skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my empirical stance: I've seen great conversion rates on that screenshot, and I've never seen a compelling example of bumping conversion rates through adding a username/password option.

Conversely, at the last place I worked, offering both options was the #1 cause of customer support requests. People sign up through both paths, then ask why everything is fucked. We ended up dedicating a lot of resources to a crystal-clear UX to avoid this problem.

Finally, when someone signs up through Facebook, you're often able to offer them a better product, because people empirically respond really well to their friends' faces, and everything else that comes with fb. Facebook permissions also promote your business goals like woah.

I'm open to more information, but this article doesn't have any. "Giving users only one way to sign in and FB as the only option is going to turn off a large number of users"? I've reread that sentence several times and I can confidently state there are no numbers in it.
I created a fork of less-rails-bootstrap a few weeks ago and put 2.0-wip on it pretty easily in an hour or so. A week or two after that 2.0-wip was pushed to the master branch on that project. What issues were you having exactly?
So what qualifies as an input?

That which affects the system

What qualifies as an action?

Changes in the system's internal state or output

How do you tell if some physical system, e.g. some biological system, contains 'inputs' and 'actions'?

You can test whether its state changes in response to external stimuli (n.b. this is no way to test this perfectly).

See my last point.

Looking back, it seems like you think I've made some claim about the system having "learned" something.

Information informs about certain details, a system can take the information and understand its meaning.

I agree that a system which computes can take the information and act in a way that depends on it, but what do you mean by "understand"?

sometimes people use this notion to distinguish between 'data' and 'information' that is more meaningful, like the sort of information that humans can process.

This is not a definition of either term I asked about.
> They keep every project in a single repo, mystery solved.

That's not true:

> It is based on a growth model of two of our current repositories (I.e., it's not a perforce import). We already have some of the easily separable projects in separate repositories, like HPHP. If we could split our largest repos into multiple ones, that would help the scaling
issue. However, the code in those repos is rather interdependent and we believe it'd hurt more than help to split it up, at least for the medium-term future.

They already have multiple repositories, the stats they're doing there is based on "two of [their] current repositories" implying more than two.
Or, perhaps the information being gathered from these calls wasn't too useful and embarrassing these agencies was judged more useful?

If they've gotten onto this phone call, one would imagine they can likely replicate this feat with regards to more detail-level meetings at one or more intelligence offices that were on the call.

And by exposing this call, they increase the level of doubt that any one agency IT team has that it was their network/phone system that was compromised. It's the ideal call to publicize.
35-year-οƖԁ burns 100 fewer calories
> I actually didn’t realize that he was handicapped at first glance, so I lowered my head and walked a little faster hoping he wouldn’t bother me.

> I thought that Jimmy was just another guy on the street wheeling and dealing!

He is. Isn't the only difference that he's got a higher hurdle to clear?
....and you're suggesting that Google is part of the "corporate plutocracy" and as such affirmatively insulated President Obama from this and similar questions?
I agree. A lot of bugs could indicate one of two things. First you need to differentiate between bugs caused by developer error and bugs caused by lack of project planning/scope. For example, a bug report that complains 'columns in the grid do not support sorting' is not a bug. They are feature requests not originally defined in the scope of the project. Bugs such as one where 1+1=3 due to a developer's bad algorithm are actual bugs. There is a big difference here. These are the bugs that should be caught by QA long before the release and while the project and algorithm are still fresh on the developers mind. There needs to be accountability for lack of planning or assuming that every time a developer uses a widget that it will have every feature possible for that widget to have.
The about page mentions that they are going to put the code on github. http://hackful.com/about

I didn't see a link to the about page on their front page, but it exists none-the-less.
I turned it off because it was too annoying, but what it was doing at the time was

* I'd scroll something horizontally,

* I'd reach the edge of the page

* Chrome would render the "I'm about to go back a page" arrow

* Nothing I tried would cancel the "Back" action
I also wrote a screenshot server (in JavaScript) for the project which is running at that subdomain. It's using Webkit for the screenshots then node-imagemagick to crop and resize. I hope to open source that part eventually too, but I have a bunch of things to fix still (some bugs in my worker/queue system, and some problems with my setup of the X server), and I need to remember all the steps I took to get it working to document it for others.

Unfortunately AFAIK all the current tools for automating webkit/khtml still require an X server so it's not quite as easy to set up as cloning a repo and running the code.

http://url2png.com/ would make a good drop-in replacement in the meantime, but it's not free.
Is it okay to judge a blog post by its width?

http://i.imgur.com/wsqPk.png
I don't think Git was designed to perform well with such a large repo. In this case, the best-practice is probably compartmentalizing the code and using Git submodules. The Git submodule interface is a little un-friendly, but I think it does work well for such large repos. I've been using submodules successfully for our development that tracks source files as well as binary assets.
New Version of the FCC’s Census Block Conversions API
I'm in the Netherlands right now, and it is not more expensive for me to go to Belgium. In fact, I don't even need my passport - just my ID(which I'm legally required to have anywhere in the Netherlands also).
What? Do you have a reference for that?
Hey that is cool that you are with the PKP. I stumbled across your Open Journals project last year. I think I was looking for academic journals covering economics in Nepal and one of the only ones I found was using your system. I was pretty excited about the open journal concept but I agree that prestige and reputation are huge barriers that will be difficult to overcome. The most promising areas might be niche journals covering new areas.
This is basically my response to the "My US border entry nightmare" YC post earlier in the day (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3545548)

Which became too long as a comment, so I blogged it.
PC Magazine mixes up MB and GB in article about Dropbox bonus space
Paleo diet
Huh, fascinating. git was initially created for the Linux kernel development, and I haven't heard of any issues there. Offhand I would have said, as a codebase, the Linux kernel would be larger and more complex than facebook, but I don't have a great sense of everything involved in both cases.

So what's the story here: kernel developers put up with longer git times, the kernel is better organized, the scope of facebook is more massive even than the linux kernel, or there's some inherent design in git that works better for kernel work than web work?
Google has everything in one Perforce repo? You mean the search engine, do you?

I agree btw, the Github mindset is the best one. Create for every project a new repo and connect them with build tools. But why not hire 100 SOA-Consultants, they have enough money now.
> It seems pretty hard to have any operation be blocking in node ... To my knowledge everything I can do in node is asynch

As soon as you code an endless loop in a function it blocks the server forever. Do a long calculation: it blocks for the time running. Node is no magic dust which turns everything it touches into asynch high speed code.

Node is asynch only when it comes to operations that are external to your code. (network, file system) . One could even argue that CPU intensive code being external to node but running on the same server could block if it's not running on a different CPU altogether.
Generating Random Haskell Functions
Refurbished Xoom tablets contained data from previous owners
The UK and Ireland are both outside the Schengen treaty.

When you take the ferry from Britain to Ireland, if I remember rightly, the customs ask you if you are British or Irish. British / Irish citizens don't have to show a passport, but everyone else does. The beautiful thing is that you are just relied upon to tell the truth.

In fact, I have never been asked anyway, they just wave everyone through.

I was really impressed by this story. I never wanted to go the U.S.A. anyway, but my decision is even more strongly reinforced now, I certainly will never go with my children. (Mostly I didn't want to be finger-printed like a common criminal.)

Travelling between the Schengen countries, in my experience, the worst country is Germany, the second worst is Switzerland. Travelling between Spain, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Portugal and Austria I don't remember being ever asked even to produce a passport. (In Germany you are though - although Germany is supposed to be a Schengen country, unfortunately the police are still bastards. They make a big rude show of themselves, and like to feel important. We decided after that never to travel through Germany again if possible.)

Also, Australian customs - really friendly. Japanese customs, also nice.
How to properly handle package dependencies on Python GAE apps.
Non-combattants should be off-limits imo, yes. However war and terrorism are completely different. It's generally accepted that there may be civilian casualties in a war zone, and that is clearly not terrorism (intimidation, maybe).

Unprovoked, unilateral attacks seem to be the more traditional form of terrorism (basically using fear to try and influence behavior), in particular when performed by groups not (officially) affiliated with a specific government.
My interest in having a boring argument with a language bigot approaches nil. But yes, aside from the very namesake of functional programming (a vague language grouping with no disciplined definition), yeah there's nothing else there...groan.
Free Indie Games not featured on TIGS / Indiegames: Jon Lovitz 3
Consistency between gestures and the mouse is a terrible goal, absolutely terrible because they're so different. The pinch to zoom and swipe to scroll works well on iOS devices but it is horrible on track pads because of the presence of a cursor. On a trackpad and a mouse you use your fingers to move a cursor, not to swipe and gesture.

Maybe it's just me, but mouse gestures, swiping and scrolling are far too easily activated. Take the worst offender in this area of all: Google. There is no UI inconsistency worse, IMHO, than scroll to zoom on Google maps. Absolutely atrocious. No matter how long I've used Google maps, I cannot seem to stop myself from using the scroll wheel/swipe/whatever to move around on the page, inadvertently zooming. Not only that, but the trackpads and Apple's "magic mouse" are impossibly sensitive, scrolling, swiping, and gesturing seemingly at random. How anyone uses these, I cannot say.

Must be me.
Why would he take HPHP as an example then? It should be obvious that there is not much interdependence with the other code.

Sounds to me like this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Enterprise-Dependency-Big-Ba...
Whitehouse hosting off-the-record conference call on SOPA
Fancy seeing you here.

Thank you. I get quite a lot of use out of it.
Spectacular High-Res Image of Earth: The Other Side
Well, there is also something as "state". You don't want "method=delete" to work as POST either, unless the client is authorized. Same with GET. I don't see why POST would be better than GET really.
Check out Apple's identity statement that they put on press releases [edit: this one's at least a year old]:

> Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork, and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple is reinventing the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

Compared to, say, Microsoft's:

> Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
The call is limited to the first 100 individuals to respond who also signed an ACTA or SOPA petition.

Anyone know of a good tool to call in and rebroadcast the call so everyone can listen?
the obvious answer, repeatedly mentioned in comments:

> factor into modules, one project per repo

where i work we have a project with clear module boundaries, but all in the same repo. we have an "app" and some dependencies including our platform/web framework. none of these are stable, they're all growing together. Commits on the app require changes in the platform, and in code review it is helpful to see things all together. Porting commits across different branches requires porting both the application change and the dependent platform changes. Often a client-specific branch will require severe one-off changes so the platform may diverge -- it is not practical for us (right now) to continually rebase client branches onto the latest platform.

this is just our experience, not facebook's, but lets face it: real life software isn't black and white, and discussion that doesn't acknowledge this isn't particularly helpful.
Kickin' ass fellas. What's next?
Is My Port Open - Week 1
Voice matters and it hard to build, especially for engineers. http://voiceandtone.com/ from MailChilp offers a good framework of designing a voice by cataloguing touch-points between the software and the user. You may or may not find MailChimp's voice fitting, but the framework itself is quite useful.
Good stuff. Started playing it, wasn't sure at first, then started working and was immediately in that other place where things get done.

But now I'm reading Hacker News.
In other words: if you're rendering HTML with node, you're probably doing it wrong.
Better:

Electricity | Gilbert/Galvani/Volta | Europe

Telephone | whoever you believe this week | Europe + USA

Computers | VonNeumann / Turing working in USA | Europe + USA

Internet | DARPA | USA

Web | CERN | Europe

Game, set... and match.

(it's all a joke, of course. Just be a sport, will you?)
509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded :-(

Guess the hacker news-dotting did it. Care to torrent the files? :-)
The Power Of Questions
He most likely used HPHP as an example because the message he was replying to also mentioned HPHP. At least that's how I interpreted it.
Would be so much more useful with some restricted tagging :)
Isolates will not be in node 0.8
No, literally the entire codebase for all of their products is in one Perforce repo. Ashish Kumar, manager of the Engineering Tools team, mentions it in this presentation: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Development-at-Google
I thought the purpose of the web was scientific hypertext documents?
What exactly is the op criticizing?
Ricky Gervais: On Fame
Apple Clarifies iBooks Author EULA, Excludes Claim on Content
If I understand correctly, we can withdraw from the whole treaty. But until it remains signed, even before ratifying it, we can't create law that is not compatible with it.

But IANAL, just have read about ACTA etc recently, mostly on Vagla blog.
> Because it's easier to convince the company's executives to do that than fix the systemic issues that are truly eating up software engineer bandwidth.

Yes and no. Politics and systemic issues are hard to face up to, but sometimes they make the problem worse, so they really do need to be fixed to make the problem any better.

Say you have everyone working 70 hours a week, and someone thinks to throw more people at the problem. You start interviewing.

2 weeks later, Bob quits in a fit of rage. (Or maybe hospitalized for exhaustion and quits. Whatever.). Now you're down an engineer, and you have to find two more engineers, making the HR department work even harder.

3 weeks later you find _one_ developer. You can't seem to find another - between good talent being hard to find, and people suddenly getting cold feet after doing face to face interviews with your blurry-eyed engineers... well there's a talent crunch going on after all, don't ya know? ;-)

And you're now 6 man weeks behind (and no closer to your goal of another engineer).

Boy, this new guy better hit the ground running, because you really need the help...
Trade it all in for a cube of gold a little over fifteen feet on a side.

It would be difficult to misplace, and hard to steal without people noticing.
Apple iPhone 4 8GB to Join iPhone 5 Release
The term I recently discoved for these people is Non-Technical Middle Managers.
All English sources, that google knows about :

http://news.google.pl/news/story?ncl=dt6kARLjrYdhuXMdAaT2Ct-...
your comment reminded me of a quote from austrian diplomat Von Metternich[1] about Italy during that country's unification period: "Italy is a geographic expression" (as it was, being half a dozen independent states with different money, government systems, economic situations, costumes).

And that made me think, maybe the simile should go further: in 1800's italy different people did have newspapers (such as the one that made the above quote popular) read in more than one state to discuss about their situation and, arguably, this did play a role in the subsequemt unification[2]. We could use something like that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemens_von_Metternich

[2] ok, an army would be more helpful
Stanford female undergrad on lack of women in STEM
WebKit browsers finally support custom headers from XMLHttpRequests via CORS
Yeah, I'm referring to the anecdote about hiring the new developer and expecting them to immediately contribute to bug fixing a mature project. Forget about any disruptive personality flaws the programer might have (which I agree is probably another factor to consider), I read this anecdote as an avoidable worst case management failure scenario and a potential straw man for his argument. So, maybe a little to negatively ideal to serve as a point of reference for his argument.
IOS 5 now available
Ansca Mobile Accuses Partner PapayaMobile Of Copying Its Code
dude, Bollycock on all your points
I'm not trying to say that he's any less of a person. I meant that I didn't even notice him being different at first and it was something I only realized after interacting with him on a personal level.

More than anything I thought it was inspiring meeting him because he's done better than most of us who have it easier.
It's all b#llsh!t what PM Tusk says. The whole "suspension" idea is simply wrong according to Article 18
"Obligation not to defeat the object and purpose of a treaty prior to its entry into force" of "Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties" which says:

"A State is obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of a treaty when:

(a) it has signed the treaty or has exchanged instruments constituting the treaty subject to ratification, acceptance or approval, until it shall have made its intention clear not to become a party to the treaty; or

(b) it has expressed its consent to be bound by the treaty, pending the entry into force of the treaty and provided that such entry into force is not unduly delayed."

I'm Polish and I have to honestly admit: my country has so many stupid political leaders, that I often feel just helpless about it.
Hi, just thought you'd be interested in hearing about my experience with eatdifferent.com. Please disregard this if it's unwelcome (sorry!) ... I figured website owners enjoy hearing first impressions, but this is kind of awkward. But on the off chance that it's useful:

Homepage: interesting concept. I like the clean design and the gigantic "start" button + "take a tour" option.

Next page: A little annoyed that I have to basically squint to see the alternative to Facebook signin. No, I don't want to join your social network.

Signup page: I'll admit, the number of fields to fill out gave me pause. I almost exited out. But I'll grudgingly give it a shot. (Specifically: you don't need my last name, it makes me feel like you want to sell my info. You don't need my location. You don't need my birthday, and the years starting with "1900, 1901, ..." makes me feel like you want to sell my info. You don't need my photo -- if I like your site, maybe I'll give one. But we just met. The lack of a "confirm password" box makes me slow down and carefully type my password, and makes me feel like closing the website. This is all happening in the span of about 3 seconds.)

Next page: Perfect; absolutely perfect. The defaults are spot-on, and the optional infotext (question mark buttons) is nice.

Next page: Hmm.... Reminders? I don't really want annoying reminders yet; I just want to see what your site is like. The lack of a 'skip this' button would make me close the site.

Next page: You want me to spam my friends. No... thanks.

Next page: We're at step 5. It's now gone from cute to annoying. No, I don't want to share my food logs with the world.

Done with the signup. Then you show me http://screencast.com/t/NXMzgOjjR50q ... it's not really clear what I should be doing next, or how it will benefit me. I think there's probably just too much raw text. Separately, each element is good -- "Prep your pantry", for example. And I like handy guides. But the sheer number of things I could be doing next makes me close the page and hope you don't spam me too much.

Apologies if this wasn't useful. I assume website owners like honest feedback, and understand that my viewpoint != the average person's. I have no idea whether your site is good or bad; I was just broadcasting my raw thoughtstream as I went. For example it might be a bad idea to cut the "invite friends" step, even if I am personally annoyed with it -- maybe it's valuable in practice. I don't know.

Best of luck to you!
Ah, fair enough. It's probably the iterations then.
The Waning Relevance Of Investment Capital (And Why That's Good)
I can believe this working with a former facebook employee. They do not believe in separating or distilling anything into separate repos. Why the fuck would you want to have a 15GB repo?

Ideally they should have many small, manageable repositories that are well tested and owned by a specific group/person/whatever. At least something small enough a single dev or team can get their head around.

Sheesh.
Wait, each person pays individually?
You have your password/session salt checked into github, you might want to remove that :)
I don't get it - glucose is fuel for our cells (or at least that's what I've been taught), so why is sugar bad for you? Does anyone know?
For that and other info, check out the "Push" Tech Talk given last year by the Facebook release engineering team's leader, Chuck Rossi: https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977
Really excited about it, but am stuck:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9133578/error-repository-...
the kde vim part was a valiant attempt to do just that. sadly it didn't work out, and its intended replacement, yzis, didn't either.

for a good overview at the history of vim integration, check out http://www.freehackers.org/VimIntegration

the only really good one i've seen is jvi [http://jvi.sourceforge.net/], which is a straight-up port of vim to java as a netbeans plugin. emacs's evil mode [https://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home] is getting there too.