skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for spelling this out in detail.

I took a user interface design course a few years ago in college (good college, good lecturer, good students), and was frustrated by exactly the same problem.

The focus of the course was learning process rather than making things, but we only were able to touch each particular process step (paper prototyping, user testing, formal usability study, &c.) one time, for a week or two of an assignment about it, and so there was no great way to judge improved understanding after having done the exercise, or experiment with different methods to see what their faults were.

Because most of the actual effort in the course went into writing about what we had done, instead of doing it, I feel like we learned quite a bit more about (a) describing our group’s working habits and parroting back the theoretical benefits of particular processes than we did about either (b) performing those processes or (c) the actual project we were trying to build.

The only way to really make these meta-analyses of process and structure valuable is, as you say, to take them on after having tried doing the thing a few times. You can’t make a map in your head of ideas you’ve never experienced by just copying other maps. It’s like trying to design an API without knowing what the use cases are, or trying to pick a data structure before you have idea what the data looks like.

* * *

This type of instruction is far too common; pedagogical exercises are decontextualized and the means become the ends. Instead of learning languages by reading and speaking, with explanations of grammar and bilingual dictionaries as reinforcement and an ultimate goal of conversation/writing fluency, language classes help students to perfect their ability to learn and perform grammar drills. Instead of trying to write and discuss stories, using writing as a tool for clarifying thought and sharing ideas, English classes spend all their effort and attention on teaching narrow rather uninspiring process and rigid form. Instead of finding math and physics problems in the context of figuring out how something works, we put the problems in their own little boxes and pretend they’re discrete entities, and students are expected to just grok the patterns without having done the kinds of doodling and exploration that ever actually reveal their structure.

Unfortunately, without much smaller student:teacher ratios, it’s really hard for teachers to act as guides and mentors rather than lecturers.
I think if features are standardized, the economy in typing alone will force the vendor-specifics away. Just a phase that (CSS) standards might go through.
Nully Nullson - Shit Our Staff Sez (Twitter)
Why did they schedule maintenance for the middle of the day on which they launch? That seems like the worst time to take down your site for scheduled maintenance.

Doesn't take a marketer to know that.
VEVO Execs Must Face Criminal Charges For Copyright Infringement

Criminal charges are a serious business and I don't think it promotes healthy debate to sling around loose statements suggesting that they be pursued recklessly by the authorities, no matter how unattractive the party involved in the wrongdoing. No self-respecting prosecutor would even consider bringing charges where only a one-time incident is involved and where the alleged perpetrator claims (as here) that the incident was inadvertent (however lacking in credibility this may be, it is a classic "plausible deniability" excuse). Do we really want our government devoting substantial resources toward trying to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in such a case? And does anyone seriously want this to be the standard by which criminal prosecutions for alleged copyright infringement are brought?

Since I would assume the answer to these questions is no, then the only point of this piece is to use an absurdly overstated headline to draw attention to itself.

I am against hypocrisy as much as the next guy, and I have no particular sympathy for the musical labels (or even for the sort of glitzy events at which this incident occurred), but it does not advance the cause of attaining sane copyright legislation to make "off with his head" demands that have no basis in reality.

Music industry hypocrisy is fair game for advocating against draconian copyright enforcement and in itself makes for a potent argument. The effect is much diluted, however, when the argument cannot be taken seriously. If instead this is not intended to be taken seriously but is rather a form of street theater intended to dramatize a point, then it is (in my view) just lame and ineffective.

This is a case of infringement by which the copyright holder can choose to take civil action or not as suits its purposes. If a cost-benefit legal analysis suggests that little damage in fact occurred and that the incident is non-recurring or plausibly explainable, then there is likely nothing worth pursuing. What the incident boils down to, then, is a horrible embarrassment for the music industry execs involved and, at the level, it does carry a sting. The rest is fluff.
I don't get what he's got against eBooks. Half the comments are asking him about Kindle versions.

Looks like it could be a very interesting book though, if it's written top to bottom, and not just a bunch of his blog stuff lashed together with duct tape and twine.

I recently read The Lean Startup, against my better instincts, and was duly disappointed. A few key ideas and lots of what felt like hand waving to me. I think Eric is the real deal, but somehow managed to produce a book aimed at the management of large companies, rather than people running actual startups. Steve's book, on the other hand, promises "lots of details" and "metrics that matter". Hopefully, actual things that can be measured, rather than "innovation accounting"...
I don't really understand this objection. Sure, HTML 5 isn't officially a standard, but neither is -webkit-whatever; in both cases, you can use whichever non-standard you like, subject to browser support. The advantage of the W3C draft is that it is a non-standard that the browser makers are all working towards.
/everything/ on their blog is a marketing piece. Nothing they do is altruistic. It either markets a specific product or promotes the brand in general. Part of that brand is lifestyle related - use our products and you'll be a successful small businessman/woman.
I was a bit puzzled reading the article, because in the places I have worked, 'root cause analysis' isn't looking for the simplistic thing the article describes. If it is simple, great, but more often than not the root cause is poor interaction between things, which can require multiple changes or even under-the-bonnet refactoring. The article's description of root cause analysis sounds like something a first-year undergraduate would think.
Github was driving us crazy with outages, before they admited to it
Google Drive Is Real: "Add To My Drive" Button Is Hidden In Source Code
This is an absolute joke. We need to heed YCombinator and "kill" Hollywood. Make Silicon Valley and S.F. the new entertainment and creative centers of America.

Let's merge technology with entertainment.
Invoice factoring
invoice factoring
More likely they're fixing stuff. That's a WP plugin which puts your site into maintenance mode.
The invasion of Iran has been planned for many years. The occupation of the two countries immediately to the west and east of Iran were preliminary steps in the same long term military campaign.

I assume that this level of internet censorship will go away because it is playing into the hands of Western imperial propagandists who are working hard to "justify" or motivate the next major invasion.
Protect your web server with SSL certificate
I ran my own ad a while back (4 to 6 weeks ago?) and faced no issue. I also think I might know why: I didn't use a coupon to run the ads for free.

I put my OWN money into the account. I also didn't set low bid limits. Actually, my bids were high enough that they came in much lower than I anticipated.

The reasoning was simple: I was paying Google for some benefit. Using a free coupon is simply taking advantage of Google for your own benefit, and that's not fair to Google -- it's absolutely one-sided.
I think it releases on March 1.
What I still don't understand is why the global namespace isn't used straight away.

You could, for example, just use one line of css for border-radius for all browsers. If one vendor does it differently you use their vendor specific namespace to override it. Surely that makes more sense than having to do a line of css for every vendor?
Apparently some of the most popular languages in the world are "toy languages" because they aren't compiled. Also decompilers apparently don't exist because compilation gives you "protecting ones ideas and security". In addition, I guess that means open source is a terrible idea.

I'm going to save this article, because if I ever have the need to start hiring people, I think I can use an applicant's reaction to it as a sort of hacker litmus test.
Because it wasn't scheduled.
67 Signals...
W3C is a web standard, on paper.

http://www.webkit.org/coding/lgpl-license.html

WebKit is living, breathing, open standard that anybody can fork and contribute to.

Code talks, paper walks.
If I were a DDoS attacker, I wouldn't want to make enemies with the sort of people that rely on github.

Though it's easy to imagine that those guys think differently than I do.
A brand is a pointer
Pyvot - Bi-directional Excel connector for Python [video]
The article provides a summary of potential problems with vendor prefixes, which still stands.

The author acknowledged that his suggested solution was wrong. See the redux [1] (which is actually mentioned in the article) for alternative solutions.

My main concern is that the dcurt.is article misses the point entirely.

[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_p...
You're right. It's not scheduled maintenance. We're furiously working on the issue as we speak.
Cool, but definitely not worth $10
On time prediction, my friend, is a profitable business. Just in case you decide to quit your current job :)
I read the whole thing. Great book. It helps to keep a red pen handy if you're perturbed by typographical and grammatical errors.
Nice work Buffer team. Notice that Leo is already using Digg Digg on his blog :) Joel's using Tumblr though so he can't use it right now :(
I would not be saddened if they turned their eye towards patent trolls, but maybe there just aren't enough lulz to be had there.
Actually, skip it. It's not that good. There were some solid ideas in it back when he wrote it, but it was/is very raw, and has been fleshed out and refined by Blank and others in the years since. That, and the writing/editing is really bad - not up to the quality of what you find on his blog, which I like a lot.
I support this methodology. Have the globally-namespaced attribute already function, but give the vendor-specific one precedence. That way the developer only has to add vendor-specific declarations for the minority that implements it differently.
The researchers behind this have pretty solid backgrounds: http://www.highiqpro.com/high-iq-pro/high-iq-pro-expertise

Here's a study on improving fluid intellience from Jaeggi and Buschkuehl (two of the people on their team): http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/04/25/0801268105.full...

Does anyone here have any experience actually using this?
Say what? Google is going to do hardware? LOL
It arrives two calendar days after it leaves!
Web Standards: Fixing the Issue
HTML5 and CSS3 are implicit standards and no one can deny it.

The Web moves fast, so does developers and hopefully the users.

HTML5 and CSS3 became standards as soon as they were supported by most browsers so, here is the idea:

- Keep drafting, is good.

- As soon as you feel a drafted feature is good, implement it, with AND without prefix. (Or better yet, only w/o the prefix)

- If there is already a draft for a feature you have and is good, stick to it.

- As soon as 75% of the browsers (or another fair big number) have implemented that feature it becomes a standard. Period.

Sincerely,
A simple developer
Very cool! Is there a Windows equivalent?
Who is your ex-employer?
I wondered about that too for "Four Steps to the Epiphany" until I saw this post on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-book-Four-Steps-to-Epiphany-...

Essentially he wants people to be able to use it as a workbook, and not as a quick read (if that's even possible).
I have two questions:
1) Is it possible to do literate programming in Python / Numpy, something like MathCAD. Where I can either convert python expressions to latex equations or vice versa.

I am trying to convert my supervisor to open source and he has used MathCAD for 20 years and he really likes the functionality that you can directly print out a sheet with all the formulas and solutions in one equation. I have all the capability of the calculations in Python/Numpy just not the pretty printing part without actually having to write out the equations/expressions twice. I have tried to ask on StackOverflow but the answers didn't work.

2) Can the arduino + accelerometer be used for calculating position given the initial position by integrating to velocity and further integrating to time. Will it work with 4-6 accelerometers and output the data to a PC in realtime or will it save the data to an SD card and post-process it later.

Thanks in advance.
I must say your chosen example is a bit poor since the precedence of unary negation vis a vis the binary exponent operator is arbitrary and varies according to the arbitrarily selected rule system selected for the task at hand.

Promoting one arbitrary choice over all others as if it is natural, obvious and correct is clearly the source of difficulties explaining to students. When I have taught this topic, I cover precedence rules as being arbitrary and show a chart of the rule system in play for western math textbooks. This clears up confusion, or rather prevents it from occurring in the first place.
It's like real life spaghetti code.
It's true that many people who say "there's a shortage" are really saying "I can't find a top 1% engineer who will work 60 hours a week for $80k a year in Silicon Valley." Well, duh: raise wages, provide better working conditions, or look elsewhere.

But I think you've taken it too far by defining "shortage" in such a way that it's impossible. If I said "A profitable company with sane hours is having trouble finding high-quality engineers at $120k+ a year" it's a little more reasonable to say, "Hmm, maybe that means that there's a 'shortage' of good engineers, in the sense that society and the economy as a whole would benefit from having more talented engineers." Just saying "look elsewhere" or "pay more" completely sidesteps the whole point, which is that where there's a "shortage" there's an obvious opportunity to profitably address it in a way that benefits the economy and society.

To use your analogy, if the beef supply was constrained such that the cheapest hamburger was $100, would you say, "There's no shortage: supply and demand have met at a price of $100?" Or would you say, "Wow, hamburger prices increased by like 20x, there's a shortage of hamburgers?" I think most people would say the latter; the former simply isn't a useful definition of the word "shortage." It means that relative to some general idea of "normal" (as defined by previous conditions, or conditions in related markets), the market seems distorted by a lack of supply.
I was unaware that a poll had been taken of all web developers asking whether they wanted Dart. If developers really don't want it, they'll vote with their feet, so what's the big issue?

Also:

> The big issue I have with Dart, which you
> seem to consider inconsequential, is whether
> Google forks the web developer community,
> not just its own paid developers, with Dart,
> and thereby fragments web content.
>
> "A Dart to JS compiler will never be "decent"
> compared to having the Dart VM in the browser.
> Yet I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft
> (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are
> enough) will never embed the Dart VM.
>
> "So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only
> in Chrome" are new norms promulgated intentionally
> by Google. We see more of this fragmentation
> every day. As a user of Chrome and Firefox (and
> Safari), I find it painful to experience, never
> mind the political bad taste.
>
> Ok, counter-arguments. What's wrong with playing
> hardball to advance the web, you say? As my blog
> tries to explain, the standards process requires
> good social relations and philosophical balance
> among the participating competitors."

--Brendan Eich, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982949

Basically he's arguing that the browser vendors of today (not developers/users) are the gatekeepers of what new technologies can be tried. It's like making browser innovation a UN Security Council where every member has a veto over doing anything. If you value progress and innovation, I do not see how you can support such a position.

If Google introduces something like Dart or NaCl, is willing to support standardization of it and even release a free implementation, but other browser vendors don't want to integrate it because they don't like it, that's their problem, not Google's. If that means popular apps become "Works best in Chrome," that is a self-inflicted wound.
I like their quotes at the bottom about the cognitive benefits of running.

One from a Nobel prize winning phsyicist... the other from Alanis Morissette.
inbound.org is a reference to Inbound Marketing, which Hubspot coined entirely.

HubSpot snapped the term "Inbound Marketing" (which really means "permission marketing") so they could differentiate more easily from other marketing software competitors.

The strategy is really smart. If you look for "inbound marketing" on Google, Hubspot has completely pushed down the older term by flooding the page with results they more or less created: conferences, groups, books, even a Wikipedia page defined by the company.

For old time marketers, "Inbound Marketing" meant "marketing research", as opposed to "Outbound Marketing" which meant "reaching out to users".

In a sense, it shows those guys are great at what they are doing, marketing.
The salient point is that Native Client is open source and the standard can be adopted by Firefox, Opera, and Safari if developers find that it meets their needs. Native Client is built on OpenGL (cross platform compatible) where ActiveX was developed against the Windows APIs.

Wine has been a long time in the making and certainly wasn't ready to be integrated into Mozilla for ActiveX compatibility on Mac OS, Linux, or even alternative browsers on Windows in 1996, so it's kind of a silly point to make.
Intentional infringement = criminal penalties. Sorry, but that's the rule of law, i.e., the very bed they made for themselves. Everyone knows the Superbowl is proprietary. The NFL says so during the broadcast.
Google Plans First Retail Store at European Base in Dublin
What are you basing this on? It doesn't jibe with the laws, as I understand them.
Heroku Jobs does not advertise software engineer positions (for a while)
Not to troll, but I think a segregation of the crowd here would be great. I know pg has made a few comments lately along the lines of "where did all these non-hackers come from?"

I feel like sub-HN's would be helpful, as I find myself generally reading programming tips and things much more than I read "how to get your conversions up".

Having a good community to submit that to and discuss would cut down on the signal to noise ratio for readers like me.
417.6 Million Bites Later ...
This is going to work (if you can make the site work!) I'll definitely participate.
1. There will be bureaucratic issue for a researcher seeking funding from public.
2. There will be patent issue ( who will own the patent?).
3. Unlike kickstarter where the contributor gets a finished product at the end, what does this project will offer to the public? Name in the publications? or patents?
"This clears up confusion, or rather prevents it from occurring in the first place."

Not in my experience and I venture to guess that you haven't taught developmental learners. Obviously one discusses the order of operations and the fact that the order is arbitrary. This does not prevent confusion from occurring in developmental learners.
$10? It might be a fun trick to show off to friends, but I am sure as hell not doing any serious work in that.

iTerm2 'till I die!
This is something that the discussion hasnt touched yet, but I don't know that you can assume that devs are omitting the vendor-specific prefixed border radius out of laziness. I'm frequently guilty of coding base lowest-common-denominator CSS, then enhancing the WebKit experience -- not because I'm not aware of the vendor-specific attributes for other rendering engines or because I'm too lazy to type them out, but because only the WebKit rendering is satisfactory.

I'm not entirely certain about this approach though, so what is the real harm in a web where boxes have slightly rounded corners in one browser and not another? I'm also curious if anybody has examples of WebKit-only sites (that don't actually function in other browsers) that don't fall under the heading of "look at this cool new CSS thing that this site exists to demonstrate."
Iran Blocks HTTPS, Cutting Off Gmail, Yahoo and Other Major Sites
Wattpad Hits One Billion User Minutes A Month
On some flights, we actually know what the corresponding inbound flight is. If we know, we show a small "track incoming flight" link and consider it in our delay prediction algorithms.
I'm really interested in seeing conclusions drawn later on about the effect of this kind of preemptive crowd-based funding on the developers themselves and their process. Obviously there is a difference in state of mind between a team working on a game with nothing but hopes and anxieties that their game will be well-received and sell, versus a team whose customers have paid them before development has even started.

The big question, of course, is how the team will handle it. Maybe they'll become overconfident, or feel less motivated to succeed than otherwise. Or, on the other hand, maybe they'll feel unpressured and able to exercise creativity more freely and naturally without those worries.
This is an often pondered question. The only right answer is the aphorism 'know your weaknesses, know your strengths, do.'

The longer answer is that programming covers a broad swath of complexity and few if any people are masters across that whole area. The closest analog I know of is cooking. There are literally billions of people who can cook, but they are also all different, some have excellent technique but can't pick spices, some have an intuition for compatible flavors, some have a knack for presentation, it goes on and on. But if you make great meals and everyone loves them and says how tasty and satisfying they are, should you stress about how you've never been able to master making souffles ? No. Recognize that when a souffle is called for you'll need to do a bit of extra work around that part of the meal, maybe even call in someone for whom souffle is 'easy' and do a great meal.
It's not just a question of legal/illegal. Some things that are illegal are not criminal--they create civil liability instead. If you lose, you owe money but you don't go to jail or have a criminal record.

Have any individuals been criminally prosecuted for their personal BitTorrent use? I've read a lot of stories of people being sued, but I can't remember a story of criminal prosecution. I guess it would be possible if the prosecutor could make the case that BitTorrent is a form of distribution, and the amount meets the criteria in the law:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506
http://mbostock.github.com/d3/

http://raphaeljs.com/