrence and always makes me nervous when asked to do these sorts of changes, just curious if this is common or rather unusual as its something I personally hate.