skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I really appreciate about good authors is their ability to clearly articulate ideas or impressions that I share, but am unable to express on my own. Or in other words, I love seeing these semi-conscious ideas floating through my mind assembled eloquently in language. I think this takes an enormous amount of skill.

I agree with French author Marcel Proust, who claimed "there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one sees oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt." We can learn what we feel by reading material written by others. We can develop our thoughts through the thoughts of others.

Of course, one shortcoming with this idea, and in my opinion, of literature in general, is that ultimately the author is not ourselves. Despite an authors ability to help us understand our feelings and enhance our sense of perception, there inevitably is a divergence in the particulars of our personal situations and those found in writing. Trying to mold our experiences into those of a book, in hopes of finding answers or guidance, is misguided.

Proust explains better than I can myself:

'It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role, at once essential yet limited, that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called 'Conclusions' but for the reader 'Incitements'. We feel very strongly that our wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to provide us with is desires... That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.'
Right now perhaps, but not in the future when this technology becomes commodotised, as all technology does.
They make a good point about how if there is too much employee ownership it could hurt growth because the capital base is not flexible enough and also employees might be less mobile. This does not assert their theory of not giving stock to employees.
The scary thing is that they are trying to get this passed without a vote in parliament.

But, unlike the USA, a vote in parliament is a rubber stamp of government's opinion, based on the party whip being used, and pairing with the opposition parties.
I'm curious - what sorts of work do you do in the data warehousing space? Do you work as a consultant, or as an implementor at a customer of data warehouse products?

It seems to me that that whole industry (DW & ETL) is a dinosaur whose lunch is about to get eaten by some upstarts.
> When considering a decision, elected officials may consult existing scientific literature, may commission scientific studies or polls on the issue, or request the public comments on their specific proposal.

You really don't know anything about elected officials.

Look at their backgrounds - how many of them can understand any of the sources that you propose?

And then there's the assumption that they're just deciding between competing proposals. They're often creating proposals.

> If they rely just on information provided by the richest, and which represents the interest of these richest groups, the politician's decisions will be suboptimal.

Since they don't, that's irrelevant. (It's easy enough to see that they're influenced by groups that aren't "rich". See AARP, Greenpeace, etc.)

It is important to remember that an elected official's job is to get elected and re-elected because anyone who doesn't do that doesn't do anything else either.
Personally, I would love to see Yonatan's explanations be made more official. I don't know if there are any plans for that (I write code for a living, I'm not in PR :-) )

Yonatan has a great thread going on in his personal account where he is responding to questions from users. He is the primary architect of both G+ and the new policy. I would recommend reading through it and posting your questions there (https://plus.google.com/u/0/103389452828130864950/posts/YJbz...)

I know that the team would appreciate real-world examples of names that are edge cases, or that would likely be false-positives in the current system.

As far as how they determine what it means to be "name-shaped", I'll just copy one of Yonatan's responses. I really recommend reading through the thread.

"OK, and now to answer the really damned tough question of "just how the heck do you define name-shapedness?" And I can't go in to too many of the technical details, but the zeroth-order answer is "using humans, boosted by computers." Humans look at names and flag things which look like they aren't names; anything which is flagged gets reviewed by lots more humans, cross-checked, vetted by people with cultural familiarity, etc. This process tries to err on the side of treating things as OK. (!) We also build up computer models to basically cache this and handle the "easy" cases automatically, since obviously having humans do everything doesn't scale. The goal is that most things which are marked as "not a name" are genuinely cases of something being meant as either a nickname or an organization; whenever the appeals process is triggered, and even more so whenever something passes an appeal, that's a sign that the first-stage check failed and we need to improve our rules. So then we can look at the pattern of appeals, see if there are classes of names which we are systematically getting wrong, and learn from this to improve the process and reduce the chance of someone being sent through it incorrectly."
> > If they are guilty of the charges against them

> And what is that?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3487808
The author has a very limited view of the function of universities. There was recent longitudinal study that confirmed what many of us who attended college already know: a vast number of people who attend college don't actually learn anything (particularly in the fields of business, education, social work and communication). [1]

If you get down to it, probably the biggest function of a university is social: if you majored in an engineering discipline, think about your industry connections. How many of them were classmates in undergrad? Elite universities have served as social hubs for the upper class for centuries and the networking function of college and university is invaluable. I'm not using this as an argument for keeping the existing university structure, but if the author really wants to make universities obsolete, he needs to think about how one might facilitate this and other functions. (I haven't even touched the subject of research, which many professors at R1 universities think of as their primary purpose, not teaching. "Teaching" is an unpleasant job you offload on adjuncts and TAs.)

We've had institutions that function like the ones that Matt Welsh envisions for thousands of years. They're called libraries.

[1] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_la...

edit: added citation ;)
Physical education teachers are not smart
Hands off my hen that laid the golden egg or ill shoot you.

No you cant have decision rights on the hen, you don't know what is best, now get back to work servicing the hen for minimum wage.

The powerful do what they can and the powerless suffer what they must. Propaganda on fairness, equality, merit and rank are just ruses. Power is the key, and those in power prevent others from getting more. The long winded justification on why this is good or evil is irrelevant.
What are your examples of historically successful democracies?
Obviously there is a belief that mobile technology is going to grow. The numbers today say are that Flash is 96% of users and HTML5 is 74%. If people didn't believe that the mobile segment was growing at an enormous rate, no business stakeholder would even consider HTML5.
Lobbying is a fundamentally stable thing. As you observed, the economic incentives to do it are strong. And lobbying is a very general thing. Truly blatant bribery is illegal, but there are many, many ways that someone with money can help a politician and communicate what they want in return. It's hard to imagine closing that off without massive collateral damage.

Hollywood, on the other hand, is vulnerable. They're a middleman in a world that doesn't like middlemen. If we destroy them once, they won't come back.
Motorola?
Though I've always been annoyed by Flash, during the Apple/Android/Flash brouhaha I was sure that Jobs was making a mistake by shunning it. I was wrong.

It's a year or two later now and nothing stirs disappointment quite like the realization that that giant, black, unresponsive rectangle on a website is Flash bringing the Android browser to its knees. I have never seen a game that successfully used Flash on the browser. There is nothing more detrimental to the web browsing experience on Android than running across a page with Flash content.
Dremel is mostly used for SQL-like queries in logs processing while Tenzing is largely used to run SQL-like queries on BigTable.
Amazing; I wonder how the webcam allowed him entry to the building and her apartment (which of course could not have happened without the webcam). I'm as tinfoily as the next guy, I have my webcam covered with a post-it, and I think the issue is serious and people should be more aware, but this video makes alarmist, overreaching leaps to conclude "use a webcam -> get raped" which is precisely what the video suggests.
Apple's stock and earnings don't go hand in hand
In general, you only need to make 1 mistake for your website to be vulnerable to what looks like a trivial hack.

The mistake could be anything from an insecure form input parser, through to not updating your web server to the latest update.

Once one hacker finds that vulnerability, it looks like it's an easy thing to do to take down or modify the side, but the finding of it can be extremely time consuming.

On the other side, look at who didn't go down in the recent Anonymous attacks - CBS and Universal Music went down, but Sony, EMI, Warner, etc, remained up.

Anonymous only had to find a couple of major relevant corporations that were vulnerable to make a big impact, it doesn't matter that the other dozens (100s?) of suitable targets were more secure.
Spoken like someone who hasn't undergone an IRS audit.

While I agree with David for the most part, his cavalier attitude of "Well, if we get audited it will be cheaper than the cost of tracking shit" is naive. Once he goes through an IRS audit, where they turn everything upside down and consume hundreds and hundreds of hours of time then he might change his attitude of the cost of an IRS audit. They are not nearly as cheap or insignificant as he makes it out to be.
https://github.com/freecivnet/freeciv-web
Particularly in terms of cost to deploy.
User testing the redesigned Smashing Magazine: lovely typography
> This sounds airtight. The analogy with the physical safe is completely destroyed by True Crypt's hidden partitions.

Because it's impossible for a safe to have an extra hidden compartment?
Migrating to Python 2.7, part 1: Threadsafe
I've seen a lot of Windows hardware drivers that do this. They detect when you've plugged a device in to an audio port and change the config to accommodate. OS X doesn't do this. If you configure Line In as the default input, the OS will monitor that port, regardless of its state. The only adjustment OS X makes is to remember input volumes based on plug state. So for example, if you plug in a set of headphones, the volume will be adjusted to the level that was set when headphones were last plugged in. When you unplug, the volume level is reverted to the state it was in prior to plugging in headphones.
So which of the following obstacles should Google place as a sign-up barrier in front of every new user on any of its services?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pro...
I've been teaching in higher education for 17 years. In that time the number of students I've had that desire to gain knowledge and really understand the material and who failed my class is zero.
I don't know where the '26% experience issues with html5' figure comes from. Based on the colors it accounts for IE<9, but the numbers show 19%+5%+4% for IE<9 (which does not == 26%), of which many HTML5 features can either degrade nicely or be polyfilled, at least for IE8, so you could argue about inclusion of that 19%.

Also, define 'wealth of capabilities', opposed to 'does not currently have some Flash features', as the reverse can also be said just as easily.

As for 3D, WebGL looks capable enough to me (but that may be because I already know OpenGL)
The lobbying system enabled hollywood, but it didn't force it. They could have attempted to make an honest profit. Plenty of industries do. Instead they chose to attack the internet. They should be held accountable.

I'm sick of the "corporations only want to make money so shouldn't be held accountable" meme. The fact that they have no intrinsic consciences makes it more vital that they be held in check by extrinsic punishments.
more conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504974
I think this has some worrying implications, For example, could someone hack into your car and make it crash while making it look like an innocent accident?
Is there some way to browse this new type of menu? How do you shop for functions that you aren't aware of?
I'm sure the imagination is there, but why bother creating hardware if programmers won't write code for it? Multicore and multinode systems are by far the least imaginative way around Moore's law, and they're the only thing 99% of software engineers are willing to touch. Not only that, programmers are fighting tooth and nail to keep using the same old languages no matter what the hardware architecture, because we are still sick with nostalgia for our single-core utopia. Compiling C to run on FPGAs is a thing that is actually done in the real world, for commercial purposes, which just makes me sick.

In an ideal world, it would go like this. First, hardware engineers would come up with an idea for a programmable hardware architecture. Second, if the hardware worked well, language designers would figure out a language that was appropriate for the architecture. Third, if the language design step was successful, programmers would learn it and write programs for the new architecture.

If you know ahead of time that the third step will always fail because learning strange new languages is assumed to be beyond the capability of 99% of programmers, then the second step (designing the language) is by definition impossible, which means the first step (designing a new programmable architecture) is also impossible.

That's why hardware designers don't seem to have any imagination -- programmers have told them to stuff their imagination and concentrate on building machines that programmers already know how to program.
That's exactly the question I have. There seems to be couple of hints about it, e.g. in section #4.8:

"Tenzing has read-only support for structured (nested and repeated) data formats such as complex protocol buffer struc- tures. <...> The engine itself can only deal with flat relational data, unlike Dremel [17]"

And from section #5.4 I assume that currently they use Dremel query engine, but are in the works of creating another one.
Mentor.FM: Music Playlists Based On Facebook Likes
It sometimes feels that Linux developers haven't ever seen a non-Linux user interact with a computer before. This seems doubly true for the folk who do UI/UX.
It still makes sense to accept an offer (even if you could be getting screwed), if that offer remains substantially better than what you're currently receiving.
I don't have a lot of experience with freelance sites (I watched the small business I work for use 99designs for something) but just something I thought of to try to solve the problem of unrealistic underfunded projects, not sure if anyone does this:

Have a little up/down box by each project where browsing freelancers can rate if they think it's a good price or way too much for what they're asking. If an unknowledgeable project submitter gets a 10/10 or so feedback ratio they could feel pretty good about their submission, but if they get 0/30 they might realize they need to raise their price a bit.
Just wanted to point out that your traffic graph is typical for a relatively new blog. The reason your traffic dropped after the posts to reddit/hn is because those are anomalies. Your organic traffic from search is your real traffic rate. Building this up takes time, a lot of time. More than 1 year with constant blog posting.

Sad but true. I'm in the same boat and my traffic graph looks exactly the same as yours :)
I know. But this is more than just a website take -down. There are individuals being extradited. This involves some actual legwork, not just sending an email to an name registrar or an ISP.
mmmm looks more of an another "conspiracy theory" to me than something real.

For example this service was announced one month ago, so the whole operation has only been planned for one month by the FBI? Seems highly suspicious, it takes months to years to do something in several countries at the same time...

More proof is needed that just a small coincidence.
Facebook is the model they had in mind when building Google+. The default circles were “Friends”, “Family”, “Acquaintances”, “Following”. The main method of recommendation was through your most contacted gmail contacts, a private form of communication. Discovery isn't structured like a forum, sorted by topics of interest. Instead, posts are limited in scope by circles, and organized by poster. (There is the stream, but that's built from people you've personally added)

They wanted a product that took your social life online. To that end, they tried to attract those kinds of people. The majority of sites with pseudonyms are open forums or comment boards. Most of the people you meet there you've never met offline. You can't offer people like that photo-tagging software or groups to set up real-life meets.

To chadmalik and gurkendoktor: Both of you are right. There are justifications for concern over privacy and I think Google went too far in enforcing its policy.
Mongrel2 has some great ideas behind it, but it just doesn't seem to be able to generate any momentum in uptake or community "buzz".

I think it may be solving problems which just aren't big enough for most people to warrant the switch in their technology stack. HTTP proxying and text config files work "good enough". Maybe everyone else is like me, and waiting for feedback from some big deployments in order to see how it all works in practice.
The problem isn't lobbying, it's bribery. We accept as normal at the national level behavior that might be prosecuted at the local level, but would almost certainly get the rascals thrown out of office. Perhaps the strangest thing about American culture is the almost complete lack of corruption in every sphere except politics.
Did her employer pay for the degree? Does she have to stay with the company for a certain amount of time before her education credit gets "vested"? (for lack of a better term)

18% is definitely unreasonable in my opinion. If she is looking for an increase anywhere in that neighborhood she needs to switch jobs. If she paid for the degree herself and has no strings attached to the company than asking for a 5-10% bump for the degree is a reasonable request but I'd imagine it will vary greatly from employer to employer as to whether or not she will get anything.

Typically an advanced degree should move you up in line to get a promotion, not necessarily guarantee you a nice pay bump upon completion.
And yet, the number of people who learned engineering, chemistry, math, physics, computer science, etc. from books alone is dwarfed by the number of people who got such knowledge from schools. Few people have have the mental and emotional fortitude to learn subjects from libraries alone. As you say, there is is something about the social aspect of the classroom and college setting that makes it better for learning than from libraries (or the internet).
>Students do problems because they will get a number for it.

And that's exactly the problem with the entire system. We need other ways to give incentives and motivation. The point is that plain numbered grades suck at giving motivation, they suck at actually judging the performance and/or understanding of a student and they suck at being anything but a completely arbitrary method of weeding out people who are unable to conform to the contrived requirements of an artificial testing environments, whether they are actually intelligent or not (and being a slow learner doesn't mean someone is dumb, another thing this system sucks at).
Could Twitter Help Us Create Smarter Transit Routes?
So far, a lot of Ubuntu-specific software has been very buggy and low quality for me (indicators, Unity). Why should this be any different?
More games can be found on this google page: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/tag/games/
Hm.. Interesting. Thanks for the response.
I think her company in the end paid for something like 10% of the degree.
My thoughts exactly. I wrote a line of plain text and it thought it was .vbs. It got a .py right, but only because I made sure it was distinct enough from Ruby for it to know the difference.
If you reduce your price by 10x then you need to attract 10x as much custom to break even. I don't think it's a given at all that moving to internet streaming and ultra cheap pricing is going to be good for business.
Dutch Court Dismisses Apple’s Appeal, Says Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Is Legal
Introduction to Sencha Touch
Hmm, I did not like the idea initially, but then I started thinking of how Emacs and (more importantly) Sublime Text work ... I must say, this very system works amazingly well for Sublime Text, why am I presuming that it is an automatic failure for menu bars?

Actually, I think that menu bars in general are a horrible crutch for pretty much every task. There is a reason why Windows introduced the "Ribbon". The Ribbon is Microsoft's way to get rid of the menu bar. Maybe Ribbons are not perfect, but they definitely improved discoverability of content.

ido-mode in Emacs introduces fuzzy matching for file navigation and it is awesome. CMD-T is a similar mechanism in Textmate. Sublime Text is pretty much built on the concept of fuzzy matched palettes.

All these are programs I very much like. Maybe Ubuntu is actually on to something there.
Content Theft: The Big Picture (MPAA anti-piracy Video)
Change the status of your chat client:

Normal: klik on icon right top -> set status
HUD: drop your mouse/stylus -> type the HUD command -> type to change your status.

In the future you will be less productive but have the gloss.
No, it's about as "apt" as comparing Cyanogenmod installations to Angry Bird downloads.
Thanks for the insights, I've been very curious about traffic on blogs such as mine, I intend to make a monthly post that makes my trends transparent so others can see what I do.
Easy win!
'It makes lobbyists having to deal with 50 separate state legislatures rather than 100 individuals.'

This is precisely why I tend to be very libertarian at a federal level and not so much at the state level. I consider having a powerful single point of failure a flaw in the system, one I think the founders were well aware of.
What evidence makes you say that? "Timing" is not going to convince me; that self-referentially uses the fact that prompted the question as its own answer.