skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fine, you're right. Let me de-hominenize. His claims are alarmist and the word toxic is unsupported by the available science and opens him up to claims of media-seeking hackery. He's probably on the right path in untangling the effects of the godawful modern diet but to single out a specific sugar and call for its regulation is still a big stretch.
> But he's screaming fire in a very crowded theater.

That doesn't make any sense.
We all know that context switching is bad, and it's tough to switch so much, but did Ed really have nothing else to do? He seems bothered by what the boss was asking him, yet he blows most of the 3hrs not working on what he said he needed to work on originally? That just doesn't add up to me.

I get the point, and it's definitely true, but I spend those idle minutes doing mail and other short tasks. I don't see how one can justify "well I'm waiting for you so I'll just not work for a while."

Is this common outside of the computing industry? What do other people do in their 'in between' time?
The fact that you have only been a member here for 22 days is plainly apparent. Our community doesn't take the tone you are using.

I frankly don't think you understand one bit of what I was saying. You latched on to one part of my original statement - which particular terrorist it was that crossed the border - and missed the overall point. The border patrol is not there for travelers convience. The burdon is on the traveler to have their affairs in order. The officers are going to really dig into anyone who has a wierd story or raises red flags. The fact that you know you are innocent doesn't mean they know you are innocent.

Let me give you an example. The last time I crossed the border from Canada into the US, I was waiting in line in my car. I was probably 10 cars from the checkpoint when I realized that I had left my passport in its usual home in my suitcase - which was in the trunk. I thought, "oh, I'll go get that now so I don't have to waste time later and hold everyone up in this line" which seemed like the efficient thing to do. As soon as I got out of my car to open the trunk I had a pile of border patrol agents running at me yelling to put my hands up. I hadn't realized it, but apparently going for the trunk would be an obvious move to set off a car bomb.

Once they came over and we talked about what I was doing it was all cleared up and I had no issues, but at the moment what was an entirely innocent action to me appeared to be very suspicious to them. That is not an indictment of them, it is just a fact based on the red flags they are looking for. If you hit those red flags, whether you know you are innocent or not, you are viewed through the lense of their training.

Now if you got that from my original message and still think I'm an idiot, then thats your opinion. But that's my perspective on the matter and I'm almost certain that you are judging it without understanding it.
One of the reasons i don't use tumblr is they dont seem to have a notable revenue stream. This sounds like a good step in the right direction.
These guys are spammers, there is no way around it.

http://lookfirst.com/2012/01/githirecom-is-spammer.html

Here is my post about an HN post that they deleted after people started ripping into them:

http://lookfirst.com/2012/01/githire-spam-again.html

Please make them go away. Mark all emails from them as spam. Do not buy their services. Do not respond to their emails.
The article says that the fungus digests polyurethane - maybe if the fungus is focused on one type of plastic that will only be used for disposable products, the problem can be avoided?
Why? we have two routes (twitter-connect, facebook-connect), socket.io and redis pub/sub. that's it.
Reasons a prospect can believe in your company
They have already been selling themes
Plastic pipes are not made from polyurethane. Virtually nothing structural is made from polyurethane, so we are safe even if it proliferated.

Polyurethane is mainly used for foams, coatings and sealants.

It's common to lump all plastic together, but they are actually VERY different and things that will destroy one type will have no effect on another.
For something this highly publicized I would only imagine an admission board deciding to grant admission again would not even be a problem.
This seems like the most important question... Since the paper is paywalled, and science reporting is terrible, can someone with access inform us just what the hell the fungus turns the plastic into?
In my opinion, you should not initiate a removal from an email. In part due to this. Instead you give the recipient a link to a web page where you have a form that sends either a POST or DELETE to the application.

"Should not" used in the rfc2119 definition. There are always exceptions.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt
People need to understand that decisions should be made based on the team's current skill set. If your team is comprised of Java developers, time shouldn't be wasted on researching node.js; rather they should focus on how to leverage their Java knowledge with Scala. It frustrates me to hear people falling for the hype machine and falling hard when they could have easily avoided by asking themselves two questions: what's the path of least resistance to shipping our product out the door, and what's the opportunity costs relative to alternative paths?
No, quite the opposite. We use plastic because it uses the _least_ petroleum of all structural materials.

If not for plastic we would have to use wood or metal, and both would take FAR more energy to work with and ship.
How do I make my virtual law startup more appealing to visitors?
The naive assumption here is that the sellout option is the entrepreneur's decision alone. If you've taken VC cash, you're answerable to a board of directors and a group of investors. If the money guys are getting cold feet, and want their cash out now, it's very hard (often impossible) to NOT sell.

If you've raised an A round, the easiest place to get your B round is the original set of investors (not least because it can keep the number of board seats/turnover low). If the A round guys want an acquisition exit and you refuse, not only are you spiting your best option for B round funding, you now have to raise money in an environment when all the other VCs know you ignored the last round of VCs' desires. Good luck getting your B round in that scenario.

Entrepreneurs may not want to be part of a talent acquisition, but often VCs do. If you're determined to never work for a big corporation you don't own, you better bootstrap forever and never take VC cash.
GPS Use Harmful?
If you're technical:
Build the first (scrappy) version yourself and do some initial testing with potential users

If you're not:
Do customer development by talking to customers and verifying that there is a need and that they will pay. then, with data in hand, try to get a technical co-founder that shares your vision to help you build it
This site has some really diverse mixes, thanks!
I'm not sure why it is bad for building a CMS. Admittedly, node isn't all that mature so doing so might be a little lower level right now than doing the same with, say, Rails. But it has one huge advantage which is that any modern CMS is going to have a good chunk of client side code, and there are immense advantages to having the same language on the client and server.
I was expecting something about the Cocoa Touch UIKit.
The "cloud" has been overhyped up the wazoo for years. That doesn't make PaaS meaningless or less useful.

PS. Could you point out a few egregious examples of the node community overhyping Node.js?
For no reason other than it would be a fine alternative. I'm sure your Node solution is performant and simple, and you should stick with that but no doubt a simple server written in ruby or haskell or python or anything really would get the same job done.
Sure, like I said, it solves some really hard problems and makes some architectures easier to execute on. But frankly, about 20-30% (probably made up percentage alert :)) of the stuff I people using Node.js for on HN is really just tech wankery. There's no real reason to be using Node.js for it, even though they will tell you that it's the only thing that worked for that possible problem!

Likewise, another 10-20% is people converting working code from a perfectly suitable technology to Node.js because it's the new cool thing.

It's not that either of these cases is "wrong." They know their problems better than I do. But I've been doing web development for about 10 years, I've seen this cycle a few times, and I know that every new tech has ridiculous adherents that do that stuff (e.g., Rails went through the same cycle except for "productivity reasons"). Everything looks like an old and busted nail when you have a new and shiny hammer I guess.
Scoreboard - Node.js leaderboard powered by redis
The Apple Voice
The fact that you have only been a member here for 22 days is plainly apparent.

How utterly obnoxious. I suspect that few of the HN community would embrace your inability to accept your error.

You latched on to one part of my original statement - which particular terrorist it was that crossed the border - and missed the overall point.

You claimed that all of those responsible for the worst terrorist incident in the US history came through Canada. Only none of them did. It's a pretty egregious claim.

The rest of your boring story is irrelevant. Terrorism has nothing to do with this situation. Nothing at all. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Agreed, I didn't want to waste a hundred megabytes of the owner's bandwidth (plus the time to download) just to sample the file, so I pasted the link into a media player to stream it. However, it was not able to jump ahead in the program I used (Media Player Classic).
I stopped reading here:

Coding is limitless, awesome, and sexy.
And there are the thousands upon thousands of dollars that will come in from people who just want to try it out for fun, since it's only a dollar. Wicked smart.
It'd be nice to have download link somewhere :P
You start getting into some deep philosophical stuff going down that path. Why is there such a huge Android vs iOS debate? Because people define themselves by what "team" they're on. Be it computers, phones, programming languages, sports, politics, etc. It's "us" vs "them".
Micron CEO dies in plane crash
A lot of times, there isn't anything you can work on that doesn't require a lot of concentration. I got an interrupt earlier today that put me on hold for an hour, while an email chain tried to sort out what was necessary.

How can I focus on implementing a hard feature when at any point, someone might pull me away from it and knock down my house of cards?

Hell, even if I'm writing code and suddenly I have to actually start working on a different project, I have to commit what I was doing, and try to squash everything later, or start stashing code around, and set up the other project's environment, etc. That's five minutes eaten up already.
Nokia Publishes Policy on Conflict Minerals
Ed allocated his time according to his bosses request. During the entire time he was dedicated to making progress on his action item. If his company allocates time so poorly it is not Ed's fault. His boss clearly deprioritized his other tasks probably because he poorly estimated the time required by close to 2 orders of magnitude.
No, there is no language v. framework confusion on my part. What I'm arguing is a concrete, fundamental fact that pertains to both the framework and the runtime.

I'm not sure what I can do to clarify the point anymore: the V8 engine is created and maintained for the purposes of speeding up a web browser's processing of Javascript within the context of an HTML document. The goals of the team implementing the runtime are not to create a general purpose language, they are to create an engine which excels at one specific use case, and granted this use case is broadening over time.

But to address your point: yes, the developers of Pyramid (to take an example) have not to my knowledge submitted code to e.g. optimize networking functionality in core Python so that it better suited their specific needs. On the other hand, the Python team has had an excellent track record in observing and adapting to trends within their community -- the introduction of WSGI is one such example.

The Python community has a PEP process for generating discussions about what the language needs. To my knowledge, there is no discussion within the V8 developer community about how to make the engine more suitable for server-side programming. And how would you begin the process of adding general programming features to the language itself? Join ECMA?

If you're really concerned about other people's language choices, you're going to need concrete reasons, not just generalities, vague insinuations and your own personal preferences.

Excellent editing. Much less combative.

EDIT: Actually I'd like to add a couple more things:

Node.js is a framework built by people other than the language's core maintainers (which is true of most frameworks)

That is not a point of contention. That is a simplistic reduction of my point which conveniently serves your argument.

If you want to add fundamental language features, you can't just force it into the core implementation, but will have to implement your own offshoot (which is true of most languages, including, for example, Clojure)

This entirely misses the question -- why use a language whose core feature set does not cover your use cases? Why use a language where you must extend the language to get fundamental features? Moreover, no you will not have to implement an offshoot to get core features. At the risk of repeating myself: when you have control over the direction of the language's evolution, you can petition and propose changes.
New Neuroscientific Evidence For Benefits Of Spaced Versus Massed Learning
> "pre-releases of Precise Pangolin
are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage".

From my experience I would say the same of Ubuntu release versions. They can't be counted on for at least 3-6 months after release, and even then bugs other than security are rarely if ever fixed, (though many can be blamed on upstream of course).
Surely there's a way to avoid implementing your own account system that doesn't drag in the massive unrelated architecture of a Facebook, Google, or Twitter. You don't even need SSO like OpenID.

Is there a company that just sells a no-frills user enrollment and login service and also provides strict isolation between sites? (I.e., they resist the temptation to leverage their aggregate user base.)
This is not so much specific to REST (although very common), it is more in the realm of TBL's "Cool URIs don't change" about URI design [1].

Even though the actual call to the REST service is opaque there is always a person that creates the calling application. Design an API that you would like/enjoy developing against.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
IPhone Lovers Excitedly Wait for iPhone 5 Release Date
> reading HN not doing something productive

Hey now, what are you trying to imply? :)
I agree it needs work but I got bored of typing on a phone and hit send. How about "OUR FOOD IS POISONED" in a crowded newscast?
Ed, the funny thing is I have customers that end up paying to do this.

I give them an answer and then they take 3 hours going in circles to arrive back at my first email. I am slowly coming to see it as them paying for time towards their education when they decide to insist understanding the inner workings of something better than someone who has built it.

Despite my best to bring it to their attention to send me the information complete and once to get the quickest resolution, folks feel productive when going back and forth.

I squarely blame this on the Blackberry exec mindset. Talking all day by email or IM or phone doesn't mean you get anything done.

If you point it out, they won't like finding out they're the cause of slowing everything down, because they're so important.

0.02
Why Aren’t More Indians Using Twitter?
Heh, I love the detail on all the confcall/web sharing problems.

Every conf call I join includes at least two of the following.

- The leader who is in the conf room calls in from the table phone and from their PC and can't figure out how to stop the screaming feedback. What's funny about this one to me is that the same people do it every time.

- Tom calls from his car. He must be on the interstate, judging from the road gradient we can hear.

- Dick joins from his laptop, where the microphone is conveniently part of the same physical device as the keyboard. CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK.

- Harry is working from home. We become intimately familiar with his three-year-old daughter's escapades with Cheerios and love of Phineas & Ferb.

- Judging from the number of sirens, Jake apparently lives in a bad part of town or is watching Blues Brothers in the background.

- Lucy has apparently joined while sitting in a conference room, attending another meeting simultaneously.

- Robert joins 15 minutes late and would like everything he missed to be recapped.

- Mark absolutely will not let the meeting progress unless someone is recording. Everyone spends 10 minutes figuring out how to do this. No one can find the file at the end of the meeting.

- James calls in via a VOIP connection from India, introducing a slight delay. "Hello?" "Hellohello" "Hi James, can-" "Hello" "Hi James, we are-" "Hello, hi yes-" "Hi James-"

- Dave joins from the airport. According to the PA, someone named Janice needs to report to the ticket desk.

- Mike has apparently set his cell phone ringer volume to "over 9000" and has placed it next to his mic.

- "Can you see my screen?" "No". "How about now?" -cue pictures of cats- "Yes but I think you have shared the wrong monitor." "How about now?" -cue spreadsheet- "Yes." -cue scrolling that the video broadcast can't keep up with- "Now if you can see here, here and here..."

Mass meetings are the funniest. During one surreal leadership presentation where hundreds of people joined via a web meeting and many more were present in person, someone forgot to lock down presenter rights, and people kept drawing on the slides.
this is a very usefull website with a fantastic opportunity to become big...
IPhone Accessories to assist Defend Your iPhone
Bloom: a programming language for the cloud
secret? http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html

I don't think it's dirty either, since it helps big companies innovate.
Just wanted to point out the apples to oranges comparison being made:

The article argues that node's sweet-spot is: "to enable real-time propagation of events and state-changes between clients. You could do the same thing with long-polling ajax or even frequent polling, but those both come with the cost of tying up unnecessary worker threads on the server and dealing with extra requests."

yes we all know that, that is why no one is suggesting that. the better comparison would be to put it up against twisted or event machine, which also use an event loop to do non-blocking IO. but you dont have to deal with callback hell, and even as a javascripter myself, I would say that I would rather code in python or ruby.

you dont have to use node to do real time, web sockets, etc.
Microsoft touts IE 9 as the browser of choice, attacks Google again
Anybody using less and sass together?
Chemicals, oh my god! Not that!

I bet you don't eat that scary irradiated meat, either.
CraftMap: lightweight jQuery plugin that converts an image into a functional map
I can't imagine doing any useful work in the scenario being described.

If I'm being strung along like that, knowing that my attention could be required at any minute, it is extremely hard to load a chunk of code in my head because any spare brain-cycles are reflexively spent trying to figure out if my input is required yet.

This is very much like trying to read when you're tired. You'll read 5 pages and then all of a sudden realize you don't even know what you read in the previous paragraph.

Sure you can triage your mail and small tasks and quickly do the stuff that takes 3 or 4 minutes, but I find that I often have just a few of those tasks. Certainly not enough to fill 3 hours worth of time.
And the US has several of its own.

Hardware:
MIPS, x86, SPARC, Motorola 68* (and the attendant Apple product lines [1,2,Mac, etc.]), DTMF phones (and thus modems), the transistor (though some very preliminary work was done in Canada and Germany, Bell Labs and TI brought them to manufacture), Ethernet, packet-switched networks, touch and light-pen interfaces, etc.

Software:
3D graphics, functional programming (LISP et al), node.js, JavaScript, C, C++, Java, jquery, Unix, Plan 9, Windows (lol), BSD everything (sockets, operating system, license), modern information theory (thanks Shannon!), BitTorrent, etc.

Culture:
GNU, EFF, FSF, copyleft, etc.
It's not just scientific evidence: it's neuroscientific evidence!
To extend the metaphor, Node is a silver bullet.

Silver's way more expensive than lead and offers little or no improvement unless you're shooting at werewolves.
He nailed it. I've experienced situations like that many times in my career. I'm now trying to live a life where I minimize my exposure to such Dilbertesque phenomena. Life's too short to piss it away on stupid people and inefficient processes.
True, but to clarify. I was talking about the wide group of people living outside the US, that 'hate' the US, but don't exactly feel like blowing themselves up.

For someone living in the US direct attacks are largely meaningless activity. If you want to change the system start a movement, a mime, or even just a blog. People may notice something like 9/11, but it simply reinforces existing beliefs. Because change takes ideas not just loud noises and death.
Interresting, since a similar 'me-too' comment yielded five upvotes just three days ago.

Yeah, maybe I'll have to add more insight as to why i'm me-too-ing the parent post. With a link.
http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/rss_is_dying_and_you_should_...
You cannot build hype out of nothing. The reason Node saw the hype it did was because it attacked and reasonably solved real problems that people were having.

What you seem to be pointing out here is that there are still unsolved problems out there. Problems where Node tried and failed to deliver. We used to write web applications completely in C, and that was shown to not work either. It doesn't mean those people were wrong to try using C. It just was proven, by actually trying it, that it is not the right tool for the job.

It's not really a shortcoming of Node or its hype, it's simply the process we use to eventually find what does work. If you don't try, you'll never know.
Hаνе уου heard аbουt thе weight-loss craze
Now that's great news! I would be interested in the environmental impact of this fungus though. It would not be a good thing if the fungus turns out to cause more damage than the plastic itself.

One of the most important things we learned from early 20th century conservationist movement was that to "preserve" something the best thing you can do is leave it alone. Every time they tried to correct something in a ecosystem something else would break. They messed up a lot of Stuff in yellowstone until they learned to just let it be.