skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"75%...drivers...filesystems...it does seem to be getting quite bloaty"

Does the code that supports those drivers and filesystems slow the overall system down in any way? If not, how can you call it "bloat"? Bloat in this context generally means additional code that is out of proportion to its functionality while also using a disproportionate amount of memory and diskspace. There is legitimate bloat in the linux kernel but suggesting that that has anything to do with the variety of hardware support is to misunderstand the meaning of the word. Oh yeah, YMMV
Remember during the build up to the Iraq war (2003) when a dossier used to justify the war was revealed to have copied portions of a graduate student's essay?
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/529

Think of how information is gathered for any kind of group/commission report...often through the use of assistants of varying skill in information-processing. It's not surprising that some number copied out of context from an out-of-date op-ed would be repeated ad nauseum.

Paper reports aren't easily hyperlinkable to ensure accuracy of their sources.
It is a reasonable thing to assume that money on your bank account is yours. Therefore they should at a minimum cover any and all damages their mistake has cost him.
IP adresses are only easy to spoof if you do not intend to receive any ACK packages (or any other reply from the target, like web pages with phone numbers on them). For everything else you need the cooperation of a rogue ISP on the shortest path between the target and the legitimate owner of the address block, or a peering with well connected networks that allows you to mess with BGP, which would be hard to hide and probably cost you your peering agreements.
I actually enjoy this, but it makes something unbalanced in the top bar. The "search box + more" is aligned with the centered text, but the 'more' button color makes it disappear layout-wise. Coloring it the same as the search button would make it more button-y and would overall balance the layout more.

Other design nitpicks:

- the search button is green on the home page but blue on the results page (while the goose knot is still green).

- the menus like behind the 'more' button feel out of place (weirly sized, lacks padding and all). They do not 'flow' enough out of the buttons so they feel floaty and disconnected to their trigger.
That's a really great write up. It sounds like you were new to web programming as well.

How difficult was it to learn the principles of web development? Did you just learn that in the background as you learned Django?
I'm starting to wonder if the people behind these sorts of projects (eg. old console emulators written in JavaScript, this, etc.) are insane or if this is all some sort of epic trolling for lulz.
a quick google search turns up https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...

there is a "sign up" button on the bottom. i don't know how it can be claimed that is invite-only. maybe in the UK?
1. of course, I completely forgot about the original scrolling for some reason.

2. I agree with you, but by itself a list is not any better for comparing rows. It's only better in the edge case where you can display the two rows on the same screen in the list but not on a pager, and even then it's visually hard to get the job done.
Apple Suspends iPhone 4S Sales in Mainland China Stores
I enjoyed the article, never liked the term startup vs business, and nothing (not even hn) can really prepare you for what to expect when you actually go for it and start one.

But it's not a game. When people's businesses (even startups) fail, there's real harm done, maybe harm that will take years to repair. I guess when it's OPM who cares... but that attitude can be a precursor to irresponsible spending/investment and there seems to be a bit of that going around these days.
Prolog might be a "logic programming" language, but the flow control is explicitly based on backtracking. Each possible solution for each statement is iterated, one at a time, and the results are fed into the next statements. The program is basically run as a search through the constraints in depth-first order. http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas02gw/prolog_tutorial/prologpag...
PS. I'm forced to use IE so misspelling are not caught.

Use this:
http://www.afterthedeadline.com/download.slp?platform=Bookma...
Let's face it though, no music quite conjures up the feeling of Geocities like a terrible midi version of a beck song.

Should have included a few "under construction" GIFs too IMO.
> Because software companies have shown repeatedly that it's possible to bring something innovative to market for much less than $1M,

That wasn't the question, and isn't relevant unless you're claiming (1) that all software costs less than $1M or (2) you'll allow software patents for things that cost more than $1M to produce.

The first is clearly false while the second doesn't make sense.

> Manufacturing and marketing a new physical device

Ah yes, marketing. Are you claiming that software is inherently inexpensive to market? If so, you just told me that you think everything is web-based eye candy. Enterprise doesn't work that way, neither does medical, and so on.

> I think it is fair to say that producing a software widget will almost always involve less initial overhead than a hardware widget, especially at market scale).

But, is the difference significant compared to the other costs? (Having been involved in both, I think that the difference is a lot smaller than is required for your argument.)

Thank you for your comments.
To The MPAA, All Critics Are Pro Piracy
The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers
Btw, it is possible to suspend Unix processes from the command line by sending them the SIGSTOP signal.

;playing a song with iTunes
$ ps ax | grep iTunes
401 ?? S 5:29.21 /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes -psn_0_213044
$ kill -STOP 401
;the song stops playing, and iTunes's CPU usage drops to zero
$ kill -CONT 401
;the song resumes exactly where it was

I've done this to, say, Firefox, and resumed it sometime later with no ill effects that I've been able to detect. (Firefox usually has a secondary Flash plugin process; the interaction between the two when one is suspended is kind of interesting, but seemingly benign.)

I've found this useful when I've wanted to throttle some application's CPU/other resource usage (usually on a laptop) but didn't want to completely quit it. Also it's just kind of awesome.
Aye, I'd be sorry to work against your fun :)

I see touch scrolling as a great implementation of the wrong solution.
How much time does he spend every day to read them? I'm always impressed by people who tell me they read a book in a few days. I understand that one can learn to read faster, but for non-technical books this always lead me to be unable to clearly envision the world it is taking place in. Just like a narrated movie.
Even if I slow down I often can't remember the names and places in the book.
In two hours I might read about 50 pages. Far too slow to even stand a chance doing the same challenge he does.
That really rubbed me the wrong way as well: it sucks that now something as unloaded as doing your best and hard work has become a politicized Horatio Alger statement about how the right mindset can achieve anything regardless of where you come from.

My first reaction was to want to say that the reporter should ask her opinion on if anyone can achieve great things regardless of their station in life, but that goes too far in the other direction. Instead the article should just state the facts about how she has achieved what she did without trying to discern any political or moral points from it.

Apart from the meta stuff, she sounds awesome. I usually grumble at these things because privilege plays such a big role--and who knows, maybe she has her own form of privileges that aren't represented by homelessness--but she managed to beat the odds. Good for her.
All PDFs, Docs, PPTs etc submitted on HN have the [scribd] link by default[1]. It's a way for people to view the document on their browser without having to download it first (there are still browsers out there like Firefox on OS X that do not have an in built PDF viewer)

[1] - http://www.scribd.com/doc/50406482/Hacker-News-Integrates-Wi...
I implemented Stripe for BCC, too, as an experiment. (I was going to milk a blog post out of it, but all my A/B tests so far have been pushes versus using Paypal, so it wasn't important enough to write before Christmas and I've been swamped since.)

It is every bit as easy as Justin says. BCC's integration was in production in 3 hours, including the wholly-new purchasing flow that my site required to support it. No hitches since then at all.

P.S. I am not unhappy in any way about Paypal, I just experiment with things all the time.
How to: deal with your Corporation Tax (UK)
One thing I don't get... someone please enlighten me..

If a VC puts money and a startup doesn't get acquired, or goes to an IPO, but becomes profitable, the VC doesn't get anything, right (assuming no dividends)?

So making profit in that sense is still not considered success. So there's some validity to the idea that startups are a game. You're betting on a bigger fool acquiring it, whether it's another company, or the public market. Sort of like buying stocks.
Red-wine researcher charged with photo-editing fraud
I've used Flipboard when it came out. I found it excellent but didn't get much value from the kind of content that it would produce for me back then, so it didn't stick. Part of me wonders if their success comes specifically because they didn't feature any scrolling.
Not a grammar issue, it's a colloquialism. I used this phrase all the time.

"My old roommate really turned me on to the Wire. What a great show."
"Learn To Code, Get a Job" According To CNN
I suppose Google spider is already ruled out?
Luke Dashjr throws book at SolidCoin
You're being downvoted because you have a very strong opinion and are providing no information to support it. What's so evil about Google? Open-sourcing Chrome? Personalizing search results? Free email hosting?

(I'm not being sarcastic with these examples. Gmail was terrible for Hotmail -- it was a lot better and nobody wanted Hotmail anymore. Chrome is similar; it gained traction a lot faster than Firefox, and is stealing developer mindshare. If you are Microsoft or Mozilla, I can see how this might be "evil". But if we compare it to the Holocaust...)
Which search engine do you use? The ones I've tried all have silly names: Google, Bing!, Duck Duck Go, Blekko...
I think the problem with the official site result is that offical site element is smaller than the others which makes me think that it is less important and less relevant to the search. Some description text or something else should be added to official site element to make it more notable.

Also I am wondering if DDG has a plan to add suggestions to their search. I use suggestions a lot in Google search and it would be nice to have them in DDG also so that transtion from other search engines to DDG will be smoother.
Looks more like a UK alternative to Dwolla (https://www.dwolla.com/)
In his latest remarks to the press, Representative Smith is still citing a $100 billion dollar figure as the cost of piracy to the US economy.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/13/us-usa-internet-pi...

*edited spelling error.
I think the saddest thing i'll read all day is this quote from the top paragraph...

"An often overlooked feature of C# (and OO programming in general) is the use of abstract classes to maximise code re-use."

Excuse me while I go weep for the poor folk for whom this applies
etc includes big govt folks too. Since they're both more numerous and more powerful than enfironmentalists.

However, I don't see the atheist connection. Yes, some atheists are big govt types, sure, some do, but "sacrifice for the stranger because ..." doesn't seem to be an essentially atheist characteristic.
As an aside, there's a good business idea hidden in this: a website monitoring service that monitors for scrapers, showing you hit rates for IPs, which countries, user agents, what pages, etc. Sends you a SMS or email when it detects a scraper and you can take action.
If Mocality's assertion that the only way to directly build a directory of Kenyan businesses is boots on the ground, then either Google must put boots on the ground or build their directory indirectly.

Let's assume that Google chose to put boots on the ground - what then is the most efficient way for those people to build a directory? It seems to me that utilizing Mocality's existing directory would at least be considered - Google's modus operandi has always been aggregating whatever is on the web and presenting it as their product.

"Getting Kenyan Businesses Online" is a Google project and among it's partner benefits are:

Opportunity to offer relevant value-added
products/services that bolt onto the Google offering
in support of SMB business growth

Ability to run own events and drive participation
across own customer base co-branded with Google

[http://www.kbo.co.ke/partnerbenefits]

The Next Web's Coverage of Google's kickoff stated:

According to Google, together with its partners, “GKBO will provide free or subsidized services to help businesses to use web and internet technologies. This includes supporting organizations that provide assistance for small and medium businesses, as well as other industry organizations that are aligned with the aims of the initiative.”

Note that the services are not necessarily free and that Google will partner with whoever it sees fit.

[http://thenextweb.com/africa/2011/09/12/google-launches-prog...]

There's nothing in the allegations which is inconsistent with Google's M.O. of aggregating other people's data on the web and encouraging people to put more information online.
What's the best cloud based hosting service?
AWS, Rackspace, Joyent? Something else?

I use ec2, but would like something with lower network latency. However, this is a general comparison, so feel free to discuss based on all aspects of your experience.
But "google" is pretty normal, right? Or "yahoo?" Or "bing?"

Your point is well-taken, but I think it's just a matter of normalizing the name. Granted, "duck, duck, go" doesn't roll off the tongue as smoothly as the other services, but I'm not sure that's a critical issue.
If TOIL is in your contract, to remove it later presumably results in a break (and perhaps resigning) of your contract. If you continued to work for them after that, I guess the old contract would still apply since you never signed a new one. Which means you should get TOIL. So I think he's right to whine about that.

You can't just summarily change peoples contracted working conditions without notice and proper consultation. There are legal processes to follow to do that. It doesn't look like they did those. And it does look like they broke the EWTD by letting (and a case could probably be made to say encouraging) people work crazy hours.

So yes, I agree they should have seen this coming and got out before it got this bad, but that's kind of what the laws there for. To protect the people who didn't.
Seems a little too clumsy for Google. I WILL say, though, that their PR handling of late makes them more vulnerable to this kind of BS. "Don't be evil" only works if you aren't, well, EVIL.
I am torn between following the coding conventions that prevail in a particular community (a generally reasonable thing to do) and (as a long-time JavaScript user) disliking nearly every new JS convention the node developers have settled on.
I have to say, why such loud mouseover effects? It's distracting to have all these boxes popping in and out as I scroll through the results. I get that you're trying to show that the click area is that big, but it impairs readability--most of the time while using a search engine I am reading very quickly. Perhaps some people leave their mouse off to the side when they scroll, but many people "think with their mouse," pointing at stuff as they look at it.

I would personally tone them down to just the underline appearing on the result link (where that activates for the big click area, and not just when mousing over the link within the big click area).
Very cool! If you added a Twostroke adapter to ExecJS (https://github.com/sstephenson/execjs), the ruby-coffee-script gem would work without modification.
No surprise: if people want something, and you lower the price, they will usually consume more of it.

That might lead to greater profits if the growth in sales volume exceeds the reduction in profit margin. Or it might not. That relationship is called the price elasticity curve; every product has a different shape and optimization point. Learning the shape, and picking the optimization point, is a huge part of selling something.

But the key point is that it is the right of seller to place themselves on that curve. LogMeIn Ignition is $30 in the iOS App Store. Obviously they would sell more copies if it was 99 cents, but they've chosen their pricing strategy. Does the mere existence of greater demand make it ok for people to pirate that software instead? I don't think it does.

It's obviously true that there is not a 1:1 relationship between piracy and lost sales. But it's also not a 0:1...some pirated copies are in fact lost sales. And, what's lost in talking about this equivalence (or lack thereof) is the damage to the pricing strategy of the seller--even the copies they do sell will necessarily be lower on the price elasticity curve because piracy increases the volume.
Not sure why people are pooh poohing this story or making it out to be something it's not -- it's just a great, inspirational story.

Especially vs. the Thiel 20 under 20 thread yesterday where there was a lot of discussion (and admitted jealously) about the fellowship winner's likely advantages -- and the simple fact that most people who participate in this stuff know about it and are able to get neat research gigs run mostly by professionals because their parents are well-to-do and academics (I know, as a kid whose dad is a math prof).

I'm inspired. I'm reminded of the team of high school students (underrepresented, low-income) who beat MIT in a robotics competition.
Android sukses di pasaran
Canada also requires photo ID at gate on domestic flights
Or just someone pretending to work for Google. Conmen do that sort of thing all the time.
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I think it's great. It's not the "normal" UI that people expect - and that's a good thing. Google defined what everyone seems to be calling normal. If people make the switch to DDG they'll understand how the results work and what to expect.
Thanks for the suggestion.

On the search button: on the homepage it goes with the logo tie more, but on the inner page all the green makes it look too much like Christmas. And then in testing, people generally actually liked how it changed (a bit fresher). However, this could be a target for another setting.

On the menus, they will be redesigned.
Google's initiative explicitly allows co-branding...ymmv as to what that means depending on if you are in Kenya or Arkansas.

http://www.kbo.co.ke/partnerbenefits
Not to get too far off-topic, but you're doing the exact same thing:

> -if- Google is doing what someone pretending to be Google is apparently doing

We don't know if it was Google or someone pretending to be Google. However, to make jontas's statement neutral:

> The post mentions that the alleged Google team was violating their T&Cs:
Anyone know when we can expect this in the UK?

I've heard good things about Stripe so far but as much as I know it's only available in the USA at current
CasperJS - a navigation scripting & testing utility for PhantomJS
Has Stripe fixed their webhooks so that they re-POST when the endpoint is down? They can't be compared to IPN until they implement it reliably... without that you have to manually reconcile Stripe's data with your own database to be sure you haven't lost a post during brief downtime, network glitch, transient application or proxy error...

> Setting up a merchant account usually takes weeks and requires hours of paperwork to be filled

That's a bit of an exaggeration... I've worked with 3 different merchant service providers underwritten by 3 different banks, and none of them took more than 2 days to approve an application, and the applications were like two pages long... 10 minutes to fill out. Names and socials of the principals of the business, estimated ticket size and monthly volume, description of your business, signature, date, send.

If you have the volume, that extra percentage point Stripe will shave off your gross sales is a lot to throw away.

They're a neat company with a neat API, but they're firmly in the "backup plan" category for me.
That suggestion reminds me of Ali Dia, the very limited footballer who ended up playing a game in the English Premier League after Southampton signed him on doubtlessly generous wages without bothering to check whether the call from legendary George Weah recommending his "cousin" was genuine, or whether a player called Ali Dia had ever played internationally for Senegal or Liberia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Dia
Who is supplying the sponsored links? There isn't anything on ddg that gives any information other than this:

http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216405-m...

Gabriel, how does someone purchase a sponsored link?

Edit: Appears that this is going through msn if you look at the URL that is generated.
I have to disagree. DuckDuckGo + keyboard is great for searching docs, Stack Overflow, etc., and the box helps me navigate with j/k.
Using OpenType font features with CSS 3
That is also the convention from Common Lisp, Scheme and (I believe) Ruby.

As for it causing bugs, bugs are like cancer -- they are caused by everything.
Agreed. Its mind boggling to think about all the technologies a modern web developer is leveraging when they work on their projects and without these lower-level technologies their job would be much harder and less productive.
Scribd also requires logging in before being able to download, so it's accurate enough.
"You broke the law, but I'll ignore that if you let me keep the money you accidentally overpaid me"?

That's extortion and he needs to get better legal advice.

In general if someone makes an accidental overpayment to you it's not your money. Especially if you do not promptly let them know about it.

I suspect he's going to have to give them the money back. And he's going to have to forfeit any interest he earned on that money. And then he's going to have to pursue any other dispute separately.

The stuff about allowing other people to swipe him in and out of the building was really stupid: he shouldn't have let that happen and he certainly shouldn't be writing it in a letter of dispute.

He does have my sympathy though - working for bad bosses sucks.
That is common in the Common Lisp and Scheme communities.

So it is actually really old.
This is totally wrong. They are right to try and reclaim overpayment if it actually occurred.

This refers to deducting wages from future pay packets but the principle is the same. You owe them if they make a mistake.

http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/index/your_money/employment_in...
Could anything like this ever happen in the UK?
"Who cares what a group of people think"

Everybody. Every single person who has ever existed and every single person who will ever exist.
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