skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This resonates:

> The most important characteristic of a suffering-oriented programmer is a relentless focus on refactoring. This is critical to prevent accidental complexity from sabotaging the codebase.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen accidental complexity creep in because someone adds a new feature without taking the time to refactor to the simplest set of abstractions. But - and here's the flaw in the approach - you have to be an expert in the code to produce such a set of abstractions, which is a potential bottleneck when your codebase is big enough to require multiple developers. Not everyone has the time/capability to be an expert.
مشاهدة قناة صوت الشعب اليوم بث مباشر 7/2/2012
Ever since MS removed the ability to dock toolbars to the left side of the screen (Vista/7) I've been using pinned start menu items and the Windows key to quickly access them. It didn't take long to get used to it and now I prefer having that tactile control. I won't miss the start button on screen. To me, it functions the same as the home button on the iPhone.
I think there is a lot they can do to make moving between metro and the desktop less jarring. They could very easily skin the desktop away from faux 3d glossy semitransparent things to solid colors for window borders and menus with clean edges, icons, and text.

In the developer preview it looked awful to have the black windows button on the aqua 3d suparbar. Why not just make the whole thing black? I think the desktop would look great with solid white / colored windows over a good photo.
LOL. Thanks, jasonshen :)
There are already defined sets of telephone numbers that can be used for fake data http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_telephone_number

Also of course example.com. Not sure if there are non routeable physical addresses.
clickable: http://eFolio.me.
"First make it possible. Then make it beautiful. Then make it fast."

Alas, the guy writing the checks all too often doesn't see past step 1.
Cat at Anfield for the Liverpool vs Tottenham Hotspur
What is it with uncommon pitch invaders on Merseyside these days? Last week, a protestor cuffed himself to the posts at Goodison Park to register his disgust with a budget airways, and tonight a cat found its way onto the pitch during Tottenham’s bout with Liverpool at Anfield.
Windows and Linux (Ubuntu Gnome or whatnot) have a much much much more responsive mouse input for me than Mac OS X. Maybe some people don't notice this, but for those who do, it's very annoying. It's inconceivable to me how somebody doesn't notice it, especially if OS X is supposed to be for graphic designers who use the mouse a lot. Maybe they all have Wacom or some such tablets.

It's much harder to hit any buttons because you can't just speedily mouse over it, you have to use visual feedback to inch on it. And it causes much more stress and strain on your hand, wrist, elbow, eyes and everything. No matter what mouse hardware you are using. The same mice work very well in Windows and Ubuntu. The OS X drivers just suck. I've tried USB overdrive, mouse settings and everything. The basic lag just doesn't go away.

Too bad some keyboard shortcuts like for scrolling work really bad in OSX too - the cursor stays in one place when going up or down pages meaning you have to use the mouse.

The cursor jumping is another crazy issue indeed. You never know where it is going to be once you go over a certain speed threshold.

(Writing this from OS X. Otherwise it's quite nice.)

Caveat: I used to play Quake where the difference between 60 and 77 FPS is life and death. Everybody used high rate CRT:s and clocked their mice to 500 Hz or so. Here's a real mouse test: http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1265679 . I'm annoyed at the mushy interfaces that electronics could have gotten rid of decades ago. It's somehow just a less stressful situation to take photos or browse them in a camera with less delay for example.
That's why I don't understand why Canada doesn't attract more start-ups. Being self-employed in Canada is much less risky than in the US as health insurance is covered by the state.
This. I've yet to see a client development project that made it past step 1 on anything other than the most trivial features. Sucks, but I got paid. What can you do?
So, you're looking for someone to build you a website for a validated business model? And to the table you bring ... 2 "meh" domain names? And for this, they can get up to 50% equity?

How nice that you're willing to negotiate on licensing your "assets."
Meteor Games to publish high-end online game Hawken in December
Hi all,

Alex Schiff, co-founder and CEO of Fetchnotes here (and author of this post). The quality of discussion on the things we post to Hacker News never ceases to amaze us! I just wanted to point out that we posted an invite link by which 1000 people can get access to our beta on the blog post itself. You can also get in directly with this link:

www.fetchnotes.com/invite/blogpost

Thanks!
The art of thinking about a problem appears to be lost. What happened to getting it fast, beautiful and possible first time by thinking about it?

I come from an engineering background and "right" is the only way to do it.
We had an auction website project in college as freshmen, and the person teaching the class who was playing the role of client made this very clear. One of the groups was demoing their app and some bad language and comments made it onto the screen. Their review/feedback/demo ended right there... Painful for them, but taught me and the rest of the class a lesson
One should lead a life in which procrastination is good
There are still a lot of print-trained editors and other publishing roles out there. The more the UX metaphor relates to past models the more secure they are in their positions. I simply think this, along with a smidgen of gewgaw for the animation, is the simplest explanation. It's easier for a pageflip model to be approved by oldschoolers.
They look pretty smart to me

http://yourhome.honeywell.com/Home/Products/Thermostats/Summ...

seriously every time someone sues someone else about a patent the whole world screams bloody murder.

sure Honeywell's devices does not look like they come out of an apple lab but I think they have a right to protect their IP.
"Maybe the bulk of the money gets transferred to the success stories, but that's little comfort to the hundreds of pretenders to the throne who don't go anywhere."
The way to get butts in seats is to have compelling games. The way to get compelling games is to have a competitive team. The way to get a competitive team is to find high quality players. I doubt any of this was not in the minds of the team's owners and management.
Generally, the write amplification will be < 7 (max # of levels), but in practice is probably ~3.5 since it's possible for files/keys to get promoted across multiple levels under some circumstances.

I haven't measured specifically what you asked for, but have watched the compaction system quite closely in heavy production loads. :)
UTF-16 will handle poop just fine. UTF-16 handles higher characters in a manner just like UTF-8. Pile-of-poo is encoded as D83D DCA9 in UTF-16, The same size as it is in UTF-8.

There may be a distinct size advantage for some asian cultures to using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 as it will allow for encoding more of the glyphs without having to add more overhead bits. How much this saves in reality I'm not sure.
Mint is still using Gnome 2, or I think there is a new fork of it named something else.

I agree though, although I blame the shift mainly on the tablet/smartphone mentality.
I never said that it is dangerous to teach people about investing. I am saying that investing is about a lot more than stock picking. Since passive investors beat active investors after costs [1], I think it is better for the average investor to focus on things that they can control to a large extent, like savings rate, fees, tax efficient asset allocation, diversification, investment horizon, etc.

Also, I do not advocate buying just any index fund, just those that are a good proxy for the market as a whole. The S&P 500 is much more representative of the US stock market than the Dow 30, and the Wilshire 5000 even more so. It is may be easy to replicate the Dow 30, it is much harder to replicate the S&P 500. And this assumes that one is only invested in US stocks, and is not diversified across other asset classes, such as international equities or emerging markets.

There are plenty of index funds that charge much less 1% in fees. Many charge 0.25% or lower. The following page has a spreadsheet that calculates the impact of fees on mutual fund investors:

http://wheredoesallmymoneygo.com/detailed-breakdown-of-the-r...

(Canadian, but the idea is the same for any stock market)

Using the spreadsheet, let's assume an initial contribution of 100K, an annual contribution of 5K, a 5% growth rate, no trailer commission and no advisor payout.

After 25 years, an investor who put the money in a fund charging an MER of 2% would have lost 33.72% to compounding costs versus a 0% fee portfolio.

An investor who put the money in a fund charging an MER of 0.25% would have lost 5.07% to compounding costs versus a 0% portfolio. I don't think that's a bad deal for the average investor at all.

[1] Cf.: The Quest for Alpha, by Larry Swedroe; The Power of Passive Investing, by Richard Ferri
Did you consider BrowserId? I think this has a lot of advantages over OpenId or various proprietary accounts.

https://browserid.org/
> put your code on Github or the like and others will add any features that you're missing.

No they won't, because he hadn't even started on the "make it beautiful".

When I want to solve a new-ish problem, I can't imagine grabbing some barely working cowdung from some guy's github repo.

If he hasn't even tried to make it clean or readable, it'll take me more time to make sense of the mess than just rebuild it myself.
The 'Apply' takes me to facebook login?
It did, in fact, take Megaupload down without a trial. You can argue about whether an indictment represents due process or not, but the Queen of Hearts seems to have set the rule here: sentence first, trial afterwards. The enormous libraries of users' data stored at Megaupload are likely to be burned (in effect) before the trial even begins, and it is very unlikely that the company can return to operation even if found not guilty on every count. Thus it follows in the footsteps of Veoh and Diamond. (Diamond produced the first portable MP3 player, you may recall. It was a huge market success, but defending it in court bankrupted them.)

Generally speaking, "due process" does not mean that a lot of policemen came to an agreement. It means the accused had an open trial in court at which they were allowed to defend themselves.
The real problem is that the biggest lessons you have to learn (e.g. self control, ability to tolerate a small draw-down, discipline to act on winners and losers if your theory doesnt pan out) require a real-money test. You can learn modeling etc from a book, but the experiential knowledge requires you to play with cash.
A great thought, there.

I've had too many conversations with people who seem determined to not see value in Facebook. Suggesting that sending out a group e-mail is just as good as a Facebook event. Or that e-mailing out a link to your private photo web site is as good as uploading to Facebook.

It isn't. And these are sensible people. They just seem utterly unwilling to even try out a web site they've already decided that they hate.
I really dislike this trend in UI design. The reason is simple: I want a fair chance to discover how to do stuff on my computer. I don't want to read handbooks or worse, watch tutorial videos.

The point of a good UI is to make a handbook superfluous.
I used a Mac and a PC at work side by side (Often working on the mac when the PC was waking, booting or installing some security upgrades which was a big part of the week, Vista wasn't really any good). But in mousing the difference was clear, Windows had the advantage. I tried switching the mice back and forth but no help.

I also had Ubuntu at home and at my parents' place, and it had the same simple responsive mouse as Vista.

Now I've gone full Mac but it still constantly annoys me at work. If it weren't for the other good things in the OS...
Since the issue at hand involves Turing's homosexuality, there is a tendency to see it in terms of bigotry. But it is not. The real issue is one of morality. The governments persecution of Turing, and other homosexuals, is immoral, because their acts did not harm anyone, and were consensual in nature. However, the governments acts did cause harm and were non-consentual. (Turing didn't consent to be prosecuted, he didn't have a choice.)

The law is not the definer of morality. The law is subject of morality, much in the same way as US laws are subject to the constitution, which is itself also subject to morality.

Thus the persecution of Alan Turing was itself a criminal act, in the eyes of anyone who accept morality (or at least the moral premise that consensual acts among adults that do not harm anyone are moral.)

The failure to pardon him -- that is, the failure to renounce the crime the government committed in the past-- shows the government to have as little regard for morality today as it did then.

This is confirmed by the manifold laws currently in place in that government that persecute people for "crimes" that are not immoral.

For example, the criminalization of drug use.

The thing that trips people up is that they're taught to believe that government is moral. Government is a collection of people, which engages in acts some of which are moral and some of which are immoral.

Since the law in question was immoral, thus enforcing it is a moral crime, and the governments failure to renounce such enforcement via issuing a pardon (and to be honest, paying some appropriate sum to the estate of the man in compensation, with interest) shows the government to be immoral to this day.

If it were a moral government, it would act morally, and remove the conviction while paying compensation for the crime.

And it would do so for every person prosecuted under this law.
I see this as more then just an extension. The basic premise is that you cannot build an elegant solution to a problem that you do not have a deep understanding off. When working in a domain that you do not know, create an inelegant solution which works. In this process gain a better understanding of the problem, and use this knowledge in a later stage to build a better solution.
I would compare Fandalism more to Dribbble or DeviantArt, but for musicians.
"It is not difficult to beat the market, nor to do it over the long term."

Yet most active fund managers, who I assume are not stupid, do not beat the market over the long term.
Go with the math.

Taking the easy path is not an accomplishment, nor does it build character. Take the advice go with math, develop a time management strategy, where you reward yourself with time for side projects by getting problems right for calc-II.
That'd be a terrifying precedent to set. "I don't see artistic value in your art, so I can mass produce copies of it."
The excellent motorcycle magazine MCN (American one, not the low-quality British one) had a series of articles by a psychologist on flow and how to attain it. According to the series, attaining flow boils down to:

1) Familiarity. You must be doing something at which you are competent.

2) Stress. You must have a moderate challenge. Imagine Notch building his nth dungeon game, and this time he's trying to do it in ten minutes less than his previous best time.

3) No distress. Distress comes from too great a challenge, such that it pulls you out of your flow state (what you call impulses, I believe). Imagine making Notch do his development in C# on .Net, since he's a Java guru (he may well be a .Net guru, too, but let's assume he's a noob for the sake of this example).

Another example of something which causes distress and an inability to reach a flow state would be tackling an integration using a new API which has a non-intuitive interface and lousy documentation.

To build on your example of changing editors or color schemes, I think this explains why we developers are so sensitive about working on other people's code base. It's not simply that it's ugly, or not architected correctly, but that every tiny, unfamiliar element compounds the inability to attain flow. We chastise one another for being self-centered and dismissing others' work as incompetent without objective reason, but within our own brains there's a very real reason. I suppose it is self-centered by definition, though. :-)
tl;dr; Argument of the defendant is based on:

“Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress: ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” the lawsuit details, adding:

“Early Circuit law in California held that obscene works did not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and thus cannot be protected by copyright.”
"Men don't like to be called that either though..."

That was my point: the intended offense is partly in feminizing the man, as if being feminine is bad in itself.
I agree with this. The #1 reason why I have been reluctant to leave my current job is because it will cost an extra $700 / month to get health insurance through my wife's employer. Not to mention the risk of what would happen if she somehow lost her job.
That's exactly what live/delegate/on does. You can bind events to "future" DOM elements.

You don't need to watch for the elements though. You just delegate the event to an element/selector higher in the DOM tree and use event propagation/bubbling.

I suggest you read up on event delegation.
I'd love to hear some examples where you got it fast, beautiful and possible the first time.
This is actually an incredibly interesting (and cunning) assertion. I hope she takes it all the way, and doesn't accept a settlement from the defendants. Having some case law on this matter would be, at the very least, entertaining. It seems the judge would have to rule either that porn is "useful art", or that it cannot be copyrighted. One little copyright troll may just have inadvertently kicked the proverbial hornets' nest.
I don't know if this will fly but it is an interesting argument to make. I will be watching this one.
Honeywell makes fancy full-color LCD touch-screen thermostats with internet connectivity, friendly graphics showing the weather, etc.

http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/7-Da...

But I don't think they sell them in regular stores much, so you don't see them on the rack at Home Depot. You only see the cheaper lower-end models with all the buttons.

Honeywell sells their $250 fancy thermostats through HVAC contractors, so do-it-yourself types probably won't encounter them.

Nest might not be taking advantage of a gap in technology in the thermostat market, so much as taking advantage of a flawed distribution model.
No one said consumption is "bad". All that's said is that consumption is dependent on "production", and "production" gets its value from "consumption" (even the producer ends up being the only consumer).

That wonderful book you read? It wasn't created by someone reading; it was created by someone writing. If everyone read Wikipedia and no one wrote Wikipedia, there wouldn't be anything to read.
I realize that's a little awkward. Good point. I should write something there about how Fandalism uses FB Connect and promises not to spam etc.

The entire site is FB Connect for now, which I know turns off many HN readers. But it made some things easier for me and for users.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."

IMO its best to think about a problem for a little while until you come up with some reasonable solution, then hack it up, then revisit your original decisions and see if you can do it better.
This may fix the problem for some, but at least for me the exact same mice and mousepads worked fine in Windows and Ubuntu. It's an OS X software issue.
Have you thought about how it would acquire money to acquire the patents? Would you run the fundraising circuit and solicit donations?

Also, I know what your question means, be careful of your wording "open source", patents are, by nature, open source, ie you can view what makes them work. (this is part of the point of patents) It's the licensing them that's the tough part, as they don't exactly operate under anything like the Apache/BSD/GNU license.
Sorry, this is now fixed!
Ask HN: Is this really what America is like?
Question:

I'm black and I live in Canada and I am hard at work at pivoting my business to position it for success. One option I've always considered for various reasons is to move the business to the US. At the same time, I've become increasingly concerned about the level of bigotry, division, and outright hate being spewed publicly by what seems like an increasing portion of the population. At first, I attributed this to TV sensationalism but the more I scour the internet, the more I come upon hateful videos, articles and comments from non-anonymous users.

This all culminated today when I read an article a friend shared about an NJ robber who was choked to death after he tried to rob and subsequently headlock one of his victims. My question is not about the appropriateness or legality of the action on either side. My question stems from the downright insensitive, hateful, divisive, racist views expressed in the comments section of the post on a seemingly neutral website like NY's Channel 4 NBC News: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Smackdown-NJ-Robber-Killed-by-Former-HS-Wrestler-138711694.html

Is this really what America has become? Has the United States become a place where a shockingly large number of individuals feel comfortable with placing their name and image beside the same type of hateful rhetoric that would have been spewed back in the days of segregation?

Why am I asking this on HN?:

I am posing this question on HN because I generally feel that people on HN are rather open and deliberate with their responses. Scoble (after what he felt were numerous personal attacks) chastised this community about this a few days ago but there is definitely a benefit in this - most of the time. As such, I feel the HN community is more than capable of providing me with a response to this regardless of whether or not it's a tech question.
A New Bitch
This post makes no sense to me.

Are you saying that we should still use character encodings rather than UTF encodings, or are you saying that we shouldn't assume that raw text is ASCII, or are you saying something else?

Unicode is, essentially, nothing unless it is encoded. When you encode it you must decide whether to use one byte, two bytes, three bytes or four bytes.

Only UTF-8 and UTF-32 are really big enough to hold the world's characters. everything else is a fudge.

ASCII was never Anglo-Saxon: it was always American. COBOL is a red herring here, too. ASCII was all about teleprinters and was a clever use of 8-Bits for its time. Bell labs invented ASCII and Bell labs invented UTF-8.

UTF-8 is much better than reasonable. It is a compact way to represent Unicode while preventing the western world from having to re-encode every text document. That's a lot of good news the internet.

Are you saying that we shouldn't ignore other charsets as they are still valid Unicode? If so I agree up to a point, the point being that there is no longer any need to have any other unicode encoding other than UTF-8. If you need to access your local characters as a byte array: choose your internal encoding and translate, do your magic, and then spit out UTF-8 again then we can all simply read the same documents without the need for over-complexity.