skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very nice job. I like the 'no need for more government' tack. This is the language that catches people's ears. If I don't understand the issue, my first impression in "Looks like the government is keeping these smart tech kids down."

I think one or two more simple 'take-aways' would help. I also think people want to know why a company Facebook would be against SOPA. If they understood that in the form of a simple example, that would go a long way. Everyone uses Facebook.

Really great job. Very articulate. I would have added 50 ums. :/
I'd be really interested to see how Mustache does in real world performance vs., say, PHP or Ruby templates. I'm also curious about using it to offload rendering to the browser, particularly when using Ajax or UI binding.

While Mustache sometimes seems like a solution in search of problem, I do like that it's completely logicless, and so forces all logic, even display logic, into the controller.
The Santorum "problem" link is a Google bomb.

You can call ANY attempt to game Google's SERPs a "media campaign, just like any other". Spam is spam.
"According to Cornell scientists, it’d take a machine 18,600 miles long to produce a time mask that lasts a single second."
Terrorists meet in your backyard, government takes your house.
Obsolete is a strong word. What happens in these industries is that they get split into the high-end (organic farming, small order manufacturing) and the mass-production low-end. Yes in many ways margin have fallen but overall production has gone up, way up.

That being said - retail seems to be our generation's victim.
In the last decade, we've replaced media consumables with digital equivalents. This alone has mostly killed music, book, and movie rental stores. It's not just retail stores but retail services - tax prep, insurance, and financial services. Some of this took place in the 90's, but it continued in the 00's and it will continue in the 10's.
Google already states its intention to tune its SERPs so that they answer the questions users likely intend to pose when they type a search in. Google is already in the business of judging search intent.

The "dangerous precedent" you're talking about was set by the Google web spam team a long time ago.
Very true. Anyone who could confidently boot up a computer had a that geek cache/tarnish.

Is there an example of expectations changing around programming or automation, specifically? Programming, as opposed to computer literacy.

I suppose what I'm wondering is, why is there such a barrier to programming? People are more and more comfortable with complex apps, but not really more liable to fire up some kind of text editor... It's quite a jump to make on your own, I think -- say, going from Excel formulae to VBA macros, or using a WYSIWYG HTML editor to coding JavaScript.
I have to think about the security of my business. The way to get me to stop running my own SMTP and IMAP is to provide a service which is:
- auditable (our stored messages by us; the whole system by a third party)
- reliable (99.9% uptime, that's not so awful)
- resilient (if you lose a server or a data center, I shouldn't have to worry about it. Ideally I don't notice anything except perhaps a slowdown)
- guaranteed (with a hefty bond against security issues and another one against prolonged downtime, not a pro-rated refund)

Those are the gotta-haves. If you provide a secure clearinghouse to talk to our clients and vendors, that would be a major selling point. It has the chicken-and-egg problem, of course, but also the network value effect.
> Google obsessively tweaks all manner of other links in the index

Via algorithm or manual intervention? I thought they were dead set against manual tweaks. I imagine their todo list of algorithm improvements is never ending, so I'm not too quick to judge them on this.

It is a PR issue for Google, though. If someone is searching for Santorum, there's a pretty good chance they're a cultural conservative. When they see listings like this at the top of the search results, do they come away with a worse perception of Santorum or of Google? I wouldn't vote for Santorum, but I didn't really like seeing "frothy mix of lube and fecal matter". C'mon, Google, I just ate.
Beyond the Uncanny Valley
Wouldn't a surgical mask and sunglasses do the same with less work? They have designer masks and sunglasses.
In which a fanboy attempts to justify his fanboyism.
Did your friend have any incentive to try it for themselves? For example, automating Photoshop using ActionScript? Maybe pro programmers like solving general problems, but professionals in other fields would be interested in solving things in just their domain.
Or advertising... (Hi, Tim!)
Given all of the distractions we have today, procrastinating is easier than ever. This is why I personally enjoyed this talk about "the battle between your present and future self" - http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_goldstein_the_battle_between...
OT but funny story I heard. The US Embassy in London wants to buy the land underneath it in Grosvenor Square. That bit of land is owned by the Duke of Westminster. He said he would gladly agree to sell them the land as soon as they returned his familys land in Virginia and New Hampshire that were taken in the 18th century.

I doubt it is even remotely true but funny nonetheless.
As expected, crazy hyperbole of an interesting scientific discovery that will have totally different applications.
He would have very little chance of getting that support included; HN's code is "markdown" in name only, and is hand-parsed.
There is one- http://www.visahq.com/ . The option in this article is for people who have already made the trouble to travel to the consulate.
Ask HN: Lisp as a first language?
Hey all I decided to learn Lisp as my first language is this a good idea and can it be used to make games like pacman and space invader?
It doesn't hurt that they have a 24hr propaganda network dedicated to repeating these catch phrases and sound bites over and over again.
I thought so too, but appending to a single string does even worse than reduce(:+):

add 2 0.390000 0.000000 0.390000 ( 0.390529)
+= 2 0.540000 0.000000 0.540000 ( 0.537450)

add 3 0.530000 0.000000 0.530000 ( 0.534131)
+= 3 0.760000 0.000000 0.760000 ( 0.752280)

add 4 0.660000 0.000000 0.660000 ( 0.668154)
+= 4 0.960000 0.000000 0.960000 ( 0.954727)

Code: https://gist.github.com/1562994
You can demand, but there are no circumstances under which they're obliged to comply. Even the copyright holder can't force that - the most they can do is win damages for infringement and prevent any further distribution.
Works pretty well for us (twitter.com).
Ask HN: Best book for learning advanced javascript
I am a front-end developer, and over the last few years I have become a bit fuzzy on my raw-javascript skills due to a heavy reliance on jQuery. After seeing some of the amazing stuff that node/backbone/other js frameworks are accomplishing, I think its time to dive in head-first to some more advanced JS. Any suggestions for books/sites/tutorials to put me in the right direction. Much appreciated!
> I know not all accelerators work this way, but some are retroactive for business closed in the period.

That definitely sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Wakanda Platform Intro Webinar
Funny Egg Photography
Creativity can be displayed on the most common things in daily life, such as eggs. Some crazy people went to paint funny expressions and even create hilarious scenes with just a pen and a camera. I had fun going through them and I hope you will feel the same too. Good day.
"Coding" isn't one thing. We wouldn't imagine that it makes sense to put a home "cook" whose idea of making a pie encompasses placing a can of premade pie filling into a premade pie shell in the same bucket as a chef with several Michelin stars under their belt. Coding has as much range and as many different roles as cooking does, if not more, but there doesn't exist a well defined set of labels enumerating such divisions of skill and specialization.

Certainly "coding" will increasingly become prevalent in more and more professions. But that says little about whether the coding equivalent of "chefs" will be more numerous or not.
Trojan Hack (USC vs UCLA hackathon)
Managing node.js dependencies and deployments
The battery time remaining will also drop by a factor of 4 or more. This is large enough that I don't think a more precise instrument is needed to determine that the effect is significant.
Didn't Google kill the 'miserable failure' google bomb of years ago?

If I were Google's team I would kill this just because it looks very bad for Google. Let's assume Santorum goes on to win the Republican Primaries and then the Presidency. Is President Santorum going to be receptive or agressive if someone from Google (or the search industry in general) turns up on their doorstep?

It's the sort of thing that stays with people for a long time, rightly or wrongly.

This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known.
Since it only supports emphasis, paragraphs and auto-recognizing links it's clearly not even remotely close to markdown, even in name.
> It's a great article, but I really, really despise the linkbait title.

Generally I feel the same. Although, I think exceptions can be made for articles with real content.
> You could say the same about any kid who inherits wealth

No, you couldn't. If your dad is a car salesman and makes a fortune, you can inherit his wealth, but not his recurring revenue (once he's dead he's not selling cars anymore).

Harry Potter books will continue to earn money for their author's descendants after her death, in addition to all the money they earned for the author directly (and which will have been inherited by her kids). That's a unique feature of intellectual property.
The obvious one is "The Good Parts" by Crockford.
http://www.virtualapple.org/montezumasrevengedisk.html
isn't that the definition of the small string optimization?

This is how the dinkumware implementation of std::string has behaved for years. The basic form of the structure is a buffer and a pointer. If the pointer is filled in, it points to a heap string and follows cow semantics. Otherwise, the buffer is used, accomplishing the small string optimization.

I suppose I should have elaborated more. It just feels like the OP is "discovering" the wheel.
The fundamental reason companies use commissions is because it shifts risk from the company to the employee. Companies that depend on salespeople tend to scale up with the number of feet you have on the ground. If you pay salaries, every employee increases your cost structure. If you depend on commissions, employees pay themselves or go hungry.

You can see this in an extreme form with car dealerships, where the salesmen are usually 100% commission. It's common for dealerships to have a half-dozen salesmen loitering on an empty lot, because they don't cost the dealership anything.
Gold for cash
There are many Cash for Gold companies out there online -- all claiming to "Pay the Best" - however, there can only be one company that actually does pay the most.
The analogy here to law is spot on. My dad and two brothers were lawyers; I grew up in an environment where getting pancakes for breakfast on Sunday required parsing statements made days earlier and finding contradictions between them and the statements being made now. Learning to think that way, however, is not just another skill in an infinite toolbox of possible skills, all of which are equal and each of which you can be proud of in a touchy-feely way. Learning to think, and talk, and conceive in advance what you'll do next that way is akin to learning the art of war. The adaptation to programming is pretty minor. Programming is mickey mouse lawyering. The beauty of law is that someone's actually right; there's a logic at work, and teasing out the convoluted threads is your job. I can dig it. If I liked people more, I'd do it. But to say it's a preference or a happenstance aptitude, rather than a learned, honed, bludgeoned and beaten-in skill, is to seriously underestimate the people who are good at it.
By definition from the webspam team, its not. Its SEO. Google bombs are getting someone else's site to rank.

[Citation: http://searchengineland.com/should-rick-santorums-google-pro... , about half way down]
s/Reward them with fun/Reward them with money/

It's ridiculous to expect more than 40hrs/wk from someone without fair compensation. Need more hours out of someone but can't afford to give them more money? Maybe they should be cofounders.

This of course with the assumption that 70hrs/wk @ 2 months is the equivalent of ~ 3.5 months of work at 40hrs/wk, which I don't buy.
`come up with specific solutions for the copyright problem and also acknowledge that copyright holders do have some legitimate concerns`

As Alexis said that's a problem for their industry. It's quite a false flag to say that the tech sites need to come up with a solution. Additionally, DMCA is already one solution.
Other analogies:

A car is used as a getaway vehicle in a robbery so the government goes after the car manufacturer.

A safety deposit box contains an illegal item, so the bank gets shut down.
AnnualCreditReport.com will do what you want for free but only once per year.

For $40 you can get a report from all 3 bureaus from Experian at any time. I did this once when I was renting an apartment and didn't come across any issues. http://www.experian.com/consumer-products/tribureau.html
Out of desperation, Google's gone evil. For all of the shady things that Google had done in the past that people said were evil, nothing approaches the infection of their search service with Google+ rankings. Google had always largely maintained the integrity of their search product which, despite minor adulterations added over the years, was still essentially based on little more than a strict, normative interpretation of the HTTP and HTML standards. By doing so, they maintained the integrity of the company itself. The standards now take a back seat to Google+.

The author is spot on about this. It's evil. In my estimation, it's disrespectful to users. And it therefore creates a huge opportunity for Bing, et al. What remains to be seen is whether, on balance, this degradation of the search service is significant enough to drive away a substantial number of users.
I see, thank you. I'm not entirely convinced, but it sounds plausible enough. I'm no expert, though.
The specific amount of fuel in the tank is a number that I would think most people wouldn't really care about.

Some cars will give you calculated "miles/km till empty" based on average mpg calculations, which is arguably at least a semi-useful metric. My car gives me a vague gauge until I get close to zero, and then it gives me a marginally more accurate countdown from 1.0 gal to zero.

I think the reason that most fuel gauges are so vague is that fuel levels rise and fall pretty erratically, which would make a very specific gauge give you bad information at least as often as it would give you good. Fuel levels are usually measured with some type of float, and depending on if you were travelling or parked on an incline the float could register a fairly large swing.

In an old Honda I drive once in a while I could see the fuel gauge swing more than 1/8 of a tank depending on what direction I parked it on my sloping driveway (nose down or nose up).
The second you've got a legitimate hit series only on Netflix, or a direct-to-Amazon smash hit, or a Facebook series...

Netflix is trying this on Feb. 6 with a new original series, "Lilyhammer."

The trailer: http://youtu.be/bfRgVbp9gSY

Steven Van Zandt of "The Sopranos" and Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band is back as a Gangster - this time in Norway...

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/a-netflix-original-s...
I agree - Namecheap reported over 32,000 domains transferred to them on the 29th Dec (http://www.namecheap.com/moveyourdomainday.aspx), but this isn't reflected in the chart. Since those are just numbers from one registrar, I'd expect the overall number of transfers out to be higher.
Same with here in CA. Both Feinstein and Boxer are PIPA co-sponsors.

http://sopatrack.com/lookup?lat=37.7825297&lng=-122.4068...
Not a book but a end-to-end JavaScript platform. I would recommend looking at the Wakanda platform (www.wakanda.org). Wakanda will let you develop with JavaScript from end-to-end. Your database are JavaScript objects, your server side logic is JavaScript, your front end is a JavaScript framework. And you can design in the GUI or in the code editor.
I used to work for wnj. I asked him about vi.

His retort, "I wrote that when I didn't know how to program."

He uses Textedit (on a Mac) these days. (Emacs bindings, if you didn't know.)

He hasn't used vi in years.
MIME could use a redesign too. It's a ridiculously complicated format that makes encoding e-mails that contain anything besides "plain text US-ASCII" far more difficult than it should be.
I don't agree with this at all. Most of time, when I see charges of "fanboyism" it is when a person is attacking, or is known for attacking, the choices of others. For example, "You use Windows over Macs? You must like viruses". Or "You have an IPhone and not an Android, then you must not care about being open".

Most rational people will not get mad if someone loves a particular product. But they will get mad if someone is constantly insulting the product choices that they have made.

It's fine to love one product and not like another. But don't let condescension, even if it is subtle, come out while you are discussing it. That is what brings the blow back.
I agree that the puzzles are bad interview questions.

But if you want a _specific_ job, it's always a good idea to find out about the interview culture (if you can, it's almost impossible for small companies) and then prep for the interview at hand.

I guess that falls under "motivated enough" :)

If you want to be prepared in a general sense, get "How would you move Mount Fuji", a book on those interview puzzlers. The upside of most of those puzzles is that the answer is blindingly obvious once you read it the first time. So read that book, and you're done ;)
Wow! Thanks. I needed something like this. I just downloaded and skimmed "The compact Org-mode Guide" - and found myself getting overwhelmed.

On a side note, the compact guide is a good read if you are somewhat familiar with org-mode - they even provide links to some advanced workflows of some users.
I didn't know "Santorum" was a guy's name until years after it became a name for the sex term.

I believe Congressman Santorum screwed up big time and now has something moderately well known named after him. Such is life. The substance is literally called that now. Tough luck for the politician.
No work, no tech and no food? God help you if you ask her about politics or religion. She was hot, obviously. Sounds like a nightmare.
I have previously looked into ad revenue for mobile apps, and it suggests $1.00 for every 1,000 impressions.

http://makingmoneywithandroid.com/2011/05/first-month-on-the...

You could always price your app at 99c to begin with and see how you go?

It sounds like your app may be suitable in terms of impressions (kids will re-open the app more than once, to see more ads, etc).

But its an experiment I suppose. Try selling your app? See how that goes?

You can always decide to make it free and put ads on it, or vice-versa.
QMTP is a good start, if only because it's simple and 8-bit clean.

http://cr.yp.to/proto/qmtp.txt

Put inside CurveCP and a ton of security problems would also be solved.
I can pretty much guarantee that "I don't give a shit how my language works" is not something most employers like to hear.
In the comments the author of the article refers to a paper[1] that describes the system (Ludi) that they're using. They came up with 57 aesthetics criteria which they used on games played by humans and compared the scores on the criteria to the human judgements.

Based on this they picked the 16 best criteria and generated games. The fitness function is a score based on the criteria after n amount of automated playthroughs.
These generated games tested by humans and they found that the aesthetics criteria and human judgements correlated significantly.

Besides these criteria (they do not describe all criteria in depth but I assume some might be leaning towards being subjective in regards to the programmers preferences) they also add a restriction to how long the planning of a move for a game can take (15 seconds) and discarding the game if it surpasses this. Which as you say can be seen as designing the search space, but the results indicate that they've come up with a way to effectively measure the "fun" factor of the games they came up with.

[1] http://www.cameronius.com/cv/publications/ciaig-browne-maire...
It's a good philosophy to start from, but you can't have a career in sales without eventually being forced to push products that no reasonable person would believe in.

Perhaps I've been soured by the particular salespeople I've worked with, but I don't think it's a job that ethical or sane people thrive in long-term because there are eventually going to be situations where management expects results that can't be achieved without deceptive behaviour. Most of the successful salespeople I've known have been greedy, delusional, unethical, or borderline sociopaths. The really good salespeople are the ones that can hide it until a critical moment.
The risk you took makes everything else seem very mundane in comparison.
The article didn't really go into detail about the criteria, but there are some easily quantifiable things that are desirable in a game if it is intended to be played 'seriously' (like Backgammon or Go, unlike the games "We didn't playtest this at all" or Munchkin which are just trying to be fun instead of legitimately competitive. A minimal first player advantage, turnabout (ability for someone to come from behind), balance between skill and randomness in games with luck.

I think you could come up with metrics for interactivity, eg how much of it is 'goldfishing' vs choices that are notably different based on what the other player has done or will do. Dominion is an example where I think you could show that (for many configurations) an AI that ignores opponents actions would still win some significant portion of the time compared to an AI that takes it into account.